This will quite possibly be the shortest, but yet most useful, posts on vRealize Automation you’ve ever read…

If you regularly develop software components for vRA, you’ve undoubtedly discovered that if for some reason a deployment fails, the machine is automatically deleted within a couple of minutes. This is frustrating as it gives you no time to debug why it failed, as all evidence is deleted with the machine.

Thankfully, Sam McGeown shared the answer a couple of weeks back:

So there you have it. One custom property attached to your blueprint will enable you to see why your deployment failed.

This is one of those things I wished I’da known ages ago!