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Automating VCF Operations Objects & Metrics Reporting

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The number of objects and metrics collected by VCF Operations in VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) 9.0 plays a critical role in determining the size and scale of your VCF Fleet.

Using the VCF Operations UI, you can navigate to Administration->Control Panel->Cluster Management to view the cluster management-level stats but this only provides a subset of all the collected objects and metrics from the VCF Operations Adapters.


To get a more comprehensive understanding of all objects and metrics broken down by each adapter, you need to navigate to Administration->Cloud Proxies and iterate through each adapter as shown in the screenshot below.


It is not really scalable to use the VCF Operations UI to manually aggregate the total number of objects and metrics being collected, instead we can automate this by using the VCF Operations API!

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Quick Tip - Using VCF CLI to login to vSphere Supervisor when configured with VCF Automation

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When a vSphere Supervisor Cluster is configured to be consumed by VCF Automation, the Identity Provider (IdP) for that vSphere Supervisor is automatically configured to redirect to VCF Automation (VCFA) as an OIDC relay.


When an end user wishes to access or manage their resources, they will be directed to the IdP that has been configured for their Organization Portal. To create a k8s login context, they will need to create a VCFA API token that is then passed to the VCF CLI before they can interact with their resources using kubectl.

Below is an example VCF CLI command where I am logging into an Organization Portal called legal and I have specified my VCFA endpoint along with the VCFA API Token to login as an end user.

vcf context create legal --endpoint auto01.vcf.lab --api-token $VCF_CLI_VCFA_API_TOKEN --insecure-skip-tls-verify --type cci --tenant-name legal

However, if you are an administrator who is managing the underlying VCF Infrastructure and need to troubleshoot or access the vSphere Supervisor Cluster, an alternative workflow will be required.

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Automating the Reporting of VCF Workload Domain Import Pre-Check Validations

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After completing the VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) Workload Domain Import workflow, I realized it would be helpful to be able to view the pre-check validations outside of the VCF Operations UI, especially if there are multiple pre-checks that have failed.


While the VCF Operations UI provides a good overview of all pre-checks, it does not provide any filtering or sorting, so you have to skim scroll through the entire list (55 in my case) to see which ones failed. For each failed validation, you can get more details including the recommended remediation, but you need to expand each section which can be painstaking if you have more than a few failures.

This is where we can leverage the power of automation and the VCF APIs ...

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