Copy and paste widgets from your favorite dashboards in vRealize Operations

While creating custom dashboards in vRealize Operations, there are times when you want to use the same widget type to be re-used within a dashboard multiple times. At the same time, you might want to re-use some of the widgets which you might like in the out of box dashboards and want to leverage the same to create your own dashboards.

In the past, you would do this by going through a lot of steps to literally recreate the entire widget and configure it to the tee. Depending upon the complexity of the customization, this could take from minutes to hours, especially if you are working on creating a dashboard with a number of widgets.

How cool it would be if you can just copy your favorite widgets from a pre-existing dashboard or configure once and replicate a widget multiple times within the same dashboard just by using simple copy and paste functions... 

Before vRealize Operations 7.5, this sounded like a BEAUTIFUL DREAM 😂

With vRealize Operations 7.5, we introduced a gem of functionality which in my humble opinion was lost in the huge list of amazing new features that came out with this release. The "What's New" section of release notes seems to be 4 pages long.

Within the release notes, you will notice a feature related to Dashboards and Widget Enhancements which talks about the functionality of copying and pasting widgets. Here is a screenshot from the release notes...

Feature Details:

As the release note mention, this capability allows you to pick up any dashboard, edit the dashboard and then select widgets within that dashboard by clicking through them, just like how you would select photos from a folder. You can select one or multiple widgets at the same time. Once selected, just use the CTRL+C on your keyboard or use the Actions menu to copy the widgets.

Once copied, you can open a new dashboard canvas in the same or a different browser session and then past the copied widget using CTRL+V or Actions -> Paste from the menu.

You would just need to redo interactions if any, else everything else will be pre-configured based on the base widget. This includes both widgets and views. Yes, you read it right.


Let's have a quick look at how this works:


Here is my favorite Capacity Utilization dashboard. I like some of the widgets in this dashboard which would take hours to configure manually. Let me just edit the dashboard and copy what I like into a new dashboard.

1- Launch the source dashboard you want to copy widgets.

2- Click on Actions -> Edit Dashboard




3- Select the widgets you want to copy. Notice how they are highlighted with a blue outline as I select them.

4- Click on the actions button as indicated below to select Copy Widgets(s) or use the keyboard shortcut for copy.

5- Now you can cancel out of this dashboard as the copy is done.

6- Click on the Actions Menu under dashboards and click on Create Dashboard.

7- Once the new dashboard canvas opens, click on Actions -> Past Widget(s)

Just like that.. It's done in seconds. Saving you a number of hours and getting you to your goal of getting that perfect dashboard you always wanted 😃😃😃

From this point onwards, you can make the delta changes you need in your target dashboard and setup any interactions if applicable and you are good to go..

To find some cool dashboards you might want to copy from, explore the vRealize Operations community created dashboard repository on VMware Code.

Hope this article helps you. Please share your comments in the comments section below or follow me on twitter to be updated on similar content - @sunny_dua.

Key vSAN metrics and properties available in vRealize Operations

vSAN day 2 operations are increasingly becoming mainstream in vRealize Operations. With the last release of vRealize Operations 7.5, while vROps added some cool capabilities around workload balancing using workload optimization across multiple vSAN clusters, there were some key metrics which were added to help vSAN administrators.

Some of the key metrics that are available today from a performance point of view :

Some of the key metrics which you can now notice include average I/O size which can be now measured to understand what I/Os are hitting the vSAN clusters and whether they are unexpected from the initial design.

Similar to metrics, here are some key properties which will help you understand the manage the configuration of your vSAN environments:

Operate VMware Cloud on AWS using vRealize Operations

VMware Cloud on AWS is one of the most talked about innovations and partnerships between VMware and AWS Cloud. With VMware’s SDDC stack fully deployed on AWS, we are delivering on the promise to VMware customers to get the economies of the public cloud without re-writing your existing applications.  While talking to most of the customers who are leveraging VMware Cloud on AWS today, the biggest value which they often speak about beyond the benefit of “zero app re-platforming” is about the seamless integration of a public cloud platform like AWS into their existing processes and toolsets.

Almost all of these customers were leveraging vRealize Operations to manage their on-premises SDDC, and find it extremely simple to add their VMware Cloud on AWS vCenter into vRealize Operations and extend the current set of monitoring, troubleshooting, optimization, and remediation processes to VMware Cloud on AWS.  This provides such customers a view of their hybrid environment within minutes and with zero impact on their people or processes.  With this post, I will show you how simple it is to bring in a VMware Cloud on AWS deployments into your existing on-premises vRealize Operations Cluster.

Before we get into the how, let us quickly look into a couple of architectural options you have while connecting your VMware Cloud on AWS vCenter to your on-premises vRealize Operations.  I will also provide you architectural options if you want to deploy vRealize Operations on VMware Cloud on AWS.

Architecture Option 1 – vRealize Operations On-Premises
Architecture Option 2 – vRealize Operations Running on VMware Cloud on AWS
Architecture Option 3 – vRealize Operations Federation with VMware Cloud on AWS

• Provide a summary of performance, capacity, and configuration to Senior Executives and Virtual Infrastructure Administrators across all your vSphere environments.

• Provide a unified view of events triggered across the virtual environments into a single pane for making it easier for NOC or Helpdesk to initiate action.

• Ability to create a data warehouse where a user-selected set of metrics can be stored for data archiving and report use cases.

• Ability to provide summarized views of health and configuration of your SDDC stack.  This includes core applications such as VMware vCenter Server, VMware NSX, and VMware vSAN.

• The solution also covers the management applications such as vRealize Operations Manager, vRealize Log Insight, vRealize Automation, vRealize Business, and VMware Site Recovery Manager.

