By: Brock Peterson
Blue Medora provides over 100 dashboards out of the box across the numerous vROps integrations. These dashboards cover everything from compute, storage, and network layers, to converged ecosystems, databases, and application environments. In this blog, we will explore the best compute (ie: server) layer dashboards. Specifically, we will highlight the top three server dashboards from Dell EMC and HP.
Let us first take a step back, what are dashboards designed to do? They provide insight into your IT infrastructure. They illustrate health, performance, and efficiency within various environments which allows executives, IT managers, and support teams to more effectively manage their IT infrastructure. Here are the top three server dashboards offered from Blue Medora.
#1 Dell PowerEdge Health
There are four dashboards provided out of the box with the Dell EMC management pack from Blue Medora. The most popular of these dashboards is the Dell PowerEdge Health dashboard as shown in Figure 1 below.
Figure 1: Dell PowerEdge Health dashboard
In the left pane you can see the Dell PowerEdge environment as mapped from chassis, blade and rack type servers down through ESXi hosts and the VMs running on them. As you choose items in the left pane, the related resources are highlighted and the right pane is populated. The widgets in the right pane provide general object health over time and detailed object metrics such as CPU Usage, Memory Usage, Read Latency, and many more.
#2 Dell PowerEdge Performance
The second most powerful dashboard is the Dell PowerEdge Performance dashboard as shown in Figure 2 below.
Figure 2: Dell PowerEdge Performance dashboard
This dashboard allows users to track performance issues within their Dell infrastructure. In the left pane you can select various discovered objects: chassis, racks/blades/servers, ESXi hosts, VMs, and datastores. Once an object is selected, key performance indicators (KPIs) are populated in the right hand pane. KPIs such as read-latency, write-latency, and Memory Usage are shown via sparklines. The spark lines show 24 hours by default, but can be adjusted to as low as one hour or as high as one year.
#3 HP Overview
The HP Overview dashboard is our third most used dashboard and shown below in Figure 3. It is a heat map dashboard showing the instantaneous health of the environments HP server infrastructure, including enclosures, chassis, blades, network adapters, racks, power supplies, fans and ports. Each heat map illustrates the health of each object from red to green (0-100). Details of each object, including a sparkline representation of object health over the past 7 days is shown while hovering over each heat map.
Figure 3: HP Overview dashboard
In addition to these, there are many more dashboards available with Blue Medora management packs. Please see our True Visibility Suite for more information.
