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The VMware Aria Operations connector is part of the Enterprise Edition, and is currently in beta.
Bag of words talks to the Aria Operations Suite API (https://<appliance>/suite-api/api/...) — formerly vRealize Operations, and VCF Operations in 9.x. It is validated against the official OpenAPI spec (VCF Operations 9.1, the same surface Aria Operations 8.18 serves) and the 8.18 API Programming Guide. There is no free-form query language: queries are JSON specs that map onto a catalog of virtual tables.

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What the catalog looks like

The discovered layer is what makes management packs useful without any vendor-specific code: whatever adapters the customer has installed — Hitachi, NetApp, IBM, NSX — show up as wide, per-kind metric tables.

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Dynamic thresholds are columns, not judgement

Aria learns a normal band for each series. The connector asks for it (dt=true) and returns it alongside the data as dt_min and dt_max, so “was this abnormal?” is something the agent can read off a row rather than estimate.
There is no events table. The public Suite API only lets you push events (POST /events); it has no read endpoint. alerts and symptoms — with their start, update and cancel timestamps — are the incident timeline.

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Before you start

  • A local or LDAP/AD user with at least the ReadOnly role on the appliance.
  • The name of its authentication source, if it is not a local user — as configured under Administration → Authentication Sources.
  • The appliance reachable over HTTPS from the Bag of words backend. If it uses a private CA, put a PEM bundle on the backend host so verification can stay on.

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Fields

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Authentication

Username + Password — userpass (scopes: system and user) The Suite API has no API keys. The connector acquires a session token (POST /suite-api/api/auth/token/acquire) and sends it as Authorization: OpsToken <token>. Tokens live six hours on a sliding window; they are cached and re-acquired automatically on a 401. Basic authentication is deprecated and disabled by default on 8.18, so it is not offered. Because the mode is available at user scope, each analyst can sign in with their own Aria login — and Aria’s own RBAC then applies to their queries. Per-user authentication on a database-style connection requires an Enterprise license. See Authentication and access.

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Troubleshooting

auth_source is still LOCAL. Set it to the exact name of the source as it appears under Administration → Authentication Sources.
Only populated resource kinds are discovered, and discovery stops at max_metric_tables (40 by default), largest kinds first. Raise the cap and re-index.
There isn’t one, and it is not an omission — the Suite API has no read endpoint for events. Use alerts and symptoms instead.
Put the private CA’s PEM bundle on the backend host and point ca_bundle at it, rather than turning verify_ssl off.