Hey I was doing some study and thinking about some tasks I had ahead of me and was thinking I dont really see anything but dashboards used for support or operations staff.
A smaller client which I look after recently placed big monitors in the CTO and CEOs office that are meant for real time stats on the environment. Now most execs dont care or even know what disk latency is or whats the difference between active and used RAM.
What Execs want to see is figures they understand and weather or not the environment is OK, So in reality you could just have a static image up there full for green boxes and they would not know the difference.
This got me thinking of what can actually be displayed that is usefull to an exec, what is more useful than speaking their language which is dollars and figures.
So I thought I would just wack together a quick look at what can be done with standard plugins and what most people would have available. I will focus on Avg running costs which is very easy to put up and can be expanded on.
If you are running custom ESXi images from vendors like HP or DELL or your running the offline vibs for the servers you are using, you should have access to power consumtion, we will use this to get some executive info to display.
1) For this we will need to create some super metrics Ive covered super metrics off in my blog many times before so I will not go into it too deeply here. I need to get how much power the servers are using in a cluster and work out how much this is costing me to run.
Lucky that vCOPs shows power usage as a cluster metric which takes the power reading from all child hosts. in the image below note that i have used the “THIS” function so that it will apply to any cluster not just the one I used to get the metrics. the formula i used (watts x 0.024) x KWh power cost. The 0.024 is 1000 x 24. instead of going watts / 1000 x 24.
2) attach the super metric to the group thats attached to cluster resources and wait 5 minutes for the metric to become available,
3) Expanding on this we could take it further, Im sure there is some number cruncher in your orginisation that knows what the opperating costs per physical server is in a datacenter taking into account air conditioning, rent etc. So we grab that number and make another supermetric like the one below, which is Total number of hosts x cost + power cost SM we created above. or you could get a total number and go cost / number of hosts etc.
4)Now expanding this further again we could go into the cost of every VM by taking the total cost SM we created and / by number of VMs.
Taking this we can create a scoreboard that now can contain figures like below
If you wanted to take what if shown here and turn waste metrics and capacity remaining metrics into dollar figures. a dashboard filled with this with a small part to environment health would get eaten up by execs 🙂
cheers