Recover Deleted Custom Dashboards from vCenter Operations Manager

Some time back, I wrote an article highlighting the custom dashboards which are available out of the box with the release of vCenter Operations Manager 5.7. I have been asked questions about, how these dashboards can be recovered in case someone deletes them accidentally. 

In reality these dashboards are a bunch of XML files which get imported as dashboards, when you install the vCOps vAPP for the first time. A shell script is behind this import which executed the script post installation and start importing these out of the box dashboard in your vCenter Operations Manager instance.

Hence, if comes a scenario where you end up deleting these dashboards, you would need to find that shell script and run it all over again to import the dashboards back into your vCOps instance. Now that we know the science behind these dashboards, let's have a look as to where this shell script is located. 

I am using WinScp to login to the UI VM and browse through to the /usr/lib/vmware-vcops/user/conf/dashboards directory as shown in the screenshot. Here you will find the shell script "import-dashboards.sh"  and most importantly all the xml exports of the dashboards which can be imported back into vCOps individually as well.

If you wish to import all the dashboards, you would need to execute that shell script using either a ssh client such as putty or by taking a console connection to the UI VM. If you run this script it will import all the dashboards listed in the screenshot above and if any of those dashboard is already existing then you will have duplicate instances of same dashboards which in my opinion is not cool.

Hence if you want to recover only a subset of the listed dashboards, then either edit the shell script (if you are good with scripting) else just grab the xml file you want to import and use the IMPORT DASHBOARD option in the custom UI.

With this I will close this article and  get on with a 360 Degree Capacity Dashboard I am working on. Will share that for sure ;-)

Till then...

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