Storage as a service reporting

[MikeSzafranski]

Hi All,

We have been using the advanced services to expose storage as a service.   One of the customers would like us to display some capacity and usage data within the service portal context (within vRA), rather than link out to an external system.

  So the question is,  is there a way to send data  to the Home tab and have a portlet report it?   I've been searching the documentation but have not found anything.    I did see the tag line - offered by VMware in the portlet selection list.

Thanks for the help!

MIke

[SeanKohler]

Are you using custom resource types to maintain your storage object inventory?

[SeanKohler]

The reason I ask is that I only see an abbreviated list of these objects in the "My Items" and "My Group Items" portlets.  I have been also wondering about portlet customization and whether or not we would have an ability to do portlet design at some point in the future.  It would be nice to be able to display our own data and values based on content in Custom Resource Items.

[MikeSzafranski]

Thanks for the reply,

I'm not currently using custom resource types.   I could but this was a POC/Demo, and the custom resource types were a bit buggy when I was doing the demo build last fall.    What I want to be able to do  is have a portlet that will display a bunch of name/value pairs  or even the results of a SQL query.    VMware has a reporting portal (finally a single one)  and a service catalog.  (again finally a single one).   That is great progress but those users of mine want the two entities combined into a single portal.

Mike

[SeanKohler]

I do not see an OOTB portlet that would provide what you are needing.

I would add, however, that any collection of data that you can gather into an MS SQL table could be treated as inventory items to be owned by users within business groups (via Dynamic Types).  Each instance of that data can have automation tasks (resource actions) associated with it.

So you could have a table of storage information that could easily be presented in the tool, altogether.. just not on the home page other than in the two Items lists.  And as individual items, you can click on them and see data about the item as well as run actions.

We put together a simple CMDB table in our Lab... here is an example of how that ends up looking.  This is one of the "Items" my coworker owns.  This "Item" could be a LUN as well.  The data is read from external SQL data using Dynamic Types.  We have one action defined (in our testing) which uses this object instance as the source data, but you could have many actions defined and I provided a couple examples.

Sorry I can't be of more help.... this is the all I know of, but maybe somebody will provide better info regarding the portlet designs themselves.

Edit:  I should note that the form is designable... it doesn't have to look like an ugly list of items like I have it.