Management Pack Builder Questions/Suggestions

[paulpitchford]

Hi,

     First off congratulations on management pack builder really impressed. Am looking forward to the news release.

Do have a few suggestions

1. When adding a metric ability to not alway add a property. I am adding a metric to extend virtual machine. Whilst I can do this I also have to add a property which I do not require (currently I add an extra property with the VM name which I don’t really need). Is it/will  be possible in future version to exclude fields selected from API request from creating properties.
2. When creating metrics/properties ability to define a name but would also like to also add description (pops up as tooltip in vROPS) , Unit, specify/create folder where metric/prop
3. When chaining requests from API ability to use more than one parameter from parent request.
4. Ability to extract data from field return by API.
5. Ability to add custom attributes to advanced properties of adaptor.
6. Ability to import Dashboards/Views/Alerts/Super metrics  etc from vROPs into management back builder. So can be delivered in a single package.

Feel free to reach out if have any questions.

Kind Regards,

Paul

[Shen88]

@paulpitchford, Great callouts.

Just adding couple of links here which might help people wanting to start off with Management pack builder.

Video demonstrating how to use Management Pack Builder:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fHqrC7U9OvQ&list=PLrFo2o1FG9n4gQ60pa8CjpTDbgpUz5Hrt

Article:
vRealize Operations Management Pack Builder - Building your first management pack

[marbogast]

Hi @paulpitchford,

Thank you for your excellent feedback and suggestions! Glad to say most of these are already in progress. Have a couple follow-up questions:

1. Should be in the upcoming 1.1 release.

2. Metric groups (folders) are in our roadmap, but probably won't be in our 1.1 release. Extended object metrics will be in a default folder, but the folder name won't customizable. I'm aware of adapter instance field descriptions and Super Metric descriptions, but I'm not familiar with regular metric descriptions in vROps. Can you share what you're referring to with this?

3. Should be in the upcoming 1.1 release.

4. Can you please provide an example of the data you'd like to extract which is not currently supported?

5. Should be in the upcoming 1.1 release.

6. Should be in the upcoming 1.1 release.

Best regards,

Mark

[MarcelMertens]

Releated to #4.
Maybe its the same limitation i mentioned here:

https://communities.vmware.com/t5/Management-Pack-Builder/Extract-Substring-of-String-for-Relationsh...

Sometimes the external API is giving you data which is not 100% what you need. Especially for creating releationships.

Your external API reports: "parent = vCloud:VM:46339458-b833-11ed-afa1-0242ac120002"

But in vROPS the ID of the parent VM is "46339458-b833-11ed-afa1-0242ac120002" and not "vCloud:VM:46339458-b833-11ed-afa1-0242ac120002"... so with 1.0 it is impossible to create a relationship.

[marbogast]

@MarcelMertens 

In the 1.1 release we will support regex, field combinations, and hardcoded text for making relationships. This should address the situation you have where the ID needs to be prefixed with "vCloud:VM:" for matching.

Best regards,

Mark

[paulpitchford]

Thanks Marcel , Exactly what I was after ability to use regex/field combinations to match fields in question 4.

[tdunckel]

Management Pack Builder v1.1 is released and can be downloaded here.  

1. Solved
2. Partially done.  Metrics are automatically added to a unique folder
3. Solved
4. Solved for relationships but complex property/metric value handling is added to future feature requests.
5. Solved
6. Dashboards and Supermetrics are supported in 1.1.  Alerts and reports are features we will work on in future releases.