In Aria Operations there are several dashboards that are enabled by default to help ensure the Aria Operations environment is healthy. These dashboards are available under Visualize > Dashboards in a folder named VMware Aria Operations. The specific dashboards have names like:
- Self Cluster Health
- Self Health
- Self Perfomance Details
- Self Services Communications
- Self Services Summary
- Self Troubleshooting
- vCenter Adapter Details
Recently I was working with a colleague who couldn’t see these dashboards. According to the documentation (https://docs.vmware.com/en/VMware-Aria-Operations/8.12/Best-Practices-Operations/GUID-8D7D3B14-6A4D-4895-B583-18753F03E48D.html) these dashboards should be activated by default. This led us to checking out permissions on these dashboards, where we found that by default they are not shared. Typically, built-in dashboards are shared with everyone, which can be seen by clicking the “share “Share Dashboard” icon in the top right, selecting the “Groups” tab, and reviewing the ‘Dashboard shard with” text at the bottom of the popup (shown below):
The built-in self health dashboards were not shared with anyone by default; only the builtin admin account has access. This seems reasonable, you likely don’t need/want everyone troubleshooting your Aria Operations cluster. However, for those tasked with maintaining Aria Operations deployments, these dashboards are very useful. If we are logged in as the admin user who owns these dashboards, from the above share dashboards screen we can select our custom administrators group and click “include” to start sharing the relevant dashboards. The next time members of the admins group login they should see these self health dashboards in the VMware Aria Operations folder.