Vmware aria

VMware Aria Operations

Disclaimer: This is a community-maintained open-source project and is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by VMware, Inc. or Broadcom Inc. "VMware" and "Aria" are trademarks of Broadcom. Source code is publicly auditable at github.com/zw008/VMware-Aria under the MIT license.

VMware Aria Operations (vRealize Operations) AI-assisted monitoring — 28 MCP tools for resources, alerts, alert definitions, capacity planning, anomaly detection, report automation, and platform health.

Domain-focused monitoring skill for Aria Operations 8.x / vRealize Operations 8.x. Companion skills: vmware-nsx (networking), vmware-aiops (VM lifecycle), vmware-monitor (read-only vSphere), vmware-avi (AVI/ALB/AKO), vmware-harden (compliance baselines). | vmware-pilot (workflow orchestration) | vmware-policy (audit/policy)

What This Skill Does

Category	Tools	Count
Resources	list, get details, metrics, health badge, top consumers	5
Alerts	list, get details, investigate (alert→resource), acknowledge, cancel, list definitions	6
Alert Definitions	list symptoms, create definition, enable/disable, delete	4
Capacity	cluster overview, remaining capacity, time remaining, rightsizing	4
Reports	list templates, generate, list, get status+download URL, delete	5
Anomaly	list anomalies, risk badge	2
Health	Aria platform health, collector group status	2

Total: 28 tools (21 read-only + 7 write)

Quick Install

uv tool install vmware-aria
vmware-aria init      # guided setup: writes config + .env (chmod 600, password grep-safe), then verifies
vmware-aria doctor

When to Use This Skill

Performance monitoring (daily proactive checks):

• Check VM contention: CPU Ready %, Memory Balloon, Swap usage
• Fetch time-series metrics for any resource (CPU, memory, disk, network)
• Find top consumers by CPU/memory/disk/network
• Check per-resource anomaly counts and risk badge scores

Alert management:

• List, investigate, acknowledge, or cancel active alerts
• List or filter alert definitions (templates)
• Create new alert definitions from symptom definitions (post-RCA)
• Enable or disable alert definitions; delete obsolete ones

Capacity planning:

• Cluster capacity remaining (CPU, memory, disk headroom)
• Time-until-full prediction per cluster
• Right-sizing: find over-provisioned or under-utilized VMs
• Capacity overview with Aria's built-in recommendations

Report automation:

• Generate scheduled or on-demand reports (capacity, performance, SLA)
• Poll report status until COMPLETED; get PDF/CSV download URL
• Delete generated reports after download

Use companion skills for:

• VM lifecycle: create, clone, snapshot, power → vmware-aiops
• NSX networking: segments, gateways, NAT, routing → vmware-nsx
• vSphere inventory, real-time alarms, events → vmware-monitor
• Storage: iSCSI, vSAN, datastores → vmware-storage
• Load balancing, AVI/ALB, AKO, Ingress → vmware-avi

Related Skills — Skill Routing

User Intent	Recommended Skill
Aria Operations monitoring, alerts, capacity	vmware-aria ← this skill
VM lifecycle, deployment, guest ops	vmware-aiops
NSX networking: segments, gateways, NAT, routing	vmware-nsx
Read-only vSphere inventory, events, alarms	vmware-monitor
Storage: iSCSI, vSAN, datastores	vmware-storage
Multi-step workflows with approval	vmware-pilot
Compliance baselines (CIS / 等保 / PCI-DSS), drift detection, LLM remediation advisor	vmware-harden (uv tool install vmware-harden)
Load balancer, AVI, ALB, AKO, Ingress	vmware-avi (uv tool install vmware-avi)
Audit log query	vmware-policy (vmware-audit CLI)

Common Workflows

Diagnostic investigations: Before running any "why is X slow / failing / down" workflow, follow references/investigation-protocol.md. It enforces the four root-cause completeness criteria (falsifiability / sufficiency / necessity / mechanism) and the up-to-three-rounds deepening loop. Stopping at a partial conclusion is an anti-pattern — always self-check against the criteria before outputting a report.

Daily VM Health Check (Proactive Ops)

Judgment: don't chase the highest CPU consumer — chase the highest contention consumer. A VM at 90% CPU on a quiet host is healthy; a VM at 30% CPU but 15% Ready is starving. Key metrics: CPU Ready, Memory Balloon, Disk Latency.

