By: Kyle Wassink, Blue Medora
vROps Views Blog Series
There is a lot to love about vROps Views. So much, in fact, that they deserve an entire blog series! This series will cover how to create them, how to reuse them, why they are valuable, and much more.
Where to Start
Views can be created in a few places in vROps, but there are two primary locations. The first is found by navigating to the Content > Views page, where every View in your environment is listed. Clicking the green “plus” icon here will open the Create View popup. Alternatively, you can create Views from any resources Details > Views page. To open the Create View popup, click the green “plus” icon.
Figure 1: The Details > Views page of a Microsoft SQL Database resource. Clicking the green “plus” (red) will open the Create View popup.
Step 1: Name and Description
After opening the Create View popup, the first step is providing a name and description for the View. The name should be concise but descriptive so it can be easily identified. The description field lets you provide more specifics about the View. This can include information about the intended purpose of the view as a reminder for why you created it. If you’re following along, give your View a name and description.
Figure 2: The first step is to provide a name and description for your custom View.
Step 2: Presentation
Presentation lets you decide how you want to display information. There are six options: List, Summary, Trend, Distribution, Text, and Image. List and Summary provide a way to display tabular information. Trend is used to get a graph, while Distribution is used for pie charts. Finally, Text and Image let you define static Views that can are primarily used to add descriptions or images to reports.
Figure 3: The second step is to decide on the Presentation, or how your View will display information.
Step 3: Subjects
Subjects are the resource kinds that the View will display information about. You can select multiple resource kinds if you want, but for this walkthrough only one will be used. Use the dropdown menu, or the search bar, to find and select your desired resource kind.
Figure 4: Step three requires you to select one or more resource kinds.
Step 4: Data
Now that you have the presentation and resource kind configured, it’s time to select the metrics and their transformation. This section will look slightly different depending on which presentation mode you select, but the overall layout is the same. You drag and drop metrics from the left panel into the empty space to the right. As you click these metrics, you can define how to display, sort, transform, and roll up the information.
If you’re following along, drag and drop a few metrics into the View and update the configurations as necessary. For this walkthrough, we’ve added two SQL Server Databases metrics: Space Used (%) and Log File Used (%). Note that Space Used (%) was used twice, the first using the maximum transformation and the second using the forecast transformation. We’re collecting this information in vRealize using the Blue Medora Management Pack for Microsoft SQL Server.
Figure 5: First, drag and drop the desired metrics into the middle section (red). Next, decide how much historical data should be used (blue). Finally, configure each metric to use the desired transformation (orange).
Note: In recent releases of vROps the “Data” step has seen a few small UI changes and may look slightly different in your environment.
Step 5: Visibility
The last step is deciding where the View should be visible. In the first section, Availability, you decide where the View can be used (covered in the first post of the series). Next, Further Analysis lets you decide whether or not to link to this View in a resources badge page. Finally, Blacklist gives you the option to hide this View from specific resource kinds in your environment.
Figure 6: The default settings for View Visibility.
Next Up: List vs. Summary Presentation Mode
A List View was used in the walkthrough, but you can also display information in a table using the Summary View. The next post in this series explores these presentation modes similarities and differences.
