Missing Metric Data in Aria Operations 8.x After System Time Changes to a Future Date
Article ID: 425942
Updated On:
Products
Issue/Introduction
In Aria Operations, historical metrics are no longer visible after an NTP-related issue caused the system time to jump more than 100 years into the future, and despite the NTP configuration being corrected and the system time restored, the metric history remains missing from the Aria Operations UI.
Environment
VMware Aria Operations 8.x
Cause
Aria Operations enforces data retention policies based on the system date. If the system date is shifted significantly into the future and the product continues running, the analytics services may interpret existing metric and property data as older than the configured retention thresholds and automatically delete it.
By default, Aria Operations data retention is configured as follows:
-
6 months of full-resolution metric and property data
-
36 months of rolled-up metric and property data
When Aria Operations is left running with a future system date that exceeds the defined data retention windows, the analytics services automatically purge historical data in accordance with these retention policies. This behavior is expected by design.
Resolution
If a backup is available that was taken before the NTP server issue and the system time change, the recommended and best course of action is to restore Aria Operations from that backup.
If no such backup exists, the deleted metric data cannot be recovered, as it was removed automatically by the system in accordance with data retention policies.
Additional Information
To verify whether any historical data is still present on the disk, perform the following steps:
-
SSH to the Aria Operations node.
-
Check for database files corresponding to year of interest under the data directory.
Following sample command finds data for the year 2025:
find /storage/db/vcops/data/ -type f -regex '.*/2025_[0-9][0-9]_.*\.dat'If no files are returned, it confirms that the data has already been purged.
Feedback
