Now that you have a sneak preview of the launch of vRealize Operations 6.6, it is time that we unwrap the goodies and take you through the new features in detail. One of my favorite areas of vRealize Operations Manager is Dashboards. A dashboard for me is like an empty canvas which allows you to paint the picture of what is most important to you, when it comes to managing day to day IT operations. Whether you are a help desk engineer, or a CIO, to be successful in your role, you need quick access to meaningful information. While their are numerous tools which will provide you data, the art of filtering down that data into information is what matters when it comes to decision making.
Dashboards being an empty slate, allows you to do so in a quick and efficient manner. This enhanced capability allowed us to create multiple out of the box categories matching the various persona of users in an IT organization. This resulted in a set of out-of-the-box dashboards which will help provide you a jump start into running product operations from Day 1. These dashboards are battle tested in large IT organizations and now are a part of vRealize Operations Manager 6.6.
It was important that all this valuable IP was easily accessible through a centralized console which acts as an anchor for user of vRealize Operations Manager. In order to achieve this, we introuduced a “Getting Started” dashboard which would step you through some useful categories and use cases.
Today we will have a look at the first category which is called Operations. Here is how operations shows up on the Getting Started Page:
The Operations category is most suitable for roles within an organization who require a summary of important data points to take quick decisions. This could be a member of a NOC team who wants to quickly identify issues and take actions, or executives who want a quick overview of their environments to keep a track of important KPIs.
Key questions these dashboards help you answer are :
- What does the infrastructure inventory look like?
- What is the alert volume trend in the environment?
- Are virtual machines being served well?
- Are there hot-spots in the datacenter I need to worry about?
- What does the vSAN environment look like and are their optimization opportunities by migrating VMs to vSAN?
Let us look at each of these dashboard and I will provide a summary of what these dashboards can do for you along with a quick view of the dashboard.
Datastore Usage Overview
The Datastore Usage Dashboard is suitable for a NOC environment. The dashboard provides a quick glimpse of all the virtual machines in your environment using a heatmap. Each virtual machine is represented by a box on the heatmap. Using this dashboard, a NOC administrator can quickly identify virtual machines which are generating high IOPS since the boxes representing the virtual machine are sized by the number of IOPS they are generating.
Along with the storage demand, the color of the boxes represents the latency experienced by these virtual machines from the underlying storage. A NOC administrator can take the next steps in his investigation to find the root cause of this latency and resolve it to avoid potential performance issues.
To see this dashboard in action click here
Host Usage Overview
The Host Usage Dashboard is suitable for a NOC environment. The dashboard provides a quick glimpse of all the ESXi hosts in your environment using a heatmap. Using this dashboard the NOC administrator can easily find resource bottlenecks in your environment created due to high Memory Demand, Memory Consumption or CPU Demand.
Since the hosts in the heatmap are grouped by clusters, you can easily find out if you have clusters with high CPU or Memory Load. It can also help you to identify if you have ESXi hosts with the clusters which are not evenly utilized and hence an admin can trigger activities such as workload balance or enable DRS to ensure that hotspots are eliminated.
To see this dashboard in action click here
Operations Overview
The Operations Overview dashboard provides a high level view of objects which make up you virtual environment. It provides you an aggregate view of virtual machine growth trends across your different datacenters being monitored by vRealize Operations Manager.
The dashboard also provides a list of all your datacenters along with inventory information about how many clusters, hosts and virtual machines you are running in each of your datacenters. By selecting a particular datacenter you can zoom into the areas of availability and performance. The dashboard provides a trend of known issues in each of your datacenters based on the alerts which have triggered in the past.
Along with the overall health of your environment, the dashboard also allows you to zoom in at the Virtual Machine level and list out the top 15 virtual machines in the selected datacenter which might be contending for resources.
To see this dashboard in action click here
Optimize vSAN Deployments
The Optimize vSAN deployments dashboard is an easy way to device a migration strategy to move virtual machines from your existing storage to your newly deployed vSAN storage. The dashboard provides you with an ability to select your non vSAN datastores which might be struggling to serve the virtual machine IO demand. By selecting the VMs on a given datastore, you can easily identify the historical IO demand and latency trends of a given virtual machine.
You can then find a suitable vSAN datastore which has the space and the performance characteristics to serve the demand of this VM. With a simple move operation within vRealize Operations Manager, you can move the virtual machine from the existing non vSAN datastore to the vSAN datastore.
Once the VM is moved, you can continue to watch the utilization patterns to see how the VM is being served by vSAN.
To see this dashboard in action click here
vSAN Operations Overview
The vSAN Operations Overview Dashboard provides an aggregated view of health and performance of your vSAN clusters. While you can get a holistic view of your vSAN environment and what components make up that environment, you can also see the growth trend of virtual machines which are being served by vSAN.
The goal of this dashboard is to help understand the utilization and performance patterns for each of your vSAN clusters by simply selecting one from the provided list. VSAN properties such as Hybrid or All Flash, Dedupe & Compression or a Stretched vSAN cluster can be easily tracked through this dashboard.
Along with the current state, the dashboard also provides you a historic view of performance, utilization, growth trends and events related to vSAN.
To see this dashboard in action click here
Hope this post will give you insights on how each of these dashboards can help you run smoother operations and ensure that you have answer to those difficult questions at the back of you hand. Stay tuned for more information on other categories.
