The View widget provides the VMware Aria Operations view functionality into your dashboard.

How the View Widget and Configuration Options Work

A view presents collected information for an object in a certain way depending on the view type. Each type of view helps you to interpret metrics, supermetrics, properties, alerts, policies, and data from a different perspective.

You can add the View widget to one or more custom dashboards and configure it to display data that is important to the dashboard users. List views can send interactions to other widgets.

Where You Find the View Widget

The widget might be included on any of your custom dashboards. From the left menu, click Operations > Dashboards to see your configured dashboards.

To customize the data that appears in the dashboard widget, from the left menu, click Operations > Dashboards. To create your dashboard, from the left menu, click Operations > Dashboards. From the Dashboards panel, click Create. To edit your dashboard, from the left menu, click Operations > Dashboards. From the Dashboards panel, select the dashboard you want to edit and select Actions > Edit. Toggle between the Views and Widgets option to view and add a widget or view to the dashboard. The widgets list panel displays a list of all the predefined widgets. Drag a widget to the dashboard workspace in the upper panel.

You can export the view as a CSV file for any view type.

View Widget Toolbar Options

The View widget toolbar depends on the displayed view type.

Option Description
Export as CSV You can export the view as a CSV file for any view type.
Open in External Application Ability to link to another application for information about the object. For example, you have a List view with VMs. You can select any VM and select Open in External Application to open the VM in vSphere Web Client.
Time Settings Use the time settings to select the time interval of data transformation. These options are available for all view types, except Image.
  • Relative Date Range. Select a relative date range of data transformation.
  • Specific Date Range. Select a specific date range of data transformation.
  • Absolute Date Range. Select a date or time range to view data for a time unit such as a complete month or a week. For example, you can run a report on the third of every month for the previous month. Data from the first to the end of the previous month is displayed as against data from the third of the previous month to the third of the current month.

    The units of time available are: Hours, Days, Weeks, Months, and Years.

    The locale settings of the system determine the start and end of the unit. For example, weeks in most of the European countries begin on Monday while in the United States they begin on Sunday.

  • Dashboard Time. Select this option to activate the dashboard time panel. The option chosen in the dashboard time panel is effective. The default time is 6 hours.
Items per page You can set the number of results that appear in the widget. Available for List view only.
Roll up interval The time interval at which the data is rolled up.
Actions An action on the selected object. Depends on the object type.
Filter Limits the list to objects for a specific host, data center, and so on. You can drill-down in the hierarchical level. Available for List, Trend, and Distribution types of Views.
Filter by name Limits the list to objects of a specific name. Available for List view only.

View Widget Configuration Options

On the title bar of the widget, click the Edit Widget icon to configure the widget.

The configuration options are grouped into one or more sections. You can select the objects on which you want to base the widget data and refine the objects in the following sections. Each section filters the objects further and pushes the filtered objects to the next section. The widget data is based on the objects that are the output of the last section.

The Configuration section provides general configuration options for the widget.

The Input Data section provides options to specify input for the widget.

The Output Data section provides options to select object types on which you are basing the widget data.

Option Description
Title

Enter a custom title that identifies this widget from other instances that are based on the same widget template.

Configuration
Refresh Content

Activate or deactivate the automatic refreshing of the data in this widget.

If not activated, the widget is updated only when the dashboard is opened or when you click the Refresh button on the widget in the dashboard.
Refresh Interval

If you activate the Refresh Content option, specify how often to refresh the data in this widget.
Self Provider
Indicates whether the objects for which data appears in the widget are defined in the widget or provided by another widget.
  • On. You define the objects for which data appears in the widget.
  • Off. You configure other widgets to provide the objects to the widget using the dashboard widget interactions options.
Input Data
Inventory trees Select an existing predefined traversal spec to pick an object for the widget data.
Object In self-provider mode, click the Add Object icon to select an object from the object list. The object list is displayed based on the inventory tree selection. You can also search for the object in this text box.
Output Data

A list of defined views available for the selected object is displayed.

You can create, edit, delete, clone, export, and import views directly from the View widget configuration options.

For more information, see Views.
Auto Select First Row Determines whether to start with the first row of data for list type views.
Show Select one or more of the following items to display in the widget:
  • To display the list of legends in the widget, select Legend.
  • To display the name of the labels in the widget, select Labels.