VMware Aria Operations MCP server

<!-- mcp-name: io.github.vmware-skills/vmware-aria -->

VMware Aria Operations MCP Skill

Note: In VCF 9.0 and later, VMware Aria Operations has been rebranded as VCF Operations. This skill works against both names — the /suite-api/ REST endpoints are unchanged.

Author: Wei Zhou, VMware by Broadcom — wei-wz.zhou@broadcom.com

This is a community-driven project by a VMware engineer, not an official VMware product.

For official VMware developer tools see developer.broadcom.com.

AI-assisted monitoring and capacity planning for VMware Aria Operations (vRealize Operations) via the Model Context Protocol (MCP).

Overview

vmware-aria exposes 44 MCP tools for interacting with Aria Operations through natural language AI agents (Claude Code, Cursor, Goose, etc.):

Total: 44 tools — 34 read-only, 10 write

Quick Start

# Install
uv tool install vmware-aria

# Configure
mkdir -p ~/.vmware-aria
cat > ~/.vmware-aria/config.yaml << 'EOF'
targets:
  prod:
    host: aria-ops.example.com
    username: admin
    port: 443
    verify_ssl: true
    auth_source: LOCAL
default_target: prod
EOF

# Set password (never in config.yaml)
echo "VMWARE_ARIA_PROD_PASSWORD=your_password" > ~/.vmware-aria/.env
chmod 600 ~/.vmware-aria/.env

# Verify setup
vmware-aria doctor

Offline / Air-Gapped Install (from source)

This project uses the modern PEP 517 build system (hatchling), so there is no setup.py by design — that is expected, not a missing file. If you cloned the source and hit ERROR: File "setup.py" or "setup.cfg" not found ... editable mode currently requires a setuptools-based build, your pip is older than 21.3 and cannot do an editable (-e) install with a non-setuptools backend. Editable mode is a developer convenience, not needed to run the tool — do one of:

# From the source tree — a normal (non-editable) install builds a wheel:
pip install .              # NOT  pip install -e .

# ...or upgrade pip first, and editable works too:
pip install --upgrade pip && pip install -e .

For a truly air-gapped host, build the wheels on a connected machine and copy them over — the target then needs no network:

# On a connected machine, collect this package + its dependencies as wheels:
pip wheel . -w dist        # → dist/*.whl   (or: uv build, for just this package)

# Copy dist/ to the air-gapped host, then install offline:
pip install --no-index --find-links dist vmware-aria

CLI Examples

# List top CPU consumers
vmware-aria resource top --metric 'cpu|usage_average' --top 10

# Check active CRITICAL alerts
vmware-aria alert list --criticality CRITICAL

Shortened. The full README is on GitHub.