Dashboard rendering failure with blank screen in Aria Operations

Products

• VMware Aria Operations (formerly vRealize Operations) 8.x

Issue/Introduction

Persistent UI rendering failure occurs when interacting with dashboards in Aria Operations. The following symptoms are observed:

• The dashboard is made up of a few widgets with interactions among them.
• The dashboard loads initially but would randomly display a blank screen instead of the expected data in widgets.
• The Aria Operations interface becomes unresponsive; navigating to other pages does not resolve the blank screen. A browser refresh is the only method to restore UI functionality.
• The failure occurs specifically when a filter is applied to a widget that results in no data being returned for display.
• When the issue occurs, the following error is logged in the browser's developer tools as well as in /storage/log/vcops/log/web.log:
  
  com.vmware.vcops.ui.action.UtilityAction.execute - JavaScript Error - Msg:Uncaught TypeError: Cannot read properties of null (reading 'removeAttribute'), Url: https://<Aria Operations ip or FQDN>/vcf-operations/plug/ops/lib/extjs6.6/core/ext-all.js, Line: 11

Environment

VMware Aria Operations 8.18.x

Cause

A software processing issue in Aria Operations where applying filters to widgets that result in "no data" causes a UI rendering failure with blank screen.

Resolution

There is currently no permanent fix available. Engineering is aware of this issue and is working on a resolution for a future release.

To prevent the UI from hanging, implement the following practices as workaround:

1. Validate Filter Logic: Ensure that applied filters are not overly restrictive and will consistently return at least one data point.

2. Dashboard Design: Temporarily avoid using filters in widgets if there is a high likelihood of the resulting view being empty.