The Live! vSphere VM Changes dashboard displays changes to vSphere VMs as they happen. You can use the dashboard to ensure both the numbers and patterns are as per your expectation.

How to Use the Dashboard

The Overview widget at the top of the dashboard provides summary and overall high level vSphere VM numbers. Ensure that the numbers match your expectation. You can set thresholds so that it is easier to see if the values change (drop or increase) to a level that you are comfortable with. By default, you can view details of the last 6 hours. This allows you to view trends and patterns in the changes.

There are 3 types of detailed information covering different types of changes. This covers all the possible changes that could happen to a VM, hence providing real time visibility into the movement or volatility. The changes are categorized into three groups for ease of understanding: Inventory, State, and Location. The changes in each widget are displayed in order of importance.
  • Inventory Changes: The sum of the changes in VM inventory over the last 24 hours. Information is displayed about whether VMs are added or removed as per your expectation, if they are added or removed the right way (cloning vs free style creation vs template based deployment), and why there is a high count of VMs being unregistered or deleted.
  • Location Changes: Refers to VMs that are moved to another host or datastore. This can be hot or cold migration. Hot migration is displayed first as it might impact performance because it changes both compute and storage. Pay attention to the storage migrations as they take the longest amount of time. If it takes longer than expected, something could be wrong. On the other hand, cold migration is typically an activity that should match the change request as the VMs are shutdown.
  • State Changes: As reset is the least desired it is displayed first. It is used as the last resort. Suspend and Power Off are least preferred as these actions should be done from within the Guest OS. Expect these numbers to be low. A high number of powered on VMs could lead to high demand.
There are two types of widgets for each of the 3 types of changes:
  • The first type of widget is a trend line. In this case the widgets are Changes in VM Inventory, Changes in VM Location, and Changes in VM State. Ensure that both the absolute amount and the pattern match your expectation.
  • The second type of widget is a scoreboard showing the present number for each of the changes. In this case the widgets are Details of VM Inventory Changes, Details of VM Location Changes, and Details of VM State Changes. The change is sorted from the least desired (most impact to operations) to the least important.

Points to Note

The changes are color coded. You can adjust the thresholds for each change, however it is recommended that you avoid too many variations as it can get confusing. You can also adjust the widget size as required for large displays.