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ChaseHansen
Enthusiast
Enthusiast

Help creating datastore dashboard

Hopefully someone can help point me in the right direction, I'm wanting to create a dashboard to help find VM's with high disk i/o at any given time.

I already have my charts on one dashboard so I can see when a datastore is going a little crazy but actually identifying the guilty VM can be a challenge.

Ideally a screen where I could select a datastore resource, it would then show all the VM's on that datastore with some type of score with who is using the most disk i/o

Any suggestions?

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ChaseHansen
Enthusiast
Enthusiast

Well may have answered my own question, was able to throw this together. Select Datastore, then manually find and select vm, then select metrics and I can throw those up on a graph.

Was hoping to put together something a little more automated, plus it seems you cannot sort by any additional columns you add... bummer

dsk usage dashboard.png

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abhilashhb
VMware Employee
VMware Employee

Take a look at this blog. Its explained really well. If you can get your hands dirty with super metrivcs you can get customized metric graphs. Hope this helps. there are two parts to it. Take a look at both of them.

vXpress: Part 1 - Using vCOps Super Metrics & Custom Dashboards to Display Datastore Usage % !!

Abhilash B
LinkedIn : https://www.linkedin.com/in/abhilashhb/

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vincikb
Contributor
Contributor

Chase, can you export out that dashboard you created in that screenshot and upload it here or email it to me?  Thanks

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ChaseHansen
Enthusiast
Enthusiast

Sure, XML Datastore1.xml is the first screenshot I posted, Datastore2.xml is the one thats attached in this reply.

dash-datastore2.png

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vincikb
Contributor
Contributor

Thanks Chase for posting them.  The first one imported great but the DataStore2.xml when I import it I get "Not all key information was found in order to import the dashboard. Please check web.log for more details."

Any idea's if you created anything special outside of the dashboard?  Do you have any other interesting dashboards you have created you would like to share?  Thanks Again

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ChaseHansen
Enthusiast
Enthusiast

Well Datastore2 is an easy setup

  • Create a blank dashboard and add two widgets first one heat map, second one resources. I did two columns, heatmap the bigger column
  • On the heatmap i configured it as a datastore resource kind sized by usage avg and colored by disk command latency
  • then i filtered it by vcenter server (we have two), you could do by datacenter also
  • For the resources widget i added two additional columns one for disk workload and disk usage rate
  • tag filter by virtual machines and then filter by collection status and just select collecting (should remove powered off vms)
  • Then I order by health for fun
  • Last you need to setup the widgets interactions selected heatmap for and point the receiving widget as your resources

As for others, the main dashboard I keep up is this one... I don't know how much it would help to share it but you could copy the widget layout and resources setup. I do have the EMC VNX Connector so some of the stats you may not be able to collect yourself without it.

Main-Dashboard.png

On the topic of the VNX connector, one cool dashboard you can make is disk heatmaps, this is sized by disk size and colored by busy %. Large blocks are 1tb 7.2k NL-SAS, middle size is 600gb 15k SAS, small ones are 200gb SSD. Easy to see we serve a lot of our IO out of SAS and FLASH. I love our VNX Arrays.

disk-heat.png

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