Monitoring Technology Dashboard for VMware vSphere
Summarize
Summary of Monitoring Technology Dashboard for VMware vSphere
The VMware vSphere Monitoring Technology Dashboard enables you to monitor the health and performance of your VMware vSphere infrastructure within ServiceNow. It highlights the top five configuration items (CIs) and servers with the highest metric readouts over the past six hours and displays the 50 most recent active alerts in your VMware vSphere environment. This centralized view helps you quickly identify performance issues and areas requiring attention.
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You can access the dashboard by navigating to All > AIOps Dashboards > Monitoring Technology Dashboards and selecting VMware vSphere Monitoring.
Prerequisites and Setup
- Create a VMware vSphere credential and use it to set up a Discovery schedule to gather data. (Refer to Discovery for VMware Cloud and VMware virtualization documentation.)
- Operate within the Agent Client Collector Monitoring scope in your ServiceNow instance.
- Ensure the roles agentclientcollectoradmin and dashboardadmin are enabled.
- Enable Metric Intelligence on your MID Server to support metric-to-CI mapping.
- Activate the following metric policies for comprehensive data collection: VSphere Datacenter Metrics, VSphere Datastore Metrics, VSphere ESX Server Metrics, and VSphere VirtualMachine Metrics.
- Verify the clotho plugin version 1.1.0 or above is enabled; follow post-upgrade instructions if upgrading from earlier releases.
Dashboard Tabs and Features
The dashboard consists of multiple tabs, each focusing on specific VMware components:
- VirtualMachine: Shows graphs of top VMware vSphere virtual machines by metric type.
- ESX Server: Displays graphs of the top ESX servers.
- Datacenter: Visualizes key metrics for datacenters.
- Datastore: Shows metrics for datastores.
- Alerts: Lists the 50 most recent active alerts linked to your CIs, aiding timely remediation.
Widgets allow you to group metrics by host name, class, operating system, or OS version, providing flexible data views. Hovering over data points reveals detailed information.
Filtering and Customization
- Time range filter: Choose the time period for displayed metric data.
- Metrics by selected CI filter: Focus on specific configuration items.
You can customize individual widgets, including adjusting alert timeframes or adding custom widgets when building personalized dashboards to suit your monitoring needs.
Value for ServiceNow Customers
This dashboard consolidates vital VMware vSphere performance data and alerts into a single interface, enabling proactive infrastructure monitoring and quicker issue resolution. By meeting setup requirements and leveraging the dashboard’s filtering and customization options, you gain actionable insights that help maintain optimal VMware environment health and performance.
With the VMware vSphere Monitoring Technology Dashboard, you can monitor the health and performance of your VMware vSphere infrastructure. By using the dashboard, you can identify the configuration items (CIs) and servers with the highest metric readouts, and view the most recent active alerts on those CIs and servers.
Overview of the dashboard
The VMware vSphere Monitoring Technology Dashboard shows the five CIs and servers with the highest metric readouts during the past six hours. The dashboard also shows the 50 most recent active alerts in your VMware vSphere environment.
To view the dashboard, navigate to and select VMWare vSphere Monitoring.
Using the Monitoring Technology Dashboard for VMware vSphere
- Create a VMware vSphere credential and use it to create a Discovery schedule. For details on creating VMware vSphere credentials, see Discovery for VMware Cloud.
- Create a Discovery schedule, using the credential created in the previous step. For details on creating a Discovery schedule, see Discovery for VMware virtualization.
- Ensure that you’re working in the Agent Client Collector Monitoring scope in your ServiceNow instance.
- Ensure that the agent_client_collector_admin and dashboard_admin roles are enabled.
- Enable Metric Intelligence on the MID Server.
- Ensure that the VSphere Datacenter Metrics, VSphere Datastore Metrics, VSphere ESX Server Metrics and VSphere VirtualMachine Metrics
policies are enabled.
Enabling these policies activates metric to CI mapping.
- Ensure that the clotho plugin version 1.1.0 or above is enabled.
- After upgrading from a previous version, follow the procedure described in the ACC-M Dashboard Filters are not working when upgraded from Tokyo/Utah to Vancouver [KB1438042] article in the NOW Support Knowledge Base.
| Tab | Description |
|---|---|
| VirtualMachine | Displays graphs of the top VMware vSphere VMs by metric type. |
| ESX Server | Displays graphs of the top VMware vSphere ESX servers by metric type. |
| Datacenter | Displays graphs of the top VMware vSphere datacenters by metric type. |
| Datastore | Displays graphs of the top VMware vSphere datastores by metric type. |
| Alerts | Displays the 50 most recent alerts that are associated with the URLs in your system. Alerts help you to remediate your system by providing information on problematic behavior. |
On the right side of widgets displaying a single metric, you can select the More options icon (
) and select Change group by. Select the category you want to view the metric by: Host name, Class, Operating System, or OS Version.
Point to the relevant widget to view a specific datapoint and all of its details in a pop-up window.
| Time range filter | The time range for which you want metric data to display on the dashboard. |
| Metrics by selected CI filter | The CIs for which you want metric data to display on the dashboard. |
You can customize the appearance of the individual widgets on the VMware vSphere Monitoring Technology Dashboard. For example, you could change the timeframe for which the alerts appear. You can also include customized widgets when you are creating a custom dashboard. For more information, see Customize the Monitoring Technology Dashboard.