With this option, the assumption is that you have a large part of your infrastructure on-premises including vCenter, ESXi hosts and other hardware and applications which you are monitoring with vRealize Operations. At the same time, you have on-boarded to VMware Cloud on AWS and have recently provisioned a couple of SDDCs therein and as a result of which you have some vCenter footprint in VMware Cloud on AWS.

In this model, you can extend the existing operational capabilities of vRealize Operations to the VMware Cloud on AWS vCenter, by simply connecting the vCenter as an end-point inside vRealize Operations. You create an adapter instance both for vCenter Server and vSAN to collect data from vCenter and bring that into vRealize Operations Manager. You can do this by either directly connecting the vCenter or leveraging a remote collector which can be deployed inside a VMware Cloud on AWS SDDC to ensure that the data can be compressed and encrypted.

The existing vRealize Operations cluster would need to be scaled out to incorporate the new VMware Cloud on AWS SDDC sites which you plan to monitor. In order to get the appropriate sizing, you can leverage the vRealize Operations Online Sizer Tool.

The diagrams below show both the options discussed above:

vRealize Operations on-premises collecting data from VMware Cloud on AWS and native AWS directly

vRealize Operations on-premises collecting data from VMware Cloud on AWS and native AWS with remote collectors

This second option applies to organizations which have moved a large part of their environment into VMware Cloud on AWS. In such a scenario, they can deploy or migrate their vRealize Operations instance in VMware Cloud on AWS directly. The power of VMware Cloud on AWS is that it leverages the world’s most reliable and highly adopted hypervisor, vSphere.  Hence it is trivial to deploy a vRealize Operations cluster there. Once deployed, organizations can collect data from other VMware Cloud on AWS SDDCs using remote collectors. At the same time, for collecting data from an SDDC located on-premises or native AWS, one can deploy remote collectors to send over data into the centralized analytics cluster deployed in VMware Cloud on AWS.

The diagram below illustrates how this architecture would look like:

vRealize Operations in VMware Cloud collecting data from VMware Cloud on AWS, native AWS and on-premises SDDCs with remote collectors

In this third option, you can leverage the federation capabilities of vRealize Operations to federate the data from both on-premises and VMware Cloud on AWS deployed vRealize Operations clusters into a centralized vRealize Operations federation instance for a centralized visibility use case. Some of the powerful use cases of federation are:

Here is an architectural diagram which can be leveraged to deploy a federation solution between on-premises and VMware Cloud on AWS hosted vRealize Operations:

vRealize Operations Federation Deployment between On-Premises and VMware Cloud on AWS hosted vRealize Operations clusters

The above examples will help you decide the best architecture to deliver all Self-Driving Operations with vRealize Operations Manager as you expand into the public cloud with VMware Cloud on AWS.  Maintain your operations people and processes without disruption while you quickly expand into the world of hybrid cloud.  For more technical information on vRealize Operations, visit vrealize.vmware.com for videos, walk-through demonstrations and more.

Note - This post also appeared on VMware Official Blog where I blog as a guest blogger - https://blogs.vmware.com/management/2019/05/vmware-cloud-on-aws-with-vrealize-operations.html

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How to recover vRealize Operations admin account password

With vRealize Operations 7.0, VMware introduced a very simple yet powerful feature which would allow you to reset the built-in admin password of your vRealize Operations instance using recovery settings. I believe this is an extremely useful feature, as I have seen numerous deployments where admins have forgotten the admin password and are forced to login through the root account and run commands to reset the password.

Note - You can follow the procedure mentioned in this KB article to reset a forgotten admin password through SSH.

I would rather use this new feature and keep the password recovery process as simple as possible. Simple in this case provides security as well, since you do not have to share root passwords and run commands.

With vRealize Operations 7.0, once you login to the CASA (Cluster Administration) UI a.k.a. Admin UI, you will find a new section called "Administrator Settings".

This screen allows you to "Change Admin Password". At the same time you can enter the password recovery settings to ensure that in case you lose your admin password, you can use the recovery email to recover the password. In the above example, I have leveraged my SMTP settings to configure this.

Once saved, on subsequent admin login screen, you will notice an option of "Forgot Password"

Once you click on the forgot password option, you will receive an email on the registered recovery account email. Here is how the email will look like:

Upon clicking on the reset password link, you will be redirected to a page where you can reset the admin password.

Once the password is SET, you are good to login with the new password in the subsequent logins.

I think this simple addition would be really helpful with enhancing your operational efficiency. Go ahead and configure the recovery settings on your vROps instances before you forget your admin account password :-)

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Reset out of box content post upgrade or install of vRealize Operations

I have been several times about this and hence I thought I would quickly blog about this. With vRealize Operations, the out of the box content owned by VMware usually gets a refresh with each release. If you wish to get the new updated content, then you can leverage the reset out of box option during upgrade. I wrote about this more than 3 years ago here and this is still relevant.

I have been asked that if one needs to reset the out of box content later on then it is possible. The use cases around this are things like, you have modified out of box symptoms or alerts and you want to restore back to factory settings, or you have accidentally deleted some out of box content which you want to recover.

You can rest out of box content easily per solution. A solution is also known as a management pack which helps you connect to various endpoints to collect data and run analytics.

Here is an example on how you can reset content for vCenter solution:

1- Login with admin privileges or the built-in admin account.

2- Click on Administration -> Solutions.

3- Find the solution for which you want to reset out of box content.

4- Click on the Configure option.

5- On the configuration page click on the option highlighted below to reset out of box content.

6- Read the warning on the dialog box, check the option to confirm and click on ok to take this action.

Note - This process can take up to 30 minutes and will affect the data collection as stated in the warning.

Hope this helps.

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