Tuesday, July 9, 2013

Group your vCenter Operations Manager Custom Dashboards with 3 simple steps.

Just wanted to share a quick tip with my readers and users of vCenter Operations Manager. If you have been working on vCenter Operations Advanced and Enterprise Editions, you must be well versed with vCOps Custom Dashboards. In this article I will give you a quick tip to Group Custom Dashboards for ease of management and access.

I have written about Custom Dashboards before and you can find them under the vCenter Operations Manager section of my blog if you want to read more about this.

Alright, so let's say that you have a number of custom dashboards created for various purposes, such as:-

Performance
Utilization
NOC
Troubleshooting
Capacity Management etc.

You have an easy option by which you can create a drop-down which would list all the dashboard under the specific category. So if you have a dashboard created for Datastore Usage and you want to categorize it under the UTILIZATION head in custom dashboards, you just need to follow the steps below:-

1- Launch the Datastore Usage custom dashboard and click on EDIT.

2- In the dashboard name section add a prefix (Utilization/) in front of the Datastore Usage  as that it reads like UTILIZATION/Datastore Usage

3- Click on OK to save the changes

Now, you would see a Utilization Menu under Dashboards Tab in Custom UI and it will list Datastore Usage dashboard under it. Ain't it simple? Here are a few screenshots which helps you visualize the same and then use this tip.

I edited the Datastore Usage % dashboard and added Utilization/ in the Tab Name section as highlighted below in orange.


















Now you can see in the screenshot below that I have a new Menu option under Dashboards Tab. I have a number of them listed and highlighted in orange.

























Hope this helps you keep your Custom Dashboards arranged and grouped.

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