Monitor Datastores using the Datastore Usage Dashboard in vROps.

In the past I have done a lot of dashboards which help you gauge the Virtual Machine Capacity within your virtual infrastructure. While those dashboards have great value, I am stating to think of the day to day operational issues which a VI Admin has to face and how can he solve those easily with vRealize Operations. If you are a fan of vROps (like I am), you would quickly realize that, the more creative you are with your thought process, the more easy it would be for you to visualize data.

I often think that it is funny that we talk about features and functionalities of a tool, while we forget that at the end of the day every person would use these features differently or rather in his or her own way to get the end result. While vROps gives you a lot of great information upfront, there are times when you would want to be creative and paint your canvas with the data you like and then come out with your own opinions about that data. In other words, while data has a lot of potential, it only becomes useful when you can visualize it as information.

I must admit that my friend Iwan Rahabok is great at doing this and I have a lot to learn from. During our discussions on the VMworld Deck which we are prepping up, we had a lot of such good conversations and I thought it would be worth starting this article with those thoughts.

Having said that, Let me move to this new dashboard which gives you some good insights on the storage utilization of your datastores and the VMs which are consuming that storage. Here is what the dashboard looks like:

So on the left you can see all the datastores which are being monitored by vROps in one list. If you zoom in you can clearly see that I am showcasing the Total Capacity (GB), Used Capacity (GB) and the Free Capacity (GB) of these datastores which can be sorted just by clicking the headings in the resource list.

This is an interactive dashboard, hence if you select any of the datastore for which you want to drill down and check the Virtual machines which are lying on that datastore, then you will be able to see them on the right pane where you will see the name of the virtual machines, and the corresponding parameters of Total, Used and Free space in GB within the guest file system.

You can always edit the widget and add the metrics which you would like to see against the Datastore or the Virtual Machine object. It is as simple as I explained here. While creating this dashboard is not a big deal, for someone who just wants to replicate what I have created, you can download the dashboard from this link. This would be a storagedb.json file which can be used to import the dashboard back in your deployments or vRealize Operations Manager 6.x.

Hope this helps you visualize and manage the datastores better!

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