How to setup generic scoreboard for specified VMs

[wilber822]

I have two question about "Generic Scoreboard":

1. I use tag to classify some VMs by QA, PRD or DEV role. If I select "Resource Kind", then select all VM under a tag, "metric selector" window will only shows "vCenter Operation Manager Generated", it doesn't show VM metrics. How can I see it?

2. If I select "Resource" mode, then I'll be able to see VM metrics on "metric selector" window, but I have to key in each VM name to "Box Label", it's very time consuming if I have lot of VM, is there any symbol I can use to match this field with "Resource" name column?

"Resource Kind" or "Resource" mode both ok for me, just want to setup a widget to show CPU usage of specified VMs real quick.

Any information is appreciated!

[mark_j · Accepted solution]

You only see vC Ops generated metrics because you're looking at the tag, which is a resourcekind. This resource selector is 'not' a tag filter, these are the actual resources. If you want to see all VMs, select the "virtual machine" resourcekind.

The generic scoreboard is rarely used to show -all- resource kinds, it's usually used for static selection for specific purposes. If you want to display all types of a resource kinds and apply a tag filter, you'll need to select a different widget to display that information.

There are no symbols that can act as wildcards as you suggest. When you're in "resource kind" mode, you don't need to fill in a box label.

[wilber822]

Thanks Mark,

Which widget you recommend to do a dashboard like this?

[mark_j]

A heatmap would work and scale and give you the color indicators.

However, a resource list widget would allow you to populate custom columns with many different metrics for each resource. The downside there, is you can't bind colors to the columns in the resource widget.

A Top-N would give you the highest and lower utilizers, which may also suite a need of your if you want to see the best and worst of a set of VMs.. it just depends on the tag filter.

It seems your viewing every VM multiple times on ever dashboard.. that can become a poor use of real estate as you scale up. I prefer to display VMs by a parent indicator, such as overall workload, then when you click on the VM you see another widget with detailed info on cpu/mem/disk/net.. so on and so forth drilling down in to the problem. To have a dashboard to show every metric of every VMs just won't scale, so you build the interactions to allow more efficient use of your screen and attention. It's something to think about instead of making a dashboard of 100 colored boxes.

[wilber822]

Yeah... team want to monitor VM real time. I have to give each important metric in same page.

I use this widget since it can also show Sparkline  of past 30 days...etc. I'll try other widget as well.

Thanks for the suggestion! 🙂