When you first log into ManageIQ, you are presented with the Cloud Intelligence Dashboard. That has a nice ring to it "Cloud Intelligence", which in reality makes sense because it gives you and overview of your internal and external datacenter resources. I can create dashboard widgets for my VMware resources, Red Hat resources, and Amazon resources. Additionally, ManageIQ can manage Hyper-V resources, I just don't have it running in my lab. The Cloud Intelligence Dashboard is customizable, which is what I am going to walk through today.
After you first log into ManageIQ, you are going to get a dashboard similar to the example above. It provides you information on guest OS, discovered hosts, and virtual infrastructure platforms, just to name a few. But, I wanted to customize my dashboards layout and add a few additional widgets.
To move a widget, you click on the widget and relocate it to where you want on your dashboard.
The buttons at the top of a widget provide you with the ability to zoom, open a full report, minimize the widget, or remove the widget from your dashboard.
If we open up the full report on the Vendor and Guest OS Chart, it gives us a greater level of detail for the infrastructure components in my home lab.
To create custom widgets for our dashboard, we need to go into Reports, I am going to walk you through a couple of widgets I created for my dashboard. First we are going to look at VM by Department, made with the tags we created in the last post.
When creating a new widget, we are going to click on Configuration and then Add a new Widget.
On the create widget screen, we are going to enter the following information:
- Title: VM by Department
- Description: VM Resources Utilization
- Active: Checked
- Filter: Performance by Asset Type - Virtual Machine - All Departments with Performance
- Column 1: Department
- Column 2: VM
- Column 3: vCPUs
- Column 4 VM:Memory
- Run: Hourly every Hour
- Visibility: To All Users
After you have saved the widget, you can generate the information by clicking on Configuration and then Generate Widget content now.
After I add the widget to the dashboard, we can see the virtual machine information in my lab environment categorized by department.
Another widget I found interesting was RSS feeds, I created a custom RSS feed widget that displayed VMware News. Below is the field information:
Title: VMware News
Description: VMware News
Active: Checked
Type: External
External RSS Feed: Enter URL Manually - http://feeds.feedburner.com/vmwareblogsfeed
Run: Hourly every Hour
Visibility: To All Users
After I generate the content and add the widget to my dashboard, I get all the latest news from VMware and I click on the news feed to bring up the full article.
Here is the top article on Enterprise mobility news crap.
For my custom dashboard I have the following widgets, as shown below.
- Vendor and Guest OS Chart
- Guest OS Information
- Host Summary
- Top CPU Consumers
- Top Memory Consumers
- Top Storage Consumers
- Weekly Utilization Report
- VM by Department
- VMware News
As mentioned at the start of the article, the Cloud Intelligence Dashboard provides a view into all three platforms in my lab environment. You will recognize, I have virtual machines in Amazon, Red Hat, and VMware. While it is limited in the amount of widgets available out-of-the-box, the widgets that are available provide valuable insight into your infrastructure resources.
For several small to medium size organizations, they don't have the staff, budget, or infrastructure scale to justify a cloud management suite. An open source solution like ManageIQ provides a valuable alternative for companies in the SMB space.
