Ability to transfer the ownership of dashboards with vRealize Operations 7.0

There have been several amazing changes in the realm of dashboard management in vRealize Operations 7.0. The very first one in my list of favorites is the ability to transfer dashboard ownership.

In the previous releases of vRealize Operations, one can create and share dashboards, however if a user must be removed from vRealize Operations for any reason (leaving the organization or transferring to a new role), he/she would not be able to transfer the ownership of their dashboards which they have created. This means that, in order to maintain their dashboards, one has to clone them and reshare them, which can be painful if you are dealing with a number of dashboards. Our awesome engineers decided to reduce this pain by introducing a simple button in the UI to seamlessly transfer the ownership of dashboards. So now if a user is planning to leave, he/she can easily transfer their dashboards to other users or the built-in admin account. This solves a big operational hassle.

Let's look at how it is done:

1- Click on Dashboard - Actions - Manage Dashboards.

2- Select one or more dashboard from the dashboard list which you want to transfer the ownership for.

3- Click on the actions tab and Transfer Dashboard.

4- Select the user to whom you want to transfer the ownership.

5- Click on Ok to confirm transfer. 

Easy Peasy....... The new owner now has all the power and privileges to manage this dashboard. Make sure you chose a responsible person as a new owner as "With great power comes great responsibility" 💪💪

Oh, by the way, while you are transferring the ownership, the dashboard sharing remains the same and hence no viewer/consumer of the dashboard is impacted. It is like vMotion of the dashboard rights from one user to another without impacting the consumers 😋😋😋

Another important thing to note is that the built in "admin" account has permissions to transfer the ownership of any dashboards.

In another post I am writing, I will share details around managing content of a user (dashboards, report schedules), who is accidentally deleted from the list of users. Stay tuned for that one as well.

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Using the compare to previous period option while troubleshooting with vRealize Operations

One of the less known feature of vRealize Operations is to visualize data patterns and compare them against previous time periods of same interval. This feature helps you to easily detect changes in behavior of a workload a.k.a anomalies which could be a result of an event leading to an underlying performance problem.

Let's explain this with an example. I am currently looking at the CPU Usage of one of my virtual machines here using a metric graph. This is the last 7 days worth of data showing the regular patterns of how CPU is being used. You can see the peaks and valleys. Upon observing closely, you can see that the data patterns are pretty consistent.

Imagine, I need to quickly look at how was the behavior of this metric at exactly the same time-period A WEEK AGO. I want to compare to see if things have changed, or is their any anomaly in the data pattern..

Alright, I will click on the calendar icon and from the second date time control chose 1st Period:

Let's click on GO and see what happens.

oooh.. look at that, I am now comparing to a previous period.. But this seems a little harder to compare in this mode.

Let's click on the split charts option to compare these charts in a single graph:

Bingo... Look at that... We immediately found atleast a couple of data points where the CPU Usage is abnormal as compare to what it is this week.

If by now, you are thinking, what happened the week before that, then you my friend are thinking exactly like me :-)

Let's get one more week in by adding "previous period 2".

Easy Peasy... A quick and easy way to get value out of vRealize Operations.

Well, I hope this gives you some ideas to how manual troubleshooting which ofcourse is a day to day operation done by admins and architects can become increasingly simple yet effective by using these hidden gems or vRealize Operations.

Share and Spread the knowledge and do share your troubleshooting techniques with vRealize Operations....

How to embed vRealize Operations dashboards for easy information sharing.

One of the most 💖loved💖feature of vRealize Operations 7.0 has been the new capability of sharing dashboards with URL. The following blogpost explains the options around dashboard sharing. In this post, I wanted to share a quick example on how you can use the embed feature of dashboard sharing.

Use Case - The use case is pretty obvious. In organizations where vRealize Operations data can be consumed by different departments, BUs, groups etc, the Operations admin can provide embed code with specific dashboard URLs to the consumers of this dashboard. This embed code can be used to embed the dashboard in an external webpage, confluence page, sharepoint, through a simple iframe.

Let's look at an example. We will use a Billing App dashboard which I have created to monitor the CPU Contention and Disk Latency on all the virtual machines which make up the billing application in my organization.

Let's click on the share button and get the embed code for this dashboard. In case of embedding dashboard, I would recommend that you keep the link expiry option to Never Expire for obvious reasons :-)

In my case, I want to embed this dashboard in this blogpost itself. See for yourself. This is a live dashboard from our lab :-)

P:S - I am able to publish a live dashboard on a public blog because my vRealize Operations instance is running on VMware Cloud on AWS. 😉😊😋

Note - You would require to accept the certificate for my vROps instance to see this dashboard in your browser. Click on this link to access the dashboard directly once and then it will be available to view in this blog post - https://35.161.24.145/ui?t=faasnilnyk#b45vkg0q2f

Go ahead and hover over the metric charts and see the live data of all the billing VMs. You can also see historical data by selecting the calendar icon in the widgets.. 👍👍

Hope this posts helps you undertsand the power of dashboard sharing with vRealize Operations and also allows you to share meaningful data with your peers in your oragnization.

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