In part 4 of this series we have finished laying down the Super Metrics infrastructure for the OvDC Admin Custom Dashboard.
Custom Groups is a powerful feature within vCenter Operations. Having said that, I will use it in order to dynamically grouping the OvDC resources.
Yes I know, we are already in part 5 and still we haven’t started putting any widgets on our canvas. I agree there is a lot of prepping in this Custom Dashboard but this is necessary in order for this dashboard to mean something so hang tight, everything happens for a reason.
Creating custom group for the OvDC resources
Like any virtual based environment, changes are rapidly being made. If you have a vCloud environment (if not, what are you doing here?! J) you know how fast things happen.
As you will see in several cases later on in this series, creating a dynamic Custom Group will help us in the widget “tags filtering process” when pointing widgets to OvDC related resources is needed.
Creating the group is done via vC Ops vSphere UI at https://vcops-address/
Login the UI and click on Actions > Create new group…
For my Custom Dashboard I will be using an example “Dev” OvDC. Provide a group name and make sure the membership type is set to “dynamic”.
As you know, in vCenter OvDC represents as Resource Pool. Copy its name to your clipboard.
What you are doing here is “capturing” the Resource Pool descendants, which are the VM’s and the datastores related to this OvDC (Or Resource Pool for that manner). To check if you got it right, hit the Preview button.
Hit the finish button and you done.
Now the group is available for tag filtering and for use in our future dashboard widgets.
In the next part for this series, we will finally start adding widgets to our canvas and will start to see this dashboard coming to life, stay tuned!
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