Pivotal Operations Manager CLI

Introduction

This post will be around a Github project by Pivotal Cloud Foundry (PCF) where they created a CLI called OM for interacting with Operations Manager (OpsMan).   This CLI has been a life safer when trying to automate any actions around upgrading components of PCF.

The Problem

When first trying to interact with the OpsMan appliance, there was not much of a choice other than manually clicking around in the interface.  The OpsMan API was available but interacting with it was not the best so PCF upgrade automation was tricky.

The Solution

When stumbling across better ways to solve the PCF automated upgrade problem, I was directed towards this CLI.  I was blown away on how easy it is now to interact with OpsMan.  You can see the full list of available options on the readme.md page.  But here is a sample workflow to get you started on how you can use this CLI on your journey of automated product tile upgrades.

1. Upload Product to OpsMan
2. Stage Product to OpsMan
3. Upload Stemcell to OpsMan
4. Set Errand State to Enabled (Step not needed if running PCF 1.10)
5. Apply Changes
6. Set Errand State to Disabled (Again not need if running PCF 1.10)
7. Apply Changes

All of these commands are available to use in the CLI and can be easily run inside of a Concourse pipeline.  But there are other problems to be solved now like the following:

• How do I get the Pivotal product tile?
• How do I know what stemcell to upload with the new product tile?
• When I know what stemcell to download, how do I download it?
• Is there currently an apply changes happening in OpsMan or is it not available to apply changes?

These questions are now real issues when trying to upgrade in an automated way.  These are the manual steps you will need to solve for so you can have little or no interaction with the upgrade.  It is out of the scope for this article to answer some of these, but Pivotal has provided some sample pipelines to answer them.

Summary

Hopefully, you find the benefit in this OM tool as much as I have.  It will save you a lot of time with staying up to date with upgrades so you can work on other cool stuff.

~RRRII