Best under utilised parts of vCOPS Part 1

I was asked to do a health check and a operational report on a clients virtual environment and the staff supporting it. While observing some day to day troubleshooting I noticed am I the only one who uses the events section of vCOPS? Then it got me thinking I dont ever see anyone use it. It is really a troubleshooting gold mine in vCOPS.

Using the Events section of the vCOPS vSphere UI can make troubleshooting so easy as you can line up events of the parent resources the child resources and the sibling resources and opens up a great picture of what could of been a cause of a performance issue, or and outage etc

Lets have a quick look at the events section in vCOPS.

Select the resource that your troubleshooting. goto ->Operations tab -> Events
You will notice that like allot of graphs in vCOPS you can choose the time line, but the most important options are located next to “related events” the target icon is the resources own events, the up arrow is the parents events (if it was a VM then the parent is the host), the left/right arrow is its siblings (if its a VM then its other VMs sitting on the same host)

Now you can see there are some events leading up to an issue. I have picked a pretty obvious situation here, but in the real world vCOPS may not pick up a health issue like this image bellow but it will show the events at the time of the incident which will generally lead you to a root cause.
If I select the workload event I can see the parent host is running at 102% demand of available resources.

Select the next event, now we can see its over 200% demand of available resources. vCOPS in this situation health is plummeting.

Now we look further across and we see it goes down to 85% and the health heads on up back to green.

This example here is very cut and dry example,

another one would be like this where there was a storage hickup

This is a very under utilized part of vCOPS that can be very quick at identifying events that could have caused a particular incident.

In some larger sites or over a large timeline, it will only ever show the last 50 events, you then have to really zoom in on the time and date you are looking for.