Tag Archives: dashboard

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vRealize Operations – Creating interactions between separate dashboards

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Whilst reading some of the older vRealize Operations documentation, I stumbled on something I didn’t think was possible.

  • The ability to create interactions between separate dashboards.

At first, I thought could not be correct? I don’t remember seeing this option. But sure enough it’s there. So, I thought I’d write a quick blog about it and share to the world.

  • You can apply sections or context from one dashboard to another. You can connect widgets and views to widgets and views in the same dashboard or to other dashboards to investigate problems or better analyze the provided information.
Configuring Interactions between Dashboards

First, I’ve created two dashboards, which are based on the old troubleshooting dashboards. Both dashboards have an Object Picker List to filter the various related objects on each dashboard.

  • Dashboard-1 – Troubleshoot Cluster
  • Dashboard-2 – Troubleshoot VM

The premise is simple, when I select a Cluster object from Dashboard-1, I want the list of VMs to be filtered in Dashboard-2, to those only in the selected Cluster.

vROPs - Dashboard Interaction - example dashboards Continue reading vRealize Operations – Creating interactions between separate dashboards →

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How to build a vROPs dashboard for tracking Total VMs deployed and Growth Trend

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In this Blog post I am going to detail how I created a vROPs dashboard based on a customer’s request.

Can we track how many VMs have been created in the past week and track if the number increases or decreases in each cluster?

If you want to just get the dashboard, see directly below, if you want to learn how it was created, keep reading further.

Installing Dashboard
  1. Download the files from code.vmware.com sample page.
  2. Import the files appended with “view” under the view’s in vROPs
  3. Import the file appended with “Dashboard” under the dashboard section in vROPs.
Dashboard Breakdown
  • First Item – This is a list which I’ve created to show each cluster, the total VM metric with some expressions attached, the timescale here is fixed by the list view and not affected by the dashboard timeframe. The change is an expression of the count of VMs at the start and end of the timeframe. I’ve added in some basic colouring to alert at thresholds.
    • Why does it say vCPUs? When using expressions, it requires a Unit to be affixed. This doesn’t work if you’re counting something, so in our next release, this issue should be addressed. It’s purely a vanity thing.
  • Second Item – This shows the VMs attached to the cluster you select on the left-hand side, showing you how old that VM is, its uptime and current power state.
  • Third is a Sparkline – Showing an easy view of the changes in total VMs per cluster over a 7-day period (as defined by the dashboards time scale)
  • Forth item is a trend graph, where we are showing date of the changes in the Total VM metric based on the data we have, and the trend/forecast. This trend into the future is set within the item itself. Currently we can set this to show the forecast for the next 366 days in the future.

vROPS - Total VMs Deployed and Growth Trend

vROPs versions

To show the VM creation date, this metric is available in vROPs 8.2 and later. This dashboard/view should work with older versions of vROPs but omit the data for the missing metric.

How was the dashboard created?

First, we need to create three views. Continue reading How to build a vROPs dashboard for tracking Total VMs deployed and Growth Trend →

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How to build vROPs dashboard for tracking VM Growth over X days

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I came across an interesting query on Reddit regarding vRealize Operations Manager (vROPs), summarised the query;

“Can I have a vROPs report/dashboard which shows me the storage usage by VMs over the past 3 days”

The short answer is yes, and I produced the following dashboard, views and report and uploaded to code.vmware.com for the post author to use.

Basic VM Growth Sparkline Dashboard VM Growth List

My dashboard has two elements to keep things simple;

  • A sparkline widget of VM’s storage used, the time frame show can be controlled in the dashboard view in the top-right hand corner
  • A list view of the VMs storage used covering a few metrics
    • Current Disk used
    • Disk Used (3 days ago)
    • Change of disk used (in GB)
    • Change of disk used (in %)

So, let’s look at how I created this.

Creating a Sparkline widget in the Dashboard

Create your dashboard, which will show you a blank canvas. Set the Dashboard name.

  • Drag the Sparkline Chart widget onto the canvas and resize as needed, you’ll see this option appear by hovering over the edge of the widget.
  • Click the pencil icon to edit the widget settings.

VM Growth Sparkline Chart Widget

Configure the Widget configuration. The most important options here are;

  • Self Provider – On
  • Show Object Name – On
  • Column Sequence – Label First

This means the widget will provide its own metric data to be displayed. It is not linked to other objects on the dashboard, as we are keeping this as a simple view. Continue reading How to build vROPs dashboard for tracking VM Growth over X days →

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vROPs Dashboard – Display port group with VLAN ID and map to virtual machines

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My customer asked me how to display the VLAN ID for a virtual machine in vROPs.

The short answer is, due to the VLAN ID only being available from the Distributed switch adapter, its not simple to display this in a single list view.

So after some thinking around this, I came up with the following simple dashboard which was edited from the default “Distributed Switch Configuration” dashboard.

The dashboard is simple, and shows a selectable list of port groups, which then will refresh the virtual machine list, so you can see which virtual machines are attached to that port group.

You can download the dashboard and edited view here:

vROPs Dashboard Display port group with VLAN ID and map to virtual machines

 

Regards

Dean Lewis

vROPs – What is the “IsGreenForPlacement” Metric + Dashboard

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A customer of mine queried the details of a metric available in vROPs “IsGreenForPlacement”

You can find this by selecting a cluster in vROPs, go to All Metrics, and just search placement.

vrops IsGreenForPlacement 1

And here is a screenshot of the Metric in a sparkline.vrops IsGreenForPlacement 2

The customer uses this metric to give a signal (Green/Red Button on a vROPs Dashboard) if a vSphere cluster can be used for on-going deployments.

Unfortunately there’s not much documented information publicly. And we ran into an  issue where the metric stayed positive (yes you can deploy), but the Storage datastore had run out of space. So I went off to dig out what this metric actually does.

IsGreenForPlacement – details

After speaking to the internal teams on vROPs I found the answer;

“Regarding IsGreenForPlacement metric, only CPU and Memory participates on calculation of this metric, by default if CPU and MEM workload is less than 80% it is green.”

So storage is not taken into account.

Creating a Dashboard

This one will be really simple. Continue reading vROPs – What is the “IsGreenForPlacement” Metric + Dashboard →