GuestOperatingSystem QoS metric is unavailable (greyed out) in vmware probe

Products

• DX Unified Infrastructure Management (Nimsoft / UIM)

Issue/Introduction

In the vmware probe (Admin Console or Infrastructure Manager), the Publish Quality of Service option is greyed out for monitors like GuestOperatingSystem, GuestIpAddress, and GuestHostName.

Symptoms

• When configuring the vmware probe, string-based metrics cannot be enabled for QoS.
• Users are unable to generate historical reports for these attributes via the Metric Viewer or CABI.

Environment

• DX Unified Infrastructure Management (UIM) 23.4.*
• vmware probe (all versions)

Cause

This is working as designed. QoS metrics in UIM are numeric time-series values used for trending and thresholding. Attributes like GuestOperatingSystem are strings (e.g., "Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9"). Because there is no numeric representation for an OS name, the probe does not expose a QoS option for these monitors.

Resolution

To retrieve and report on these attributes for VMware devices, query the UIM database directly. This data is captured during standard discovery and stored in the inventory tables.

Procedure to retrieve Guest OS via SQL

1. Open your SQL management tool (e.g., SSMS) and connect to the UIM database.
2. Run the following query to list all VMware VMs and their discovered Guest OS details:

SELECT v.dev_id,
       vm.dev_attr_value AS VMName,
       os.dev_attr_value AS GuestOperatingSystem,
       ot.dev_attr_value AS PrimaryOSType,
       ov.dev_attr_value AS PrimaryOSVersion,
       vc.dev_attr_value AS vCenter
FROM CM_DEVICE_ATTRIBUTE v
JOIN CM_DEVICE_ATTRIBUTE vm ON vm.dev_id = v.dev_id AND vm.dev_attr_key = 'VMName'
LEFT JOIN CM_DEVICE_ATTRIBUTE os ON os.dev_id = v.dev_id AND os.dev_attr_key = 'OSDescription'
LEFT JOIN CM_DEVICE_ATTRIBUTE ot ON ot.dev_id = v.dev_id AND ot.dev_attr_key = 'PrimaryOSType'
LEFT JOIN CM_DEVICE_ATTRIBUTE ov ON ov.dev_id = v.dev_id AND ov.dev_attr_key = 'PrimaryOSVersion'
LEFT JOIN CM_DEVICE_ATTRIBUTE vc ON vc.dev_id = v.dev_id AND vc.dev_attr_key = 'vmware.vCenter'
WHERE v.dev_attr_key = 'VirtualizationEnvironment' 
  AND v.dev_attr_value = 'VMware'
ORDER BY vm.dev_attr_value;

Note: This data reflects the current discovered state and is not automatically historized. For reporting, you can use this query in a Dashboard SQL Widget.

Additional Information

• If you need to alarm on changes to these strings, you can still configure an alarm monitor in the probe using string comparison operators (e.g., "not equals").
• For more information on managing support cases, see Creating and managing Broadcom cases