This is a quick followup on my yesterday’s blog post that discussed how to customize vCloud Director UI with additional links. vCloud Availability has separate Portal UI where the users can monitor status of their replications and optionally trigger failover operations. Wouldn’t it be nice if the link from vCloud Director UI would automatically sign in the user into the vCloud Availability Portal UI?

Quick chat with the engineers showed that indeed it is possible by leveraging the {vcdSession} variable that provides the vCloud Director session token. The URL provided in the link then must look like this:

https://<vCloud_Availability_Portal_UI_FQDN >:8443/login?token={vcdSession}

In my case the CMT command for the whole link would look like this:

./cell-management-tool manage-config -n ui.tenant.customOrgLinks -v "

# vCloud Availability

[Monitor Replications](https://vcloud.fojta.com:8443/login?token={vcdSession})"

And this is the end result:

Click on the Monitor Replications link above (red box) opens vCloud Availability Portal screen with the tenant signed, in the next browser tab (below).