vRealize Operations Manager 6.0 - Views

With vRealize Operations Manager 6.0, there is a new component called views, which provides details on a specific object that has been selected. In order to get the most out of views, VMware has provided a custom UI to build your own views. Views can be accessed right from the Analysis tab, if you find something that you want to investigate further, there is a good chance you can get the information you want from a view instead of having to dive right into the all metrics information on the Troubleshooting tab.

For instance, you may find a workload issue on a host with CPU demand, under Further Analysis you could select Host CPU Diagnosis List to get more details.

A view presents collected information for an object in a certain way depending on the view type. Each type of view helps you to interpret properties, metrics, alerts, policies and data from a different perspective. A view is the smallest component of a dashboard or a report. 

An adapter that pulls in information to vRealize Operations Manager can be used in a view, this includes information from 3rd party partners. There are a large number of system views that come out of the box.

When building a new view, there are five different parts required:

• Name and Description
• Presentation: 6 types of views (List, Summary, Trend, Distribution, Text, Image)
• Subject: Associated object (Host, Virtual Machine, Resource Pool, Datastore)
• Data: Metrics information (Workload%, Contention%, Swap-in Rate KBps)
• Visibility: Where the view is displayed (Dashboards, Reports, Details tab, Analysis tab)

The view types in the Presentation section are how the information is displayed. There are a number of view types that are available and expect these to grow in future releases. Currently the view types include:

• List: List views provide tabular data about specific objects in the environment
• Trend: Trend views use historic data to generate trends and forecast for resource use and availability in the environment
• Distribution: Distribution views provide aggregated data about resource distribution in the environment (pie charts and bar charts)
• Text: Insert the provided text
• Image: Insert a static image
• Summary: Summary views present tabular information about the current use of resources in the environment

Let's walk through the process of creating a new view. Like in my previous posts, I am going to focus on host memory shortage and create view that provides the the relevant information.

On the Details tab, we are going to click on the green + arrow.

Give your custom view a name and a description, I recommend providing information about the object type the view is associated with to gather the information. In my example below, I give a description of This view displays information on host memory shortage.

Next we supply the view type, I am going to use a List to provide tabular data about specific objects in my environment. This will also give me the option of providing a summary of the data.

For the Subjects, I scroll down to vCenter Adapter and select Host System.

The fourth step asks us to supply the data for the Host System; I expand the Memory metrics and select Swap In Rate, Contention (%), and Demand Workload (%). Also, I click on the Summary button and add an average summary to the view.

Last, we are going to provide the information on where we want our users to have access to this view, I make the view available through Dashboards, Reports, Details tab, and Further Analysis for Workload and then click Save.

After my view has been saved, on the Details tab I can select the Host Memory Shortage view in the upper panel and the information is displayed in the lower panel. In my case, my three hosts have a demand workload(%) of 12.647% with no memory swap-in rate and no memory contention(%). My systems seem very healthy.

In my next post, we will go through creating a custom report from this new view.