Press "Enter" to skip to content

Best Underutilised parts of vCOPS – Part 2

Hey Hey
I thought I would post part 2 of this series of posts which look at parts of vCOPS that ive noticed go unused allot of the time but do contain great information when actually looked at. In part 1 i looked at the events tab. In this part 2 I will be looking at the scoreboard tab.

Now I will be honest I was one of those people that just skipped over this tab generally until I realised the power it has for quickly identifying hot spots.

1) Now select the resource that you want to view the scoreboard of. The scoreboard tab works well for resources that have child resources like clusters or hosts but I would recommend the cluster level at a minimum. go to environment tab -> scoreboard tab. you have a drop down of 4 options health / risk / efficiency / custom. when you select your option you can see on the right what the x and y axis are as well as size. You will also notice the filter objects which allows you to filter out objects you don’t want included.
My test lab is a little lack luster to show this on but in a big environment this is great.
scoreboard01

2) If you choose custom you can then choose the what you want to be the color, the x and y axis and the size, you can see from the image below that im looking at risk, with the size of the circle as waste, the x axis as health and the y as anomolies. Then by clicking or selcting a circle you can see all the overlapping resources.
The idea of this is that its very easy to spot problem areas and where they are more concentrated depending on what you want to look at.
scoreboard02

or the image below I can see by the size where the most waste is, and can see x axis the time remaining for capacity and the y axis is showing me the workloads. you can really jumble it around until it fits what your looking for, its also another good image to put up in meeting or presentations to management.
scoreboard03

There really isn’t that much to it. its easy its quick and at a glance you can see where the wastage is occurring where high amount of faults or anomalies are occurring, where there is space for more vms etc. It can be a really powerfull and useful tool once you understand it.

Cheers

2 Comments

  1. Don
    Don June 14, 2014

    I have started getting into the /custom interface in vCOPs and Have been really excited with it. But, I want to take content out of a performance widget and drop it into a csv file for further manipulation and it’s rediculous how impossible this is. Have you found a way to make that work? I am still on 5.7.1 and all I want is a Top 100 VMs sorted by disk commands per second, and then to put that into a csv file.

    I have everything working in the dashboard EXCEPT a way to export to csv.

    Thanks in advance for your assistance 🙂

    • Scott Norris
      Scott Norris June 16, 2014

      Hi Don, Sorry for the late reply. Unfortunately there is currently no way to export the content from the custom ui.
      I believe VMware are working on the reporting and exporting of data side of things in version 6 but the best I can think of from the top of my head is the virtual machine list report from the list of standard reports in the vSphere ui which has a bunch of metrics that go along with them like IO demand but I think its in KBps not commands.

      If i come across anything ill be sure to send it your way

      Cheers

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Anti SPAM BOT Question * Time limit is exhausted. Please reload CAPTCHA.