Preview of Custom Dashboards Available With vCenter Operations Manager 5.7.x.

With this blog, I wanted to showcase the power of custom dashboards in vCenter Operations Manager. In the past I have written about creating custom dashboards with vCOps. I would encourage you to read all those articles before you read this one. An easy way to access all those articles is through the page dedicated to vCOps on vXpress.

As mentioned in my introductory article about vCOps, the solution comes with 3 different user interfaces. In this article I would specifically talk about vCOps Customer User Interface.

With vCOps 5.7.1, VMware decided to provide some excellent custom dashboards pre-built into the solution. If you go through the release notes of the product, you would see the following section which talks about these dashboards:-

vSphere Dashboards in the Custom UI

The vSphere group in the Dashboards menu contains several default dashboards for managing virtual objects in a vSphere environment. These default dashboards are available to all members of the Administrators, Operators, and Users user groups. This release introduces the following default vSphere dashboards:

• Troubleshooting Dashboard
• VM Utilization Dashboard
• VM Performance Dashboard
• Host Utilization Dashboard
• Cluster Utilization Dashboard
• Datastore Performance Dashboard
• Datastore Space Dashboard
• Heatmaps Dashboard
• Alerts Dashboard
• Host Memory Dashboard

Let me run you through all these dashboards and show how you can use them in day to day operations management.

While in the previous release of vCOps, you required to create all the custom dashboards, the above mentioned release comes with these custom dashboards. The screenshot below showcases how these dashboards can be accessed and used.

To being with, let's log on to the vCOps Admin UI to check the version of vCOps I am running in my lab environment:-

1- Login to vCOps Admin UI - https://<admin ui ip address>/admin

2- The username to be used in 'admin' and the password is 'vmware' by default if you have not changed it during initial setup.

3- Click on the status tab and you can check the version of vCOps, you can see I am running 5.7.2 in my environment.

4- Now lets log on to the Custom UI - https://<admin ui ip address>/custom

5- Click on the Dashboards Tab -> vSphere (this lists all the custom dashboards which are incorporated in the 5.7.x realease:-

Lets ho through each dashboard one by one to see how it helps you to manage your VMware infrastructure:-

VM Performance Dashboard (click the image below to enlarge)

This dashboard showcases the key performance statistics of  top 25 virtual machines in your environment. This includes some of the key parameters such as CPU Ready%, Memory Swap In Rate, Memory Swap Out Rate, Write Latency, Ready Latency, Disk Commands Per Second (IOPS), Network Packets sent and Received Per Second.

Troubleshooting Dashboard (click the image below to enlarge)

This dashboard sis pretty interesting as it helps you to troubleshoot and find out the culprit objects for any performance problems in your virtual infrastructure. Here you can select an object you want to investigate, see its relationship with other objects in the virtual datacenter and also find out interesting metrics and latest events associated. This will help you to zero down on a root cause by correlation which can be a big help while troubleshooting issues.

VM Utilization Dashboard (click the image below to enlarge)

As the name suggests, this dashboard is focused on giving you utilization statistics for your virtual machines in your virtual datacenter. The dashboards uses the Top 'N' Analysis widgets to show the Top 25 VMs with CPU Usage, Memory Usage, Disk IOPs, Network Packets Sent and Received.

Host Utilization Dashboard (click the image below to enlarge)

As the name suggests, this dashboard is focused on giving you utilization statistics for your ESXi hosts in your virtual datacenter. The dashboards uses the Top 'N' Analysis widgets to show the Top 25 ESXi hosts with CPU Usage, Memory Usage, Disk IOPs, Network Packets Sent and Received.

Cluster Utilization Dashboard (click the image below to enlarge)

This dashboard can be used to focus on the resource utilization at a cluster level. It clearly indicates how much is used and available which can give you a clear picture around resource utilization in your clusters. This includes CPU Demand, Memory Usage, Disk IOPS, Network packets send and received.

Datastore Performance Dashboard (click the image below to enlarge)

This dashboard is by far the best resource I have used to troubleshoot performance issues in a vSphere infrastructure which are primarily due to issues in the underlying storage issues. This dashboard lists the top 25 Datastores with highest Latency and IOPS. The good part is that you can select the object (datastore) and see which VM within that datastore is driving the latency or IOPS. This is an easiest way to find the culprit VM or datastore.

Datastore Space Dashboard (click the image below to enlarge)

This dashboard helps you keep a track of the occupied space in your datastores. This is similar to the custom dashboard I showcased in my article - Using vCOps Super Metrics & Custom Dashboards to Display Datastore Usage % !!

You can select the datastore on the left which is showcasing the space remaining on the basis of colors, red being less space and green being enough space. On the right pane it shows the VMs which are utilizing this space and the widget below shows the metric sparklines.

Heatmaps Dashboard (click the image below to enlarge)

Heatmaps are a good way to showcase utilization and load with the effect of changing colors. This dashboard helps you to understand the load of your Virtual Environment across clusters 7 ESXi hosts. The metrics measured here are CPU, Memory, Disk and Network.




Alerts Dashboard (click the image below to enlarge)

I do not have a screenshot for this dashboard as I do not have any alerts in my virtual infrastructure. But yeah this alerts dashboard helps you to deal with all the alerts with the health of all the related objects and interesting metrics. This can help you do a 1st level root cause for the issue for which the alert is generated.

So you can see that there are a number of goodies available in the product out of the box. I would encourage you to upgrade the environment to 5.7.x release so that all these dashboards are automatically created in your vCOps Custom UI and you can use them to monitor your infrastructure more efficiently. Also try my other vCOps custom dashboard articles to learn how to create a custom dashboard.



