The latest vRealize Operations release brings many exciting new features including improvements to the views functionality. Two major enhancements were introduced, both of them regarding data configuration options
The two major changes we will be looking at in this post are:
- Cell coloring based on result value
- New metric transformations.
View Cell coloring
Let’s start our overview from the coloring feature. This option is completely new and allows to highlight view cells with green, yellow, orange, or red colors based on its value. You can easily see if a metric or property value falls within an expected range or something needs your attention.
In picture below, we see a table showing the “Snapshot Size” metric with the “Descending” direction and following ranges:
Green: Value < 1
Yellow: 1 <= Value < 3
Orange: 3 <= Value < 5
Red: Value >= 5 If the Snapshot size is greater than 5 GB (cell coloring logic considers values with applied unit)
In our sample we will see these values in red color.
Before you go ahead and try this great feature here are some tips for view cell coloring configuration:
- For string values simple value comparison works
- For better highlighting you can set ascending direction for value ranges
- It is not mandatory to set intervals for all colors, even one range for color can be used – only red etc.
At the end I would like to point out that cell coloring implemented for views and color customizations are not yet available in generated reports.
New metric transformations
Views have historically provided different types of transformations for raw value representation. In vRops 6.6.1 we had a choice of 8 different transformation types with “Last” being the default transformation:
In vRops 6.7, 3 new types were introduced for better customization:
- Current: This is now the default transformation and allows to achieve better performance since data requested directly from caches only and not from databases. Note that the “Last” transformation now refers to the last existing value in the database, so for your custom content I would recommend applying “Current” where possible or check that “Time Settings” range fits to data collection interval for the desired metric (otherwise returned value can be null).
- First: This transformation returns the first collected value for configured time interval.
- Percentile: This transformation allows aggregating values with percentile function. You can set the desired percentile. The default value is 95.
For better representation I prepared the following dashboard configuration:
