Architecture

The 'Script Control Center' solution consists of two main components working together to enable custom monitoring in VMware Aria Operations.

High-Level Components

The Management Pack is the component installed directly in VMware Aria Operations. Its primary responsibilities are:

Configuration Management: Providing a UI for administrators to define script paths, arguments, target endpoints, and execution intervals.
Execution Triggering: Sending periodic requests (during each collection cycle) to the Script Execution Agent to trigger script runs.
Data Ingestion: Receiving and parsing the results from the Agent, then mapping them to Aria Operations objects and metrics.
Object Modeling: Creating and managing the lifecycle of Custom Script Execution and Script Endpoint objects.

The Script Execution Agent is a lightweight service that runs on a Linux virtual machine (acting as a worker node). It provides:

REST API: A secure interface (HTTP/HTTPS) for the Management Pack to communicate with.
Task Scheduler: A built-in engine that manages the execution of scripts, including queuing, concurrency control, and retention of historical results.
Script Engine: Executes scripts (Bash, Python, PowerShell, etc.) located in a dedicated /scripts directory.
Parsers: Built-in support for parsing standard outputs such as Nagios plugins and Prometheus metrics.
Persistence: An internal SQLite database to track task statuses and results.

The interaction between components follows a structured flow during each Aria Operations collection cycle (typically every 5 minutes):

Trigger: Aria Operations triggers the Adapter Instance collection.
Request: The Adapter sends a POST /api/v1/execute request to the Agent's API. This request includes:
- Script name and type (Nagios/Prometheus).
- Arguments (including dynamic target endpoints).
- Environment variables.
Scheduling: The Agent schedules the task and immediately returns a Task ID to the Adapter.
Polling/Results: The Adapter polls the Agent using GET /api/v1/scripts/result to fetch the execution outcome.
Execution: Meanwhile, the Agent's scheduler runs the script on the worker node for each defined target endpoint.
Data Processing: The Adapter receives the JSON response containing status, metrics, and properties for each endpoint.
Ingestion: Metrics are saved in the Aria Operations database, where they become available for dashboards, alerts, and reports.

The Management Pack creates a hierarchical structure of objects in Aria Operations:

Adapter Instance: The root object representing the connection to a specific Agent.
Custom Script Execution: Represents a specific script configuration. It tracks the overall status of the execution.
Script Endpoint: Child objects created for each target endpoint defined in the configuration. These objects hold the actual metrics (e.g., metric_value, status, etc.) parsed from the script output.

API Authentication: All communication from the Adapter to the Agent is protected by a mandatory API Token (shared secret).
TLS Encryption: The Agent supports HTTPS to encrypt data in transit.
Execution Sandboxing: Scripts run on a dedicated worker VM, isolating them from the Aria Operations core infrastructure.