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Part 2 - Using vCOps Super Metrics & Custom Dashboards to Display Datastore Usage % !!

This post speaks about creating a Custom Dashboard in vCOps using Super Metrics. Please read  the Part 1 of this series to ensure that you know the context.

Here is the link - 

Part 1 - Using vCOps Super Metrics & Custom Dashboards to Display Datastore Usage % !!

Now since we have the Super Metric from the previous post, we will go ahead and use it to create a Custom Dashboard which reflects this metric and helps you to monitor the Datastore Usage %. Here is how you do it:-

1- Login to vCOps Custom UI with a user with appropriate access rights.

2- Click on Dashboards -> Add

3 - Drag and Drop a Heat-map widget from the left pane to the right pane. (To know more about custom dashboards in vCOps, read this Guide.)

4- Give a Name to the Dashboard, Select the number of Columns as 1 and click on OK. (refer to screen shot below.)

5- Now lets configure this widget. Re-size the widget as per your viewing requirement and then click on Edit widget to configure the heat map.

6- Here is how you will configure the Heatmap.

7- And once you click on OK, you have you Heat Map which you can start monitoring to ensure you never run out of space on your datastores.

You can hover over these objects and you will see 2 metrics for each object - Total Capacity & Usage in %age

Here you can clearly see that some of my datastores in my primary DC are actually reaching the 100% usage  and I have some work to do to ensure I have enough free space to keep them green. Since this heat map is auto refreshing, it will ensure that your datastores are continuously monitored for the thresholds you have set for utilizing space on datastores.

If you want to see me present other tips and tricks on vCOps at VMworld 2013, please vote the session which I have submitted. 

For more details refer to - VMworld 2013 - Call for Papers Voting is Now Open. Cast your vote to see your favorite sessions!!

Don't forget to Share and Spread the Knowledge. This will help others!!

Part 1 - Using vCOps Super Metrics & Custom Dashboards to Display Datastore Usage % !!

For the past few weeks, I have been working on vCenter Operations Manager as a part of a project. As always, I am here to share my experience around the work I have been doing and hopefully help the larger VMware community.

As we all know, one of the basic rule of thumb is to ensure that you have a certain percentage of space always available on your datastores to ensure that you cater to the need of all the virtual machines which are a part of these datastores. For example, you would always want your datastores to be around 10% free to ensure that you have enough space for snapshots or any other unplanned requirement. At the same time, you would want to keep an eye what percentage of space is available in your datastores so that you can provision VMs accordingly, of-course I am assuming that you are not using Storage DRS ;-)

Okay so let's quickly jump into action with our use case. We will use vCOps custom dashboard to create a heat-map which would change colors according to free space remaining and would help you to monitor and plan things accordingly in your Virtual Datacenter.

Since, vCOps pulls all the metrics from vCenter, it will be able to pull the Datastore Total Capacity and Used space. Using these 2 metrics, we would create a super metric which would give us the usage %. Using simple math:

Datastore Used % = (Used Capacity/Total Capacity)*100

So how do we create this super metric.

Note:- For someone new to super metric concept, I would recommend you read this white paper from VMware.

1- Login to vCOps Custom UI with a user with appropriate access rights.

2- Click on Environment -> Super Metrics

3- Click on the Add New icon on this window to create a new super metric.

4-  Configure your super metric as shown in figure below

Your super metric will now reflect in the list of available super metrics. Now we need to create a super metric package to attach the same with all the datastores, so that the system automatically can calculate the usage percentage for every datastore which exists or will be added to vCOps, in the future for monitoring. Here is how you create a package and attach it.

1- On the same screen click on -> Super Metric Package -> Add Super Metric Package.

2-  Give it a name and select the super metric which we create above. Refer to the screen shot below.

3- Put a Check-mark against the given thresholds to make this super metric a Key Performance Indicator (KPI) - I just left the setting to default and clicked on OK.

Now we need to add this Super Metric to all the datastores. This will enable vCOps to calculate this new metric for all the datastores which exist and would be added in the future. This can be done by adding this Super Metric will the Resource Kinds - Datastore. Let's see how we will do it.

1- Click on Environment -> Configuration -> Resource Kind Defaults

2- On this Screen, select the Adapter Kind as VMware Adapter, Select Datastore as the Resource on the left pane and under super metric package select the super metric package which you created before.

UPDATE 19th June 2013 - At this point if you want to collect this super-metric on the existing datastores as well, you need to Click on Environment -> Environment Overview -> Click to Expand Resource Kinds -> Select Datastores.

This will list all the Datastores in the right pane - Select All the Datastores -> Click on the small Pencil on the top to edit all these resources -> In the new window, put a check against Supermetric and then select the Datastore Usage% supermetric-> Click on Ok to save.

Well now you need to wait for the next collection and  performance calculation cycle which is usually 5 minutes. In another 5 minutes we will be able to use this super metric for creating custom dashboards.

We now create a custom dashboard to display this Metric in Part 2.

Click here for Part 2 - Using vCOps Super Metrics & Custom Dashboards to Display Datastore Usage % !!

If you want to see me present other tips and tricks on vCOps at VMworld 2013, please vote the session which I have submitted. 

For more details refer to - VMworld 2013 - Call for Papers Voting is Now Open. Cast your vote to see your favorite sessions!!

Don't forget to Share and Spread the Knowledge. This will help others!!