1. Find top CPU consumers → vmware-aria resource top --metric cpu|usage_average --top 20 (this is the starting set, not the answer)
2. Check CPU Ready on hot VMs → vmware-aria resource metrics <vm-id> --metrics cpu.ready.summation --hours 24

   • 5% = warning, >10% = problem, >20% = critical

3. Check memory pressure → vmware-aria resource metrics <vm-id> --metrics mem.balloon.average,mem.swapped.average --hours 24
   • Balloon >0 = ESXi reclaiming memory; Swap >0 = severe — act immediately
4. List active CRITICAL/IMMEDIATE alerts → vmware-aria alert list --criticality CRITICAL
5. Check anomaly counts → vmware-aria anomaly list
6. Cross-validate against the investigation protocol before reporting any "root cause" — high consumption is rarely the root, usually a downstream symptom

Investigate High CPU Alert

1. List active CRITICAL alerts → vmware-aria alert list --criticality CRITICAL
2. Get alert details + symptoms → vmware-aria alert get <alert-id>
3. Find top CPU consumers → vmware-aria resource top --metric cpu|usage_average
4. Fetch 24h CPU metrics for the hot VM → vmware-aria resource metrics <vm-id> --metrics cpu|usage_average --hours 24
5. Check risk badge → vmware-aria anomaly risk <vm-id>
6. Acknowledge the alert → vmware-aria alert acknowledge <alert-id>

Capacity Planning

1. List clusters → vmware-aria resource list --kind ClusterComputeResource
2. Get remaining capacity → vmware-aria capacity remaining <cluster-id>
3. Predict time until full → vmware-aria capacity time-remaining <cluster-id>
4. Get capacity overview with recommendations → vmware-aria capacity overview <cluster-id>
5. Find rightsizing candidates → vmware-aria capacity rightsizing

Post-Incident: Create Detection Alert (RCA Follow-up)

After resolving an incident, create an early-warning alert to prevent recurrence. Alert definition management is MCP-only (no CLI subcommands):

1. Find matching symptom definitions → MCP list_symptom_definitions (filter by name_filter / resource_kind)
2. Create alert definition referencing symptoms → MCP create_alert_definition with name, resource_kind, symptom_definition_ids, criticality (any one symptom firing triggers the alert)
3. Verify it appears in definitions → vmware-aria alert definitions --name "Gold VM CPU" (criticality shown is the max severity across the definition's states)
4. Enable or disable later → MCP set_alert_definition_state

Generate Capacity Report

1. Find report template → vmware-aria report definitions --name "Capacity"
2. Trigger report generation → vmware-aria report generate <definition-id> --resources <resource-id> (the Report API requires at least one resource UUID)
3. Poll until completed → vmware-aria report get <report-id> (repeat until status == COMPLETED)
4. Download via the returned download_url (PDF) or csv_url
5. Clean up → vmware-aria report delete <report-id>

Multi-Target Operations

All commands accept --target <name> to operate against a specific Aria Ops instance:

vmware-aria alert list --target prod
vmware-aria resource top --target lab

Usage Mode

Scenario	Recommended	Why
Local/small models (Ollama, Qwen)	CLI	~2K tokens vs ~8K for MCP
Cloud models (Claude, GPT-4o)	Either	MCP gives structured JSON I/O
Automated pipelines	MCP	Type-safe parameters, structured output

Running vmware-aria with a local or small model? See references/agent-guardrails.md for tool-calling guardrails (alert-to-resource correlation and Aria data fidelity).

MCP Tools (28 — 21 read, 7 write)

All MCP tools accept an optional target parameter to select which Aria Operations instance to connect to.

Category	Tool	Type	Description
Resource	list_resources	Read	List VMs, hosts, clusters by resource kind
	get_resource	Read	Get resource details with health, risk, efficiency badges
	get_resource_metrics	Read	Fetch time-series metric stats for any resource
	get_resource_health	Read	Get health badge score (0–100)
	get_top_consumers	Read	Rank resources by CPU, memory, disk, or network usage
Alerts	list_alerts	Read	List active alerts with criticality and resource ID (resolve names via get_resource)
	get_alert	Read	Get alert details with contributing symptoms (recommendations live on the alert definition)
	investigate_alert	Read	Resolve an alert to its confirmed affected resource in one call — returns both UUIDs explicitly labelled plus the vmware-monitor handoff
	acknowledge_alert	Write	Mark an alert as acknowledged (does not close it)
	cancel_alert	Write	Cancel (dismiss) an active alert
	list_alert_definitions	Read	List alert templates configured in Aria Ops
Alert Defs	list_symptom_definitions	Read	List symptom definitions — use IDs when creating alert defs
	create_alert_definition	Write	Create new alert definition from symptom definition IDs
	set_alert_definition_state	Write	Enable or disable an alert definition
	delete_alert_definition	Write	Delete an alert definition permanently
Capacity	get_capacity_overview	Read	Group-level remaining % + per-dimension headroom and days-until-full
	get_remaining_capacity	Read	Remaining CPU, memory, disk before hitting limits
	get_time_remaining	Read	Days until cluster capacity is exhausted
	list_rightsizing_recommendations	Read	VMs to resize: over/under-provisioned
Reports	list_report_definitions	Read	List available report definition templates
	generate_report	Write	Trigger report generation (async; returns report_id)
	list_reports	Read	List generated reports, optionally by definition
	get_report	Read	Poll report status + get PDF/CSV download URLs
	delete_report	Write	Delete a generated report
Anomaly	list_anomalies	Read	Per-resource anomaly counts (System Attributes|total_alarms metric)
	get_resource_riskbadge	Read	Risk score (0–100): likelihood of future problems
Health	get_aria_health	Read	Aria platform node status (ONLINE/OFFLINE)
	list_collector_groups	Read	Collector agents status and connectivity

