Aria Operations not collecting data for all clusters or objects in a vCenter

Products

• VCF Operations/Automation (formerly VMware Aria Suite)

Issue/Introduction

• Aria Operations shows a drop in collection status for a specific vCenter adapter.
• Certain clusters, hosts, or virtual machines are missing from the Aria Operations inventory/dashboards, even though the primary data center and collectors appear healthy.
• The vCenter adapter status in Aria Operations shows as Online and Collecting, but the object count is lower than expected.

Environment

• VMware Aria Operations 8.18.x

Cause

This issue occurs when the vCenter permissions for the service account used by Aria Operations fail to propagate correctly within vCenter. Even if permissions appear correct in the vCenter UI (e.g., assigned at the Global level and set to propagate), they may not be effectively applied to all child objects, preventing the Aria Operations collector from 'seeing' and retrieving data for those objects.

Resolution

To resolve this issue, you must force a refresh of the permissions for the collection account within vCenter Server:

1. Log in to the vSphere Client with administrative privileges.
2. Navigate to Administration > Global Permissions.
3. Locate the service account used by the Aria Operations vCenter Adapter.
4. Select the account and click Edit (or the pencil icon).
5. Without making any changes to the assigned role or propagation settings, click OK or Save.
   •  Note: This action re-triggers the permission propagation logic across the vCenter inventory.
6. Verify the fix by logging into the vSphere Client using the Aria Operations service account credentials. Check if all clusters and objects are now visible in the vCenter UI.
7. In Aria Operations, wait for the next collection cycle (typically 5 minutes) to see if the missing inventory begins to populate.