By: Kyle Wassink, Blue Medora
vROps Views Series (3 of 5): List vs. Summary Presentation Modes
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.
Using Tabular Views
There are two options for creating tabular Views in vROps: List and Summary. While they both display information in a table, there are some minor differences in how they display data. Specifically, the List option displays information per resource while the Summary View only displays summary or aggregate information across resources.
When creating tabular Views, there are a number of configurable items. The main items include: metrics, collection period, data transformation, and summary. To highlight the similarities and differences between List and Summary Views, we’ll use both fictitious collection data and a real environment. All of these configuration options are found in the “Data” step of creating a View. Note that the “Data” step has seen small UI updates in recent releases of vROps, so your environment may look slightly different.
Metrics
The first thing to do when creating a tabular View is to select the metric(s). This step is identical for both List and Summary Views. Simply drag and drop (or double click) the metrics from the metric picker on the left into the empty area on the right.
Figure 1: Drag and drop, or double click, metrics from the list into the data section.
Collection Period
Next up is the collection period. Again, this is the same for both List and Summary Views. On the far right is a small section to define how many hours/days/months/etc. worth of collections should be gathered.
Figure 2: The collection period is shown to the upper right of the data section.
Data Transformation
Applying data transformations is also the same for both List and Summary Views. To apply a transformation, simply click on any of the rows in the Data table and change the “Transformation” dropdown value as seen in Figure 3.
Figure 3: Changing the transformation used on the selected data row.
Summary
Not to be confused with “Summary Views”, summary is its own setting that lets you aggregate the values over all resources the view is showing. It is here that the List and Summary View diverge in their similarities. Adding a summary section is optional for the List View, but required for the Summary View. Let’s see why.
Behind the scenes, vROps is building a dataset for your tabular View. Figure 4 below shows what the result of this is after the Metrics, Collection Period, and Data Transformation steps are.
Figure 4: A simplified version of what vROps is doing behind the scenes.
A List View takes this last dataset and makes the selected metrics column headers. If a summary section is defined for a List View, an additional row is added without impacting the final dataset.
A Summary View, however, does not list individual resources. It lists a summary, or aggregation, of resources. This is done by making each selected metric a row, with each defined summary setting a column.
Building on the simplified dataset in Figure 4, Figure 5 shows what configuring the summary sections results in for both List Views and Summary Views. For the List View, an “Average” row is added. For a Summary View, the resource rows are aggregated using min, max, and average summary settings.
Figure 5: The point of divergence between List and Summary Views, as well as a sample output and summary configuration.
The result in a live environment can be found in Figure 6. Note that an additional metric was added (Write Latency) to highlight how data is added to each type of View. In the List View, another column appears to display the metric whereas a new row is added for a Summary View.
Figure 6: Comparing a List View and a Summary View containing virtually identical configurations.
Next Up: Trend Presentation Mode
Next up is learning about the Trend Presentation Mode, which lets you graph historical data.