Read/write split: 21 read-only, 7 write. All write operations are audit-logged to ~/.vmware/audit.db (via vmware-policy).

List results are envelopes — read truncated before you summarise

Every list-returning tool above (list_resources, get_top_consumers, list_alerts, list_alert_definitions, list_symptom_definitions, list_rightsizing_recommendations, list_report_definitions, list_reports, list_anomalies, list_collector_groups) returns an object, not a bare array:

{
  "items":     [ ... ],
  "returned":  50,
  "limit":     50,
  "total":     213,
  "truncated": true,
  "hint":      "Showing 50 of 213. Raise limit or narrow the query with a filter to see the rest."
}

Rules:

• Rows live under items. An empty items with returned: 0 means the query genuinely matched nothing — report that, do not report a tool failure.
• truncated: true means more rows exist. Never describe such a result as the complete set; either say it is a partial view or re-query with a higher limit or a narrower filter, as hint instructs.
• truncated: false means the answer is complete — safe to summarise as the whole picture.
• total: null means the API reported no collection size, so a page filled exactly to the limit is flagged truncated conservatively. It may in fact be complete; a follow-up query with a larger limit settles it.
• list_anomalies also carries scanned — how many VMs were examined. It returns only VMs with a non-zero anomaly count, so a short list is not evidence that the environment is clean; check truncated.

CLI Quick Reference

# Resources
vmware-aria resource list [--kind VirtualMachine|HostSystem|ClusterComputeResource] [--name <filter>]
vmware-aria resource get <resource-id>
vmware-aria resource metrics <resource-id> --metrics cpu|usage_average,mem|usage_average --hours 4
vmware-aria resource metrics <vm-id> --metrics cpu.ready.summation,mem.balloon.average --hours 24
vmware-aria resource health <resource-id>
vmware-aria resource top --metric cpu|usage_average --kind VirtualMachine --top 10

# Alerts
vmware-aria alert list [--criticality CRITICAL|IMMEDIATE|WARNING|INFORMATION]
vmware-aria alert get <alert-id>
vmware-aria alert acknowledge <alert-id>
vmware-aria alert cancel <alert-id>
vmware-aria alert definitions [--name <filter>]

# Alert Definitions: creation/enable/disable/delete and symptom-definition
# lookup are MCP-only tools (list_symptom_definitions, create_alert_definition,
# set_alert_definition_state, delete_alert_definition) — no CLI subcommands.

# Capacity
vmware-aria capacity overview <cluster-id>
vmware-aria capacity remaining <resource-id>
vmware-aria capacity time-remaining <resource-id>
vmware-aria capacity rightsizing [--resource-id <vm-id>]

# Reports (async: generate → poll get → download → delete)
vmware-aria report definitions [--name <filter>]
vmware-aria report generate <definition-id> --resources <id1,id2>   # at least one resource UUID required
vmware-aria report list [--definition-id <id>]
vmware-aria report get <report-id>        # poll until status == COMPLETED; shows download_url
vmware-aria report delete <report-id>

# Anomaly
vmware-aria anomaly list [--resource-id <id>]
vmware-aria anomaly risk <resource-id>

# Health
vmware-aria health status
vmware-aria health collectors

# Diagnostics
vmware-aria doctor [--skip-auth]

Key Metric Names (for resource metrics command)

