How to de-anonymize vCloud Usage Meter Virtual Machine History reports

Products

• VMware Aria Suite

Issue/Introduction

Symptoms:
To hide sensitive data like virtual machine name, hostname, and username, the data transferred between vCloud Usage Meter and vCloud Usage Insight is anonymized.

Environment

VMware vCloud Usage Meter 4.x

Resolution

Prerequisites

• You must have a password to log in to the vCloud Usage Meter console as root.
• You must start the SSHD service on the vCloud Usage Meter console.
• You must download the Virtual Machine History (VMH) report in advance.

Procedure

To de-anonymize your VMH reports, do the following:

Note: This procedure applies to Virtual Machine History reports only.

1. Copy your Virtual Machine History report, e.g., vmh.tsv, to your Usage Meter appliance using WinSCP. In the example below, it is copied to /home/usagemeter.

2. Log in to the vCloud Usage Meter console as usagemeter.
3. Navigate to cloudusagemetering by running the command below:

cd /opt/vmware/cloudusagemetering

4. To deanonymize the anonymized Virtual Machine History report, run the command.

./scripts/report_deanonymize.sh [location_of_anonymized_report] [destination_for_de-anonymized_report]

Example:

./scripts/report_deanonymize.sh /home/usagemeter/vmh.tsv /home/usagemeter/report.txt

Where /home/usagemeter/vmh.tsv is the location of where you have copied the Virtual Machine History report.  And /home/usagemeter/report.txt   is the location where you would like to have the decrypted report.
 

After successfully deanonymizing your report, a message is displayed. The de-anonymized report is located in the directory you specified during the de-anonymization.

5. Copy the report.txt file to your local machine to view the decrypted information.

Additional Information