Monitoring vRealize Automation by simulating machines deployments

A while ago, a customer faced an issue with vRealize Automation (VRA) due to the underlying infrastructure. The impact was that no users could deploy any new machines. The deployment would miserably fail.

Since this customer were not using vRealize Operations (vR Ops) to monitor vRealize Automation I adviced him to use this as well as use Log Insight to monitor the logs.

But the fact is that this approach is primarily to monitor the insight of vRealize Automation, not the vRealize Automation service itself.

In many situation, monitoring the service from a user point of view is the best metric one could have.

So, I also adviced him to create a workflow that would trigger a "probe" deployment in vRA and send the result to vR Ops.

Since I liked that idea, I decided to actually do the workflow by my own. (Actually, I also needed to better understand vRealize Orchestrator. I totally fall in love with this product.)

It took me few hours to realize it and I decided to share it on github as well as the documentation.

Important: the workflow currently work for vRA 6.0.x. Not vRA 6.1.

If this is your version, all you need is to import the workflow and follow the documentation.

You can see few screenshots of the result below.

Full topology of vRealize automation showing the probe deployment monitoring alert impacting the service health

vRealize orchestrator Workflow

Want to try this out? Click here.