vROps – How to create a custom dashboard with custom XML metric picker

Currently I am running a proof of concept of vRealize Operations  Manager (vROps formerly known as vCOps).  During this process I wanted to create a custom dashboard wherein I could select a VM from my environment and have several widgets auto-update with the information from that VM.  One of the problems I ran into was that the metric chart, by default, shows the top 10 things that vROps considers to be “most interesting” (i.e. most anomalous behavior).  If you want a particular subset of metrics to always show up you must create a custom XML file.  There wasn’t a lot of information out there on how to do it hence this article.  First, here are the steps I took to create my custom dashboard:

From the home page I chose “Create Dashboard”:

Name the dashboard, choose the column count (note that you can SLIDE the columns around in the left panel, knowing this from the start would have saved me a lot of time 😛 )

Pick the widgets that you want to use.

For my dashboard I chose:

Object List to select my VMs (renamed to “Select Virtual Machine”)

View (with a custom view of the “Big 4 workloads” CPU, RAM, Network & Storage):

Object Relationship shows how the object you’ve selected is related to the rest of the VMware infrastructure:

Stress is a 6 week average of the “Big 4” metrics shown on a 7 day chart:

Reclaimable Capacity is pretty obvious and extremely useful for when you need to justify resizing a vm:

and Metric Chart (for which I will need the custom XML file):

Tie them all together on the Widget Interaction page, feeding off of the Object List (here called “Select Virtual Machine”):

And all together it looks like this!

If you want to view items in the metric chart other than the default view or the 4 sample files, you must create a custom XML script to feed the Metric Chart.

Here is a text file with sample xml contents:

First you need to know where the vROps Adapterkinds are so that you can populate your XML file.  They are actually listed as links on your appliance and can be found here:  https://appliance_name/suite-api/api/adapterkinds

When you get here you will get a headache!!!  Take a look at the sample XML files to get an idea of what you are looking for, you need to get the adapterKindKey and the resourceKindKey for each metric that you want to view.  When you go looking for the metric, you want to look for your metric by it’s <ops:description>, THEN in the XML file  you want to use the <ops:key> information:

Example if you want to get % of IOwait:

This is a total pain in the ass and I’ve spoken to several VMware vROps employees about my feature request of making this easier 🙂

Second you need to know where on your appliance you need to put that XML file.  Using whatever tool you want to access the appliance (I used WinSCP) you must put your new file here:

/usr/lib/vmware-vcops/tomcat-web-app/webapps/vcops-web-ent/WEB-INF/classes/resources/reskndmetrics/

Once the XML file is in place, refresh your web browser & you’ll be able to choose your new XML file from the Metric Chart edit window:

You’ll then have your custom metric chart automatically seeing exactly what you want to see!  Note that this all feeds off of the Object List, so if you pick a metric like “Host” and your Object List is only pulling “VirtualMachines”… You’re going to have a problem 🙂

Thanks and let me know if you have any questions!