1-Click Capacity Planning vCOps Dashboard – Part 3

In part 1 and part 2 we’ve covered how to create the Super Metrics and the custom XML files for our 1-Click Capacity Planning Interactive Custom Dashboard (WOW that’s a long name for a dashboard ). In the final part for this series we will finally create this great dashboard. Let’s start…

First, let’s have a look on the Dashboard High Level Design

Creating the dashboard

1. Create a new 2-column dashboard and name it “Capacity Planning”.
   Add the following widgets:
   1 x RESOURCES widget
   4 x METRIC GRAPH widgets
   
2. Edit the “RESOURCES” widget. The goal here is to filter the resources so that only the ESXi host clusters will be shown. Under “tags to filter” select Resource Kinds -> Cluster Compute Resource -> All Attributes
   
   
   
3. Edit each “METRIC GRAPH” widget in the following way:
   Widget Title – Each of the “METRIC GRAPH” widgets will show data taken from its corresponding XML and this is how the widget name should be decided.
   For example: “CP-Cluster CPU”
   Self Provider – Set it to “Off” as each of the “METRIC GRAPH” widgets will interact with the “RESOURCES” widget to get its data.
   Refresh Widget Content / Widget Refresh Interval – This one is optional and for you to decide.
   Res. Interaction Mode – Select the relevant XML. Eventually each widget will point to its XML file. For example: “CP_Cluster_CPU.xml”
   

   CP – Cluster CPU
   
   CP – Cluster Memory
   

   CP – Cluster Storage
   
   CP – Cluster Density and Deployment
   

For each “METRIC GRAPH” widget, under the “Date Controls” select how old is the data that will be shown in the widget (in days). Since this is for capacity planning purposes I selected “Last 30 days” but it’s really up to you.

Configure Widgets Interactions

Enter the Interactions tool and configure widgets interactions in the following way:

Does it really work???

Consider everything we did in this 3-part series and all “moving parts” involved, this is a fair question.

Select a cluster from the “RESOURCES” widget list and see how all the “METRIC GRAPH” widgets gets filled up with the capacity planning metrics we put in the XML files.

Now, is that cool or what?!

When performing capacity planning there are many things to consider. Use this dashboard wisely and don’t forget things like your RPO/RTO, HA Admission Control, Buffers, etc.

Hope you enjoyed this and I wish happy “dashboarding”