You can perform tag based application discovery if you have added tags for virtual machines in your VMware vCenter, Azure, AWS, or VMware VMware NSX-T environments.

Prerequisites

Add tags for virtual machines in your VMware vCenter, Azure, AWS, or VMware VMware NSX-T environments. To learn how to discover applications based on tags, see Discovering Applications based on Tags.

Procedure

  1. From the left navigation panel, go to Applications > Discover.
  2. Select the Tags tab.
  3. Define the scope based on which applications and tiers have to be discovered.
    • Select All VMs to see a list of all VMs from all the data sources that are added in VMware Aria Operations for Networks.
    • Select Manual Selection and filter the VMs based on your requirements such as account, data center, manager, and so on.
      For example, this query limits the discovery of applications to specific regions: 
      VMs where Region in ( 'Central US' , 'East US' )
  4. Group applications using the key-value combination of tags.
    1. Enter a key for the tag.
    2. (Optional) Enter a value for the respective key.

    For example, if you enter the key as Department and select Any Value, VMware Aria Operations for Networks will create application boundaries based on all values of the Department tag.

  5. Group application tiers using the key-value combination of tags.
    1. Enter a key for the tag.
    2. (Optional) Enter a value for the respective key.
    For example, if you enter the key as Role and select Any Value, VMware Aria Operations for Networks will create distinct tiers of an application based on all values of the Role tag.
  6. (Optional) Click Found count Applications to see the list of application names, the VM names and the number of VMs that matches the specified criteria.
  7. (Optional) Click Unclassified VMs to see a list of VMware vCenter, AWS, or Azure VMs that are not following the specified name pattern or tag pattern. You can edit these VMs on the respective environments to fix the name or the tag criteria.
  8. (Optional) Select the Save changes to option to create a template or update an existing template.
    Note: If you are an admin user, you can update all templates. If you are a member user, you can only edit the templates that you had created.
  9. Click Discover.

Results

You see the tabular and the hexagonal map view of all applications that matches the criteria.

What to do next

View the applications discovered by tags. To learn more, see Viewing Discovered Applications.