The Inventory Summary dashboard is used by the Ops team to explain capacity to IT Management. This dashboard works together with the Capacity Summary dashboard. The inventory provides details on available resources and what is running on these resources. The capacity provides details on the remaining capacity and time.
Design Considerations
See Executive Summary Dashboards for common design considerations among all the dashboards for the IT senior management.
How to Use the Dashboard
- The Summary widget provides a quick view of the key inventory number.
- The scoreboard is interactive. This widget drives the eight pie charts that are placed at the bottom of the dashboard. Since all the information is at the vSphere World level, clicking any of them will display details of the total inventory.
- Select any data center from the Datacenters widget.
- This widget drives Clusters and Datastores so that you can quickly view what you have in a given data center and related capacity.
- For a small environment, the vSphere World is displayed so you can view all the VMs in the environment.
- To sort by any of the columns in the table, click the column title.
- The eight charts in the dashboard provide details of the inventory. They are driven by Datacenters, Compute, Storage, and Summary widgets.
Points to Note
- Understand the relationship hierarchy in vSphere. For example, Compute (cluster) is not a parent of Storage (datastore), so logically it is not possible to display datastores in a cluster. Data center consists of compute (cluster), network (distributed switch), and storage (datastore).
- Datastores do not drive the pie chart. This is a known limitation in the View widget.
- If your senior management wants to view the largest VM in a given environment, add a Top-N widget to list the top 10 largest consumers so that CPU, memory, and the disk details are highlighted.
