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twoton
Enthusiast
Enthusiast

Help Creating Datastore Activity Dashboard

Hello All-

I'm trying to create a datastore dashboard that includes a Heatmap configured to show data-stores colored by either Workload%, Latency, or outstanding IOPS.  Upon selecting a datastore, there are two Top-N charts that I want to display the top 10 VM's in the selected datastore using read IOPS in one chart and write IOPS in the other.  I have the heatmap working fine, but I can't get the Top-N charts to work propery.  I have set them to use the heatmap as the source data in the widget interactions, but chosing the metrics to list gives mixed results.  In the chart options windows, I have tried selecting vCenter Adapter in the left pane, Virutal Machine in the middle pane, and then Datastore I/O -->Read Rate (KBps) and Write Rate (KBps).  When I go back to the dashboard, selecting a datastore does not populate the Top_n charts most times.  Sometimes I can get data to populate, but it is showing data for all VMs, not just the ones in that datastore.  I'm really confused as to what's going on since I made a similar dashboard for monitoring resource pool usage and have Top-N charts for VMs with the highest CPU/Memory utilization filtered for the selected resource pool, so I would assume that this should be similar.  Not sure what I'm doing wrong with this one...

3 Replies
twoton
Enthusiast
Enthusiast

I've been playing around with this a lot and I still can't get it to work how I want, but at least I think I understand why now.  It seems as though the datastore object doesn't have "children" of the type "virtual machine", at least that's what I'm speculating.  If I change my dashboard widget for the source to something like a resource pool or cluster, I can get the machines to filter and display information properly.  However, nothing I seem to do will allow me to do it with a datastore selected.  I tried changing the heatmap to simply an object selector but it did the same thing.  Since we use a single datastore per resource pool in my environment, I'm wondering if there is a way I can still show a heatmap based on the datastore metrics, but somehow use it to "select" a resource pool, and then filter my VM top-n charts based on the resource pool?  Anyone have any ideas? 

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Souad90
Enthusiast
Enthusiast

Hi Twoton,

The virtual machine is not considered as a Child for the Datastore in vROPs, that's why you could not get the interaction results proper.

Instead of using a Top-N Widget, you can use Object list. Set the object list to show the two metrics Writes IOPS ans Reads IOPS for virtual machines, and set the mode of the object list to Parent, then set the heaptmap to be the source of the list. Now when you click on a datastore in the heatmap, you will get the list of VM with the wanted metrics. To know the top ones, just click on the columns to sort the values descendently  or ascendingly . I hope that helps.

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Iwan_Rahabok
VMware Employee
VMware Employee

Datastore is not a parent object of VM. It is in fact a child object.

That's the reason why it does not work.

I'm aware of this limitation in 6.3 and have tabled it up to Product Manager.

e1