Metric	API Key	What It Means
CPU Ready %	cpu.ready.summation	vCPU waiting for physical core; >5% = warning
CPU Used	cpu.used.summation	Actual CPU execution time
CPU Demand	cpu.demand.average	Total MHz requested by VM
Memory Active	mem.active.average	Actively used by guest OS (sizing)
Memory Consumed	mem.consumed.average	Footprint on host (capacity)
Memory Balloon	mem.balloon.average	>0 = ESXi reclaiming memory
Memory Swap	mem.swapped.average	>0 = severe pressure
Disk Read Latency	disk.read.average	Read I/O latency ms
Disk Write Latency	disk.write.average	Write I/O latency ms
Net Received	net.received.average	Inbound network KB/s
Net Transmitted	net.transmitted.average	Outbound network KB/s

Full CLI reference with all options and output formats: see references/cli-reference.md

Troubleshooting

"Token not found" error after setup

The token acquisition request failed. Verify:

1. Aria Ops is reachable: vmware-aria doctor
2. The auth_source in config matches your environment (LOCAL, LDAP, AD)
3. The password env var follows the naming convention: VMWARE_ARIA_<TARGET>_PASSWORD

Resources appear missing from list_resources

The collector agent may be offline. Check list_collector_groups for any collectors in a DOWN state. Restart the affected collector from the Aria Ops UI under Administration > Collector Groups.

Metrics return empty data

The resource may not have metric collection configured, or the requested metric key is incorrect. Verify metric keys against the resource's available metrics in the Aria Ops UI (Metrics tab on the resource detail page).

"Password not found" error

Variable names follow the pattern VMWARE_ARIA_<TARGET_NAME_UPPER>_PASSWORD where hyphens become underscores. Example: target prod needs VMWARE_ARIA_PROD_PASSWORD. Check your ~/.vmware-aria/.env file.

invalid peer certificate: UnknownIssuer when running uvx (corporate TLS proxy)

uvx re-resolves dependencies from PyPI on every launch. Behind a corporate TLS-intercepting proxy whose CA is not in uv's bundled cert store, the handshake fails. Use the v1.5.15+ recommended single-command form vmware-aria mcp (after uv tool install vmware-aria — no network on launch), or set UV_NATIVE_TLS=true to make uv use the system cert store.

Safety

• Read-heavy: 21 of 28 tools are read-only
• Audit logging: Write operations logged to ~/.vmware/audit.db (SQLite WAL, via vmware-policy) with timestamp, user, target, operation, and result
• Token expiry handling: vRealizeOpsToken re-acquired automatically 60 seconds before expiry (6-hour sliding validity, extended on each call)
• Prompt injection defense: API text values sanitized via _sanitize() — strips control characters, truncates to 500 chars
• Credential safety: Passwords loaded only from environment variables (.env file), never from config.yaml
• Input validation: resource_id and alert_id validated before API calls; criticality values validated against known enum

Setup

uv tool install vmware-aria
mkdir -p ~/.vmware-aria
cp config.example.yaml ~/.vmware-aria/config.yaml
# Edit config.yaml with your Aria Operations host details

# Add to ~/.vmware-aria/.env (create if missing, chmod 600):
# VMWARE_ARIA_PROD_PASSWORD=<your-password>
chmod 600 ~/.vmware-aria/.env

vmware-aria doctor

All tools are automatically audited via vmware-policy. Audit logs: vmware-audit log --last 20

Full setup guide with multi-target config, MCP server setup, and Docker: see references/setup-guide.md

Architecture

User (natural language)
  |
AI Agent (Claude Code / Goose / Cursor)
  | reads SKILL.md
vmware-aria CLI or MCP server (stdio transport)
  | Aria Operations Suite API (REST/JSON over HTTPS)
  | POST /suite-api/api/auth/token/acquire → vRealizeOpsToken
Aria Operations Manager
  |
VMs / Hosts / Clusters / Datastores / Alerts / Capacity

The MCP server uses stdio transport (local only, no network listener). Connections to Aria Ops use HTTPS on port 443 with vRealizeOpsToken authentication (6-hour sliding token validity, auto-refreshed).

Audit & Safety

All operations are automatically audited via vmware-policy (@vmware_tool decorator):

• Every tool call logged to ~/.vmware/audit.db (SQLite, framework-agnostic)
• Policy rules enforced via ~/.vmware/rules.yaml (deny rules, maintenance windows, risk levels)
• Risk classification: each tool tagged as low/medium/high/critical
• View recent operations: vmware-audit log --last 20
• View denied operations: vmware-audit log --status denied

vmware-policy is automatically installed as a dependency — no manual setup needed.

License

MIT — github.com/zw008/VMware-Aria