Tanzu VM is not reported in Usage Meter Monthly Usage Reports

Products

• VMware Aria Suite

Issue/Introduction

Symptoms:
Usage Meter monthly usage reports do not show any Tanzu metering. The collection logs do not show any information about Tanzu VM nor show any collection error.

Environment

VMware vCloud Usage Meter 4.x

Cause

The issue is due to the permission needed by a user for metering Tanzu setup, which is different from the permission which a user in a non-Tanzu environment requires.

Resolution

Pre-requisites for Tanzu Metering in Usage Meter

1. Usage Meter needs to be associated with a Term and Rental contract.
2. Tanzu VMs should not be running on hosts with licenses tagged for perpetual/demo.
3. Tanzu VMs supported by Usage Meter are Supervisor VMs (SUP), POD VMs (POD), and VMs created by vSphere Tanzu Kubernetes Grid service(TKG).
 

Procedure

For metering Tanzu VM, a user should have read permission on vCenter, and the user should be part of the "ServiceProviderUsers" group under the SSO group in vCenter.

The following steps will help you configure read permissions for a vCenter Server and add a user to the ServiceProviderUsers Group.

Note: If you are using Active Directory, the following process applies too. You can also assign the same role and permission to your Active Directory users.

1. Create a local user under the vSphere.local domain as per the following document.
2. Create a role in vCenter by cloning any existing read-only role. Edit the role and select the following permission: Profile-driven storage > Profile-driven storage view.
3. Under the vCenter Permission tab, assign this role to the user (propagate to children as checked).  
4. Navigate to the vCenter Single Sign-On user configuration UI.
5. From the Home menu, select Administration.
6. Under Single Sign-on User, click Users and Groups and search for the "ServiceProviderUsers" group as it does not appear in the default list. 
7. Add the local user created in the above step to this group.
8. Log in to vCenter with the local user to verify that all Tanzu VMs are seen in the vCenter inventory.
9. Add vCenter to Usage Meter by using that same user.