To help you investigate and troubleshoot problems with your cluster and host systems that might occur in the future, you can create dashboards and views. These tools apply the troubleshooting solutions that you used to research and solve the problems with your host system, and make the troubleshooting tools and solutions available for future use.

To view the status of your cluster and host systems when your CIO asks you about their health, you can use the decision support dashboards on the VMware Aria Operations Home page. For example, you can:

  • Use the Cluster Utilization dashboard to view the use index, CPU demand, and memory use for your clusters. This dashboard also tracks Internet use and disk I/O operations.
  • Use the Capacity Summary dashboard to track total environment capacity, system-wide capacity and time remaining, and capacity remaining by CPU, memory, and storage. The dashboard also includes Top 10 lists for clusters running out of CPU, memory, and storage, respectively. Additional details are available.
  • Use the Capacity Optimization dashboard to examine the provisioned capacity levels for CPU, disk, and memory and to review potential reclaimable capacity from CPUs, data centers, snapshot waste, and virtual memory.

Or, you might need to create your own dashboards to track the status of your clusters and host systems.

If you work in a Network Operations Center environment and have multiple monitors, you can run multiple instances of VMware Aria Operations. By running the many instances, you can dedicate a monitor to each dashboard and visually track the status of your objects.

Procedure

  1. From the left menu, click Visualize and then click Dashboards. Look through the list of existing dashboards to determine whether you can use the cluster and host system dashboards to track your clusters and host systems.
  2. Click the Self Troubleshooting dashboard, and review the widgets included on it: Object Type, Select Objects, Metric Picker, and Metric Chart.
    By adding the Object List, Alert List, Heatmap, and Top-N widgets, you can easily peruse the status of the host systems that you select in the Object List widget. Configure widget interaction so that the object you select in the Object List widget is the object for which the other widgets display data.
  3. Create and configure a new dashboard that has widgets to monitor the health of your host systems and generate alerts.
    1. Above the dashboard view, click Create .
    2. In the New Dashboard workspace, for the Dashboard Name, enter System Health, and leave the other default settings.
    3. In the Widget List workspace, add the Object List widget and configure it to display host system objects.
    4. Add the Alert List widget to the dashboard, and configure it to display capacity alerts when the capacity of your host systems becomes an immediate risk.
    5. Add the Heatmap and Top_N widgets.
    6. In the Widget Interactions workspace, for each widget listed, select the Object List widget as the provider to drive the data to the other widgets, and click Apply Interactions.
    7. In the Dashboard Navigation workspace, select the dashboards that receive data from the selected widgets, and click Apply Navigations.
    After VMware Aria Operations collects data, if a problem occurs with the capacity of your host systems, the Alert List widget on your new dashboard displays the alerts that are configured for your host systems.

What to do next

Prepare to share information with others, plan for growth and new projects, and use policies to monitor continuously all the objects in your environment. To plan for growth and new projects, see the topic, How Does Capacity Optimization Work in the VMware Aria Operations Configuration Guide. To generate reports, and create and customize policies, see the VMware Aria Operations Configuration Guide. .