How to build a vROPs dashboard for tracking Total VMs deployed and Growth Trend

Dean Lewis

This post was originally published on this site

In this Blog post I am going to detail how I created a vROPs dashboard based on a customer’s request.

Can we track how many VMs have been created in the past week and track if the number increases or decreases in each cluster?

If you want to just get the dashboard, see directly below, if you want to learn how it was created, keep reading further.

Installing Dashboard

Download the files from code.vmware.com sample page.
Import the files appended with “view” under the view’s in vROPs
Import the file appended with “Dashboard” under the dashboard section in vROPs.

Dashboard Breakdown

First Item – This is a list which I’ve created to show each cluster, the total VM metric with some expressions attached, the timescale here is fixed by the list view and not affected by the dashboard timeframe. The change is an expression of the count of VMs at the start and end of the timeframe. I’ve added in some basic colouring to alert at thresholds.
- Why does it say vCPUs? When using expressions, it requires a Unit to be affixed. This doesn’t work if you’re counting something, so in our next release, this issue should be addressed. It’s purely a vanity thing.
Second Item – This shows the VMs attached to the cluster you select on the left-hand side, showing you how old that VM is, its uptime and current power state.
Third is a Sparkline – Showing an easy view of the changes in total VMs per cluster over a 7-day period (as defined by the dashboards time scale)
Forth item is a trend graph, where we are showing date of the changes in the Total VM metric based on the data we have, and the trend/forecast. This trend into the future is set within the item itself. Currently we can set this to show the forecast for the next 366 days in the future.

vROPS - Total VMs Deployed and Growth Trend

vROPs versions

To show the VM creation date, this metric is available in vROPs 8.2 and later. This dashboard/view should work with older versions of vROPs but omit the data for the missing metric.

How was the dashboard created?

First, we need to create three views.

Show total VMs deployed in each cluster currently and the number from X days ago and the change between the two figures.
Show VM details from selected cluster in the first view = How long ago was the VM created, what is the uptime of the VM, what is the current state of the VM.
A trend view plotting the change in VM numbers we have seen in the clusters and using that data to forecast into the future.

View #1 – Total VMs per Cluster and change

Create a new view and provide a name
Set the presentation to a list
Subjects = Select “Cluster Compute Resource”

Under Data tab, add the following metrics and configure as follows

Summary|Total Number of VMs

Provide a metric name
Leave transformation as current

Summary|Total Number of VMs

Provide a metric name
Set Transformation as “First”

Summary|Total Number of VMs

Provide a metric name
Set Transformation as “Expression”
- Expression formula = current-first
Use the advance settings to configure ranges for metric colouring as needed.

Note: In vROPs 8.2 and earlier, the Unit had to be set to some sort of figure, in my dashboard screenshot you will see the change column show X vCPUs. This issue is fixed in vROPs 8.3, as you can see in the above screenshot.

Click on the “Time Settings” tab
Set your time settings as needed, for me I want to track changes over a 7 day period. So, my above expression looks at the difference between today’s VM count and the VM count 7 days ago.

If we preview the data against this view, we should see something similar to below.

View #2 – VM Age, Uptime and State

Create a new view and provide a name
Set the presentation to a list
Subjects = Select “virtual machine”

Under Data tab, add the following metrics and configure as follows

Configuration|Creation Date (Day(s))

Provide a metric name
Set your units

System|OS Uptime (Day(s))

Provide a metric name
Set your units

Summary|Runtime|Power State

Provide a metric name

View #3 – New VM Trend

Create a new view and provide a name
Set the presentation to a trend

Set the Subject to “Cluster Compute Resource”

Under Data tab, add the following metric and configure as follows

Summary|Total Number of VMs

Set Metric name as necessary
Select all three data series

You should now have the following views created.

Creating the Dashboard

Next, we will create the dashboard.

This will contain:

Our three views we created earlier (2 lists and 1 Trend)
A Sparkline widget

Create a new dashboard by clicking the three lines next to the dashboard navigation object on the left-hand pane and then “create dashboard”.

Next, we need to add our three views to the dashboard canvas.

Change the bottom selector pane from widgets to views
drag and drop the list view object to the canvas

Hover over the top of the view object in your canvas and select the pencil icon to edit

Provide a name as to be shown on the dashboard (I just matched the view name I created earlier)

Under Input Data – Select vSphere World

Under Output Data – find your first view you created. here I’ve filtered the view list for my total VMs I created first.
Select the view and click save at the bottom of the edit view dialogs.

Repeat again for the second view.

Set as a Self-Provider
Under Input Data leave as All Objects
Under Output data, find your Second view.

You can drag the sizes of your view boxes on the dashboard canvas by hovering over the edge of the list view box.

You should have a Canvas like the below. We will now create an interaction between the two views, so that when a cluster is selected on the list from the left-hand view, it will populate the VM data in that cluster on the right hand view.

Click Show interactions

Click and drag the two object points together as highlighted below.
This will give you the blue linked line
Click Save.

Now when we select a cluster name, the right hand VM view we creates will show us the relevant data.

Next, we are going to add our Trend view.

Make sure you are still in the view selections and drag and drop trend view onto the canvas
Click to edit the same as with a list view.

Provide a name to show on the dashboard for the view dialog box
Under Configuration – Set the Self Provider to be On
Under Input Data – Select vSphere World
Under Output Data – Filter and find your trend view we created earlier.
Click Save

You will now have your Trend View Object which should show you all your clusters and the trend data of VM count as well as forecast into the future.

Finally, the last object we’ll create on the dashboard is the Sparkline. We will create this object on the fly on the Dashboard canvas.

Change to view the widget objects list
Find the Sparkline object and drag it to your canvas
Resize as necessary

However, over the Sparkline object box and click to edit (little pencil icon)
Provide a name for the object on the dashboard
Under Configuration
- Set to refresh content as needed
- Set to be a Self Provider
- Set to show object name – This will show the cluster names for our metrics
- Column Sequence – Label First (you can test what works for you)
- Show DT (Dynamic Threshold high and low point markers)