Hey everybody, so a few months ago I wanted to give our Operations team a quick and dirty dashboard to quickly view some very basic metrics to determine at a glance what’s happening to a guest. I knew I wanted an Object List, Top Alerts, Workload and a Metric Chart, the problem I was having is that the default view on the metric chart widget didn’t gave me the metrics I wanted to display. The good news is that you can create a custom XML file that you can choose in the Metric Configuration drop down menu when configuring the widget.

First off we need to make sure that to use the metric configuration dashboard and widget, configurations must be set up so the Widget Interactions are configured so that another widget provides objects to the target widget, like an Object List and the widget Self Provider is set to off. The custom XML file that we will choose from the drop down when configuring the Metric Chart widget needs to be imported into the global storage using the import command. Ill show you how to do that in the next couple steps.

Next we create our custom XML file with the metrics we want. vROPs offers so many metrics to choose from, so pick ones that make sense to you. I decided to use CPU Usage (%), Memory Usage (%), and Virtual Disk Aggregate of all Instances Total Latency. Below is the XML code I used.

After you have created your XML file, the next process is to save the XML file to your vROPs server and import it into the global storage. Depending if you are using a vApp/Linux server or Windows server the location will be different. Im running the linux appliance.
vApp or Linux – /usr/lib/vmware-vcops/tools/opscli
Windows – C:\vmware\vcenter-operations\vmware-vcops\tools\opscli

Now its time to import the file, pretty simple. run the following: (from the directory)
vApp or Linux – $VMWARE_PYTHON_BIN ./ops-cli.py file import reskndmetric YourCustomFilename.xml
Windows – ops-cli.py file import reskndmetric YourCustomFilename.xml

Lastly, when you create your dashboard and edit your Metric Chart widget, in the Metric Configuration drop down you can now select your custom XML file to display the metrics you want to see.

If you would like to use my XML file or dashboard, download it here:
dashboard.zip