Interesting use case I saw recently on Twitter. User wanted to know which VMs were most active (IOPs) on a particular Datastore Cluster. It's not quite as easy as one might think because by default, Datastore Clusters have Datastores as children, and VMs are parents of Datastores.
In order to get directly from Datastore Cluster to VM, we have to use the vSphere Storage Inventory Tree, which can't be used within an object list widget. To get around this we'll use the view widget pointed at a list view exposing the metric we want. This is what I did:
1. Create a list view with the following attributes. Feel free to choose whatever metric/s you want, I've chosen the VM-Datastore-Aggregate of all instances - Total IOPS metric:
2. Create a dashboard using an object list widget to select the Datastore Cluster, which will feed a view widget populated with the list view created above. I've added an Advanced Object Relationship widget for context. It'll look like this:
The object list widget should feed the other two widgets. The VM IOPS widget should be configured to use the vSphere Storage Inventory Tree which will provide the relationship from the Datastore Cluster to the VM.
It's output data should point to the previously created list view:
3. Finished product will look something like this:
Shout out to Rick Pocklington, another Solution Architect at Blue Medora, who I collaborated with on this post, thanks Rick!