Pricing engine is not running or is not populating metrics like Summary|Metering| total price metrics in VMware Aria Operations

Products

• VCF Operations

Issue/Introduction

Month-to-Date (MTD) pricing and Summary|Metering price metrics do not populate for Virtual Machines and Custom Groups.

When this issue occurs, the daily Cost metrics calculate successfully, and the pricing policy (configured as "Based on Cost") is confirmed to be correctly assigned to the respective objects. Despite this, the corresponding pricing data remains blank in the dashboards and metric charts.

Environment

VMware Aria Operations

Cause

This issue is caused by a combination of resource constraints and a scheduling synchronization conflict between the Cost and Pricing calculation engines.

1. Resource Constraints: The Aria Operations cluster may be operating at 100% capacity. For example, if High Availability (HA) is enabled, the object count is effectively doubled, which can exceed the maximum recommended capacity for the deployed node size (e.g., exceeding 36,000 objects on a Large node). This resource exhaustion can cause calculation batch jobs to drop or fail.

2. Engine Synchronization Conflict: When a pricing policy is configured as "Based on Cost," the Pricing engine strictly requires the Cost engine to finish its daily calculations first. The Cost engine operates on Host time, whereas the Pricing engine executes strictly in UTC. This timezone variance can cause the Pricing engine to trigger before the Cost metrics are fully generated, leaving the engine with no base cost data to apply the custom multipliers against.

During this failure, the following explicit error trace will be present in the analytics.log: "Unable to get any value for metric {} in time range from {} to {}: most probably cost and pricing engine start times are out of sync, please make sure that pricing engine is scheduled after cost engine completed"

Resolution

To resolve this issue and restore the data flow for MTD Price and Metering metrics, apply the following steps:

1. Alleviate Resource Constraints: Review the current cluster sizing against the official sizing guidelines. If the cluster is at capacity (especially with HA enabled), perform a Vertical Scale Up of the Analytics nodes (e.g., from Large to Extra Large - 32 vCPU / 128 GB RAM) via Aria Suite Lifecycle.

2. Synchronize Calculation Engines: Modify the Cost calculation schedule to run at 12:00 AM Host time as shown below. This ensures that the Cost calculations have ample time to complete before the UTC-scheduled Pricing engine triggers.