vRealize Operations Manager is a stand-out product for monitoring your application, virtual, and physical infrastructure. vROps comes pre-loaded with some amazing dashboards to get you going on day one. Additional management packs available in the VMware Solution Exchange and third parties like Blue Medora can also be easily installed to extend the capabilities of vROps. If you own the advanced or enterprise editions of vRealize Operations Manager, you can even create custom vROps dashboards. Best of all, it is incredibly easy!
Building a custom vROps dashboard
I will take you step by step through the process of creating a simple custom vROps dashboard in the video below. In this demonstration, we are going to build a custom dashboard that shows you some basic capacity information for a selected host. We will see how much capacity is remaining based on the most constrained resource, as well as some general workload information and system metrics.
Creating a custom vROps dashboard like this can be accomplished in three easy steps.
Step 1 – Laying out the dashboard
Our custom vROps dashboard will include four widgets. An object list, a capacity remaining widget, a workload widget, and a metric chart. The object list will be used to select which ESXi host we would like to view. Additional object lists can easily be added to filter down from clusters or data centers for larger environments. The capacity remaining widget will show us how much capacity is remaining for the selected host based on its most constrained resource. The workload widget will tell us how hard the selected host is working. The metric chart will display a timeline of the chosen host’s workload information. Adding these widgets to the dashboard is as simple as dragging and dropping.
Step 2 – Configure the widgets
By default, an object list will display much more than our ESXi hosts. We will filter the object list down to show only the ESXi host names. We will also add some trending information to our metric chart.
Step 3 – Create some interactions
The final step in creating our custom vROps dashboard is the easiest. We need to configure our widgets so that they show information for the ESXi host that we select in the object list. This process consists of choosing the object list from three drop-down menus.
Watch the video here to see how easy it is to create a custom vROps dashboard.
Creating custom vROps dashboards is easy and can be completed in minutes! If you want more experience creating custom vROps dashboards without impacting your production environment, or if you do not have the advanced or enterprise editions of vROps, then check out VMware’s Hands On Labs. For a complete step by step guide to creating the custom vROps dashboard described above, be sure to check out this post on VMSpot.com.
