Email Delivery Failures for Scheduled Reports in VMware Aria Operations

Products

• VCF Operations

Issue/Introduction

• Reports are successfully generated and remain visible within the VMware Aria Operations user interface.

• The report generation task status displays as Completed in the system audit or reports list.

• The automated email containing the report attachment fails to arrive in the inbox.

 

 

Cause

• The generated report attachment exceeds the maximum incoming message size enforced by the configured SMTP mail server.
• Mail servers automatically reject emails that surpass defined size thresholds (commonly 10 MB or 25 MB), often resulting in an SMTP 552 error code.
• The size of the generated PDF or CSV file is directly proportional to the scope of data, number of objects, and time range configured in the report definition.

Resolution

Large report attachments often exceed SMTP server size limits, causing delivery failures despite established network connectivity.

1. Inspect Report Size

• Log in to Aria Operations 

• Navigate to Operations > Reports > Generated Reports.

• Review the file size of the specific report that failed to deliver.

2. Analyze System Logs

• If the report size exceeds common limits (e.g., 10 MB), verify if the SMTP server rejected the transmission.

• Access the primary node via SSH and execute the following command to search for SMTP size error codes (552):
  grep -i "552" /storage/vcops/log/analytics*.log


3. Recommendation

• Compress the Payload: Modify the report schedule to distribute the file as a CSV (which is typically smaller) rather than a PDF.

• Adjust Server Limits: Increase the maximum allowable message size on the receiving SMTP mail server configuration.

Additional Information

If increasing the server limit is not possible, consider splitting the report into multiple smaller schedules (e.g., separating "Host CPU" and "Host Memory" into distinct reports).