SovLabs Blog Counting Custom Code in vRealize Orchestrator

Introduction One of the things I had always found difficult in translating to upper levels of management was the level of effort required to get vRealize Automation up and running in an environment. It was always a tough sell to add additional developers to staff to work on what is technically a COTS product, and being able to quantify that level of effort in a way that is also meaningful to the upper echelons of management (and not just us technically oriented folks) can be difficult. To be fair, this challenge is certainly not unique to vRealize Automation, but is common with all of the CMP platforms that I have encountered, as well as many other enterprise grade applications. That being said, going back several years now, I have toyed with the idea of counting the number of lines of code (or even the total number of characters of code) used in vRealize Orchestrator workflows and actions in an attempt to somehow quantify the level of effort required to stand up, support, and maintain the solution. However, it always seemed that as soon as I started to investigate ways to gather the required information that I would get pulled in five different directions and was never able to make much headway.