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Showing posts from May, 2020

Complex vRNI Queries

Hi everyone - this'll be a short post, as I just wanted to write some some quick notes about queries in vRealize Network Insight.  VMware has a great document on some Advanced vRNI Queries ; I wanted to talk about the keyword "in" and "of" and record how I've used them for some other interesting queries that aren't on their list. "In" allows you to search in a list so that you can take advantage of nested queries.  "Of" allows you to specify a property of a query (which can be useful when you want to search a list based on that property). So, if I want to see all network flows that hit firewall rules in a particular NSX section, I could use this query: flow where firewall rule in (nsx firewall rule where section name = "My Critical Section") That will give me a list of all flows that have hit any firewall rules in that section.  That's actually the query that I needed to solve my problem, but I solved it with &qu

Accessing the vCloud Director API

I've been working on a vCloud Director environment recently and need to use the API for my current project.  Well, I'm not a big API guy, so this has been a good learning experience for me!  The first hurdle that I had to overcome was authentication, and since I didn't find that to be super well documented, I figure that I should put my notes up here.  So, here's how I get authenticated to vCloud Director's API via PowerShell (because, of course PowerShell!). First things first, you've got to figure out what credentials you want to use.  The most basic way to authenticate is with a local account (rather than an LDAP account), but you need to append a scope to that account name to get logged in.  If the account is part of an Organization, you can use that Organization's name, but if it's a system administrator, you'll need to use "@system" instead. Next, you'll need to Base64/UTF8 encode your credentials in order to pass them success