Dashboards that use custom properties stop working after upgrade to Aria Operations 8.18

Products

• VMware Aria Suite

Issue/Introduction

Dashboard which uses custom properties shows no values. All graphs and counters show zero.

Environment

Aria Operations 8.17.x

Aria Operations 8.18

Cause

An issue was introduced in version 8.17 where dynamic properties (custom properties and properties pushed via the REST API) were being removed.

A hotfix was provided for versions 8.17 and 8.18 to recover lost properties. The recovery code is scheduled to run alongside the unused metric removal process, which is triggered every 24 hours:

• com.integrien.alive.controller.distributedtask.DistributedTaskCleanupMetricKeys

The process is skipped if fewer than 10,000 new metrics have been added since the last clean-up. In larger environments, this threshold is always reached after an upgrade, ensuring the process runs. However, in smaller environments, the threshold isn't met, so the recovery process is not triggered.

Resolution

 

For environments experiencing this issue, please apply this workaround. Temporarily (for one day), the limit for the clean-up task can be changed. There are two properties responsible for this limit:

• metricKeyCountDiffForCleanupTrigger

• metricKeyCleanupThreshold

These values are configured in the file; 

• /usr/lib/vmware-vcops/user/conf/controller/controller.properties

These properties may have different values in each environment or might not be present at all. Whatever the current values are, they should be noted before making any changes, so they can be restored after a day.

The values can be changed to:

• metricKeyCountDiffForCleanupTrigger=-1

• metricKeyCleanupThreshold=-1

Wait 24 hours, ensure that properties are recovered and revert values to whatever was there before.