Aria Operations stops collecting data from vCenter due to unusual VM names.

Products

• VCF Operations/Automation (formerly VMware Aria Suite)

Issue/Introduction

• Aria Operations shows problems collecting data on vCenter adapter.
• Few VMs or all the VMs data are missing in the inventory for vCenter.
• vCenter object cannot be expanded on the Aria Ops inventory.
• From the Inventory Management, it is possible to confirm that Aria Operations is collecting the data for the affected vCenter.
• vCenter integration has been configured with an user with vCenter Global Permissions.

Environment

Aria Operations 8.18.x

Cause

The issue is caused by the presence on vCenter of several VMs with unconventional names starting with the symbols "$" or "%".

Those VMs are usually created created on vCenter by the penetration test.

Resolution

There are two options:

OPTION 1
Renaming the VMs to a conventional name.

OPTION 2
Deleting all the VMs with names starting with "$" or "%" if the VMs were created on vCenter by the penetration test.