Last week I had the chance to test the OpsLogix VMware Management Pack for System Center Operations Manager. Recently OpsLogix released the RTM version of this management pack. My goal was to look into the dashboarding possibilities of this management pack.

Some other SCOM guru’s already described the monitoring capabilities of this management pack. Check these links for more information:

• First Look at OpsLogix’s VMware Management Pack by  Stanislav Zhelyazkov
• Test drive Opslogix VMware management pack by Dieter Wijckmans

Creating dashboards inside SCOM can natively be done through the built-in dashboard widgets or through the Visio-Sharepoint extension. Stanislav already showed in his blog the possibilities of the built-in widgets so I want to focus on the Visio/Sharepoint dashboards. Through this integration we can show the following information on the dashboards:

• Health information of objects (SCOM Visio/Sharepoint Extension)
• Performance information from the SCOM Datawarehouse of objects (Office Data Connection)

More information about the SCOM Visio Sharepoint extension can be found here. The Visio/SharePoint exentension is orginally made for SCOM 2012 and SharePoint 2010. My experience is that this extension also works with SCOM 2012 R2 and SharePoint 2013. If we look to the OpsLogix VMware management pack  the following health information can be shown on the dashboards:

• VMware Cluster
• VMware Datacenters
• VMware Datastores
• VMware Networks
• VMware Resource Pools
• VMware ESX Servers
• VMware vCenters
• VMware Virtual Machines

Combining health states of the above objects results in the following overview dashboard showing the health status of the different instances and the summary health status of the above components of VMware:

Beside these health states we can also use the performance information from the SCOM data warehouse to show on the dashboards. Important is that the information is collected by Rules from the Management Packs. If we look to the OpsLogix VMware pack we have the following performance counters available for showing on the dashboards:

VMware ESX Servers:

• Total CPU Usage
• Total Memory Usage VMware

Virtual Machines:

• Total CPU Usage
• Total Memory Usage
• Disk Read / Write Average
• Disk Usage

When we add these performance counters to the dashboards we can create the following detailed dashboards of ESX Servers and Virtual Machines:

Detailed ESX Server Dashboard

Detailed Virtual Machine Dashboard

My conclusion is that with the current version of the OpsLogix VMware pack for SCOM we have great possibilites to visualize the health of your VMware environments with also showing the performance information of the components. If you have questions about the creating dashboards you can always contact me through my contact details. If you need more information about the OpsLogix VMware Management pack you can contact Opslogix by mail.