How to Create Business Unit- and Application-level Sustainability Dashboards Using Aria Operations

Today, sustainability is a big concern, and this is certainly true for many VMware customers. We introduced our first sustainability dashboards in VMware Aria Operations in 2021, and many customers have been happy with our initial approach.

However, as always, there is a potential to do more, and by meeting with many VMware customers, we’ve developed some new ideas and identified additional needs.

One of these needs is to get sustainability information not only on virtual machines (VMs) but also at the application and business unit (group of applications) level. This is why we’ve created next-generation dashboards for sustainability, providing data like scope2/scope3 CO₂ emissions with visibility at the Business Unit/Application/Datacenter/Cluster/ESXi level, and business unit and application summaries like the ones shown below.

For the sake of brevity, we have omitted some of the intricate calculations and details in this overview, but visit the VMware Developer site to find supermetrics, views, and dashboards available for import. Here you’ll find a guide for using some of these new features.

PUE and carbon intensity factor for datacenters

First, set the power usage effectiveness (PUE) and carbon intensity values for each group of datacenters (one group for all the datacenters with the same values is better). These values will be stored in a custom group because, as of today, we don’t have a way to get them directly and this is a nice way to store them centrally and make them easier to change if needed (with or without the API).

Note: Carbon intensity is measured in grams of CO₂ emissions per kWh, but since we have our CO₂ emissions stored in kg and the power in Wh, we will need to divide it by 10⁶(either on the carbon intensity value or in the next formula).

Using the custom properties feature in the custom group will create a custom property for each datacenter named in the custom group, so these values will be easily accessible as metrics (under Metrics –> Tags –> Custom properties).

The metric should be added here: Environment –> Custom Groups –> Add.

Now let’s go to the math part: What do we need to get all these calculated data? Supermetrics, of course!

Creating supermetrics

Here, we’ll demonstrate how to prepare supermetrics. These metrics allow us to calculate, store, and build dashboards based on new data. These supermetrics will have different assigned object types depending on where we want the metric to be stored, as we would like to have some of them at the Business Unit/Application/Datacenter/Cluster/host level.

Note: After a setup of supermetrics for objects, we must choose the correct policies. If overlooked, the supermetrics will not be applied to those objects. Once this is done, it’s normal to experience a little delay, usually around one calculation cycle (around 5mn), before metric values become visible.

Here is the list of all the metrics used and their meanings/usage:

If you want to understand some of the calculations, here are some explanations and tips:

To correct the PowerUsage for the VM, as there is a known bug due to a conversion issue in ESXi 7.0, the supermetric VMPowerUsageCorrected is created (In the future, or if you don’t have this issue, you can use the Total Energy metric for the two other supermetrics or just get rid of the / 1000).
For the Scope2VMCO2, the hierarchical relationship of Aria Operations is used to get the datacenter’s PUE on which the VM is running (so doing a negative depth to go up to three levels of relationship, the sum is just a trick to access to the custom property value at the parent level):

{‌This Resource: ‌Super Metrics|VMCO2} * sum({‌Datacenter: ‌Custom Properties|DatacenterPUE, depth=-3})

Also, we need to add the power usage of the ESXi host itself without any VM charge to the running VM. This power will be split across all running VMs on the host, Scope3VMCO2. The average CO₂ emission of 1.3T for the manufacturing, transportation, and EOL of a server for its four years of life is a good value (In this example using Dell PowerEdge R640, the CO₂e is 17% of the total 7.7T of CO₂e).

As the given server’s life is four years (365.25 x 5 days, so 365.25 x 4 x 24 x 12 = 420,768), there are 420,768 slices of 5mn on which the Scope3 CO₂e for the server life will be allocated. 5mn is the sampling time to store the metric for the Scope3 on the VMs (checking if the VM is running to apply the weight of the scope3 is a good thing too).

In future versions, one idea could be to have this info stored at the ESXi level and do a more accurate calculation using info coming from the manufacturer itself (and when the info from manufacturers will likely become more accurate, since today some have 100% deviation possible).

All calculations are performed at the VM level and then aggregated to higher tiers. With our supermetrics in hand, our next step is to present them in informative and relevant dashboards.

Dashboards and views

When designing dashboards and views, prioritize simplicity. By creating fewer objects, we make management and understanding easier.

The dashboards are built the same way to have visual consistency and are provided with the power and CO₂e versions for a combination of them.

The next question is how to group our VMs into applications and our applications into business units, as this is the key: being able to have an application and business Unit view of our CO₂ emissions/power usage.

Custom groups

Since we can’t populate the applications (nor the business units) automatically, we must do that manually (investigating how to do that using Aria Operations for Networks or API could be interesting for future versions).

The tricky part is to use Group Types to be able to categorize our business units’ and applications’ custom group. It will be useful in the selectors and all the widgets we will use in the dashboards (as we don’t want to select only one app or business unit but all of them).

Create two Group Types, Business_Unit and Application, to group the new custom groups into the same category (This is useful for filtering and building the views/widget in the dashboards).

Now we can create all our applications and then add them into our business unit’s custom groups.

Creation of applications and business units custom groups

Conclusion

After setting up groups, the new dashboards show insights from applications, business units, and IT infrastructure.

Now, the business units, application, and infrastructure owners can have visibility on their CO₂e emissions and can take the appropriate actions to help improve their organization’s VMware Green Score.

Of course, there is a lot of potential for us to add to and enhance these capabilities in future releases.

Free trial

Sign up for a free trial of VMware Aria Operations and deploy these dashboards in your environment to gain helpful application and business unit insights (and possible cost savings) through power reduction while simultaneously reducing carbon emissions.

Acknowledgements

Vincent Meoc, Bengt Gronas, and Thomas Kopton

References and sources

Supermetrics, Views, and Dashboards:
- These sources are available: VMware developer just upload and import them in your Aria Operations (you might encounter the known issue for the supermetrics
  https://kb.vmware.com/s/article/2126552, but it will work anyway).

Note: If you import each supermetric in the precedence order and wait for the data to appear (usually 5mn after creation max), then you can import the next one without naming issues in the formula).