Aria Operations shows the Importance of Reading ALL of the Release Notes!

In the standard course of troubleshooting an upgrade we tend to look at the known issues, and the fixes for those issues in the release notes. I don’t know about others, but I barely skim the body for new features during a failing upgrade. Unfortunately, that bit me just recently.

In Aria Operations 8.12 VMware had begun deprecating the use of Remote Collectors in preference of the Cloud Proxy. I had a customer attempting to upgrade from 8.12 to 8.16 they were getting a failure when attempting to deploy the cloud proxy. After reviewing the release notes known issues and workarounds for 8.12 through 8.16 I was unable to find any information regarding the failure and not sure what happened with my Google-fu but didn’t find a KB so I opened a case with VMware. Luckily enough I got connected to the Engineer who wrote a KB due to this being harder to find.

In the first two paragraphs of the release notes it calls out that you need to delete the remote collector and deploy the cloud proxy. https://knowledge.broadcom.com/external/article/367358/cloud-proxies-originally-deployed-as-rem.html

So long story short, if you are planning an upgrade of any software please make sure that you read the release notes from the beginning. If you are in technical support and are troubleshooting these issues, you may want to look at all of the release notes and not just the problems, fixes and workarounds sections.