{"id":2070,"date":"2024-11-14T16:24:53","date_gmt":"2024-11-14T21:24:53","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/enterpriseadmins.org\/blog\/?p=2070"},"modified":"2024-11-15T11:07:53","modified_gmt":"2024-11-15T16:07:53","slug":"leveraging-vmware-aria-operations-for-power-consumption-tracking","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/enterpriseadmins.org\/blog\/scripting\/leveraging-vmware-aria-operations-for-power-consumption-tracking\/","title":{"rendered":"Leveraging VMware Aria Operations for Power Consumption Tracking"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

I’ve been looking for a good reason to try out the Aria Operations Management Pack Builder, ever since a peer of mine built one for Pi-Hole<\/a> back in early 2023. One thing that I thought would be of particular interest was tracking the power consumption of my lab. This article will outline how I achieved this goal.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Getting the data<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

The first task for this project was finding a way to get the data on my power consumption. The majority of my lab gear plugs into a small APC BackUPS UPS, which provides enough power to handle the occasional blip, but not to run the lab for any meaningful amount of time. This UPS came with a serial\/USB cable that could be managed with some software available for Windows. I don’t have a physical Windows system running 24×7 in my lab, but I do have a domain controller virtual machine that resides on local disk of a single system. Since the VM isn’t moving around with DRS, I was able to pass a USB device through to the VM. I added a new USB controller, then added a new USB device, and then my VM settings had the following entries:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"<\/a><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

With this USB device passed through to the VM, I was able to install the PowerChute Serial Shutdown application. In this application, there is a logging > data log configuration, where you can set how frequently the service should record data. I’ve set this to 5 minutes. With this configuration enabled, there is a text file that is updated in this folder: C:\\Program Files\\APC\\PowerChute Serial Shutdown\\agent\\energylog<\/code> that includes details on the relative load in percentage of the UPS as well as the calculated load in watts. This is a great start, we now have a source of data on our local filesystem.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Formatting the data as JSON<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

The Aria Operations Management Pack builder can point at an online JSON or XML API and return fields for use in our custom management pack. I had considered enabling a web server (like IIS) to serve up a dynamic page read the energylog<\/code> and re-format the file as a JSON. This seemed like a bit of overkill, setting up IIS to server a single page. I then remembered seeing some code once to have powershell listen for http requests. I did a bit of searching and put the below code sample together. It listens for HTTP requests, then when one is received, powershell looks for the latest energylog<\/code> file, finds the last row with the newest data, then returns that data as a JSON object.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

$httpListener = New-Object System.Net.HttpListener\n$httpListener.Prefixes.Add('http:\/\/*:6545\/')\n$httpListener.Start()\n\nwhile($true) {\n    $context = $httpListener.GetContext()\n    $context.Request.HttpMethod\n    $context.Request.Url\n    $context.Request.Headers.ToString() # pretty printing with .ToString()\n\n    # use a StreamReader to read the HTTP body as a string\n    $requestBodyReader = New-Object System.IO.StreamReader $context.Request.InputStream\n    $requestBodyReader.ReadToEnd()\n\n    Get-ChildItem 'C:\\Program Files\\APC\\PowerChute Serial Shutdown\\agent\\energylog\\*.log' | ?{$_.LastWriteTime -gt (Get-Date).AddMinutes(-10)} | Sort-Object LastWriteTime | Select-Object -first 1 | Foreach-Object {\n\n        # once we know the latest file, lets read the last line and split on the delimiter so we can assign the various parts to descriptive variables\n        $contentParts = (Get-Content $_.FullName -Tail 1).Split(';')\n        $responseJson = [pscustomobject][ordered]@{\n            'HostName'               = $env:computername\n            'ModelName'              = (Get-Content $_.FullName -TotalCount 10 |?{$_ -match 'modelname'}).Split('=')[1]\n            'FormattedDate'          = (Get-Date).ToString('yyyy-MM-dd HH:mm')\n            '2010Date'               = [int]$contentParts[0]\n            'relativeLoadPercentage' = [int]$contentParts[2]\n            'calculatedLoadWatts'    = [float]$contentParts[3]\n        } | ConvertTo-Json\n    } # end file loop\n\n    $context.Response.StatusCode = 200\n    $context.Response.ContentType = 'application\/json'\n\n    $responseBytes = [System.Text.Encoding]::UTF8.GetBytes($responseJson)\n    $context.Response.OutputStream.Write($responseBytes, 0, $responseBytes.Length)\n\n    $context.Response.Close() # end the response\n} # end while loop<\/code><\/pre>\n\n\n\n
There is likely some room for improvement in that code, but as a proof of concept it seems to get the job done.  I needed to open a Windows firewall port to allow incoming TCP 6545 requests, but we can test our ‘API’ from a remote machine easy enough, again using PowerShell:<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Invoke-RestMethod -Uri 'http:\/\/servername.example.com:6545'<\/code><\/pre>\n\n\n\n
This should return the JSON object we created above.  I created a scheduled task to start the above script when the system starts so that it is always running.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Management Pack Builder<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
For this part of the process, we’ll download the latest version of the Management Pack Builder appliance from https:\/\/marketplace.cloud.vmware.com\/services\/details\/draft-vmware-aria-operation-management-pack-builder-1-1?slug=true<\/a> and deploy it into our environment.  <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Our ‘API’ is super simple.  Any request to the IP:Port will result in our JSON being returned.  When building the management pack, we really don’t need much with authentication, special headers\/request query strings, or object relationships.  In fact, there are only three tabs where we need to fill in some details in Management Pack Builder, listed below.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Source<\/h3>\n\n\n\n