Virtualisation Tips & Tricks

If you have symptoms like the Cloud Director UI is slow to load or tasks will finish relatively quickly, but loading information is slow, then this could be your case.

Slow UI performance can usually be attributed to a large growth of the audit_trail table in the database.

The audit_trail table will capture activity ongoing within the environment and will capture additional information should Cloud Director be integrated with other Products such as Container Service Extension (CSE) or Aria Operations.

Resolution:

1. Reduce the current size of the audit_trail and clear some data.
2. Set Cloud Director to automatically remove activities after a period of time.

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Reduce Size

How does one track down what tables are taking up space? Running the following command will provide the sizing:

select schemaname as table_schema, relname as table_name, pg_size_pretty(pg_relation_size(relid)) as data_size from pg_catalog.pg_statio_user_tables order by pg_relation_size(relid) desc;

Let’s try to reduce the current size of the audit_trail and clear some data.

1. Stop the services on all cells:
/opt/vmware/vcloud-director/bin/cell-management-tool cell -i $(service vmware-vcd pid cell) -s

2. Take a backup of VCD DB:
/opt/vmware/appliance/bin/create-backup.sh

3. Connect to the DB:
sudo -i -u postgres psql vcloud

4. Run the below commands to clear the data in the audit_trail table:
truncate table audit_trail;

5. Start the VCD services:
systemctl start vmware-vcd

6. Repeat step 5 above once the first Cell has come up.

Set Retention Time

Set Cloud Director to automatically remove activities after a period of time. You can use the Cell-Management-Tool, present on all Cloud Director Cells to configure the application and set the number of days you wish to retain events for.

The following commands adjust the retention time for Events, Tasks and Audit Trail, where the -v <number> represents the count of days to be stored. The change does not take effect immediately. It would not delete all records older than <number> days. One of the jobs related to the cleanup is ActivityLogCleanerJob which by default is set to run once per day.

Update retention time for Events.

/opt/vmware/vcloud-director/bin/cell-management-tool manage-config -n com.vmware.vcloud.events.history.days -v 30

Update retention time for Audit Trail

/opt/vmware/vcloud-director/bin/cell-management-tool manage-config -n com.vmware.vcloud.audittrail.history.days -v 30

Update retention time for Tasks

/opt/vmware/vcloud-director/bin/cell-management-tool manage-config -n com.vmware.vcloud.tasks.history.days -v 30