At the top of the Navigation Panel, you will recognize five buttons that are links to parts of the product UI. vRealize Operations 6.0 is broken up into five sections. They include the Home link, Alert link, Environments link, Content link, and the Administration link.
We start off in the Home screen, the screen that is displayed when you initially log into the product UI. The Home screen is where your dashboards reside, including any custom dashboards you may create and any custom product solutions you may install (vCenter solution, Hyperic Solution, SCOM Solution). These are the same type of dashboards that we were used to seeing in the vCenter Operations Manager Custom UI at https://(vCenter Operations Manager host)/vcops-custom/; now integrated into a single viewing panel on the Home screen of vRealize Operations 6.0.
In the below diagram, I have clicked on the vSphere VMs CPU dashboard, which gives me the heatmap widgets we recognize from vCenter Operations Manager 5.x. It displays VMs sized by CPU demand % and colored by CPU content %.
You can click on the Dashboard List drop down field, and select a specific dashboard to drill down into specific issues.
The Actions drop down list provides the ability to create new dashboards, edit existing dashboards, delete dashboards, remove dashboards from the menu, and set a dashboard as the default.
Now that we have looked at the Home page, let's look at what I consider the most fundamental facet of vRealize Operations 6.0, the Environment view. As the shepherds of the virtualization infrastructure, we perform the majority of our work monitoring the health and stability of our infrastructure environment and keeping the wolves at bay.
When you click on the Environment link, it is going to bring you to the portal that displays three different inventory lists in the Central panel. These inventory lists include Group, Application, and Inventory.
You can customize the Groups and Applications tab, but the Inventory tab is a static list of all the objects being monitored by vRealize Operations 6.0. Groups and Applications were available in vCenter Operations 5.x. Groups were found in the vSphere UI and Applications were found under the Custom UI. Now both features have been collapsed into the Environment Overview in vRealize 6.0.
I am going to create a custom Application inventory list for a dashboard that I will create in a future post. Click on the green + sign at the top of the Applications tab. Next, I am going to select Custom for the Add Application type, and then click OK.
If you have created applications in the past, this should look very familiar to you.
On the Application Management page, I am going to give my application the name of Management Application Group. I am going to create a new Tier and call it the Management Tier. Under the object filter tree, I am going to select Object Type and then Virtual Machines. I will then drag the virtual machines I want included in my new application group from the bottom right hand panel to the Tier Objects pane.
After I click Save, the new application group shows up under the Applications tab inventory list.
Application groups provide you the ability to monitor specific application resources, it gives you a more concise view the health, risk, and efficiency of the specific application tier. These types of application inventory groups are vital when making custom dashboards for troubleshooting application issues, or providing a dashboard to your application developers so they can monitor the health and stability of the infrastructure platform supporting the business applications.
To finish off the post, we are going to look at the Navigation pane of the Environment portal. The Navigation pane is broken up into inventory trees. There are tree types (storage, hosts and clusters, networking, ect), tree instances (each vCenter would create an instance of the hosts and clusters tree), branches (relationships, and leafs (objects).
Each adapter can create new inventory trees when it is installed, for example if I install the EMC Storage Analytics MGMT pack it can make relationships to hosts and datastores that already exist. An important fact to remember, it is important to install the adapter packs that you have in vCenter Operations Manager 5.8 before you migrate to vRealize Operations 6.0. vRealize 6.0 will not know what to do with the data until you have established the necessary relationships.
If I click on a host, then I get information on the Center panel.
In the picture below, you will notice eight different tabs.
- Summary tab: Displays active alerts for the object and for any descendent objects.
- Alerts tab: Displays the active alerts for the current object.
- Analysis tab: You use the Analysis tabs to evaluate the details about the state of your objects to help you resolve problems.
- Troubleshooting tab: Helps to identify the root cause of problems that are not resolved by alert recommendations or simple analysis.
- Details tab: This view provides multiple ways to look at different types of collected data by using trends, lists, distributions, and summaries.
- Environment tab: The Environment tab shows how objects in your environment are related.
- Projects tab: With projects, you can create scenarios to add virtual machines and hosts to the cluster and view the impact it will have on your environment to determine the best course of action.
- Reports tab: Several out-of-the-box reports with the ability to generate fully customizable reports.
That is a brief overview of vRealize Operations 6.0's new merged UI, there have been several changes to help make it more uniform by merging in the vCenter Operations Manager 5.8 vSphere UI and Custom UI. It takes a few days to get use to the new layout, but it is much easier to use than having separate UI interfaces like the previous version.
