Custom dashboard showing number of provisioned VMs in each month

[defmania]

Hello,

I'm currently trying to create a custom dashboard with relevant data regarding the VMs provisioned by vRealize Automation each month, just to highlight the advantage of using vRA for provisioning vs. traditional ways. The environment has a single vRA tenant and the vRA management pack is installed in vROPs. I created some custom views using the VM count metric on the vRA tenant and modified those for different timelines, but that isn't really the answer. Do you have any idea on how to create this "using a simple" approach in vROps. Getting the total number of VMs for that tenant is easy, but breaking that up for each month looks a bit difficult.

Thank you,

[erikverbruggen]

vROPS doesn't have a metric/property when a VM has been created in vSphere but it does has a metric when it has been added to the vROPS inventory. Maybe you could use it to create your custom dashboard?

[defmania]

Thanks for your reply!

Yes it does, it does create the trend graphs and I suspected it uses some sort of time stamp for when that type of particular object was added to it's database. I got some monthly trend graphs already running based on some custom views.

My question was more related to how to do that VM monthly breakout based on the given timeline. If anyone has some pointers in that direction. My guess is - the total number increases each month for those particular VMs I'm interested in, but the relevant data for each month will be given by the difference between the total VM number and the previous months VM number...unless there's some other way to think about the whole process and use some soft of filter that keeps certain VM objects for each month.

Thanks!

[erikverbruggen]

Maybe it is possible to create a super metric which displays the amount of vm's added to vROPS in the last month. But I'm not sure if it is possible to filter on a date in a super metric.

My lab environment is not running at the moment, otherwise I could try to create the supermetric.

[defmania]

Well so far I've been able to create some custom views, set the time settings for each month and use the data from the tenant object - VM count metric. Of course this does get me the total number of VMs for each timeslot, not the actual number of VMs deployed in that month, but at least it's something. I guess yes, some super metric makes sense at this point.

The problem with these Views is they are separate, is it possible somehow to combine data into a single view and modify the time settings per each data entry? It would be so much easier to display things further in a dashboard.

Thanks!

[lannguyen]

I have already created a dashboard for this. 

Download – vROPS VM Growth Dashboard | VMignite.com

[defmania]

Thank you, that is helpful. The only problem is the view shows the total number of VMs each month, not the number of provisioned VMs that month. This is probably a limitation of vROps, somehow you can't do this in vROps and to get this done you'll have to export the data into Excel and work it there further.

Thanks though! Very helpful!