Background
The Professional Services team at Blue Medora has customized hundreds of vRealize Operations management pack dashboards for customers to meet their unique needs. But many of these dashboards share common approaches that appeal to nearly all customers. Full Stack dashboards highlighting system dependencies and relationships is one example. Another is Application-centric dashboards focusing on end user impact.
Application-centric dashboard approach
Let’s explore this approach with the example of a User Driven Dashboard built for the Citrix XenDesktop management pack. The key to this dashboard is the ability to start troubleshooting from the user and move up the chain to discover where your latency issues are being caused. Consider the use case: A user calls IT and says their session is extremely slow. The next step for the XD administrator is to start investigating to find the offending session in their XD management software. Once they find it, if the issue doesn’t lie with a XD artifact, troubleshooting pretty much ends. The XD admin really doesn’t have a good way to trace from the User to the Session, and on up to the VDA, VM, and Host. We attacked this problem by utilizing the relationships our XenDesktop management pack provides. By doing so, we are able to provide real value to a XD admin.
Moving through chain of objects
In the following dashboard, we can either select a user or filter by the user’s name. Once we make this choice, we instantly see a list of User Sessions. From here, we move to the VDA, VM, and Host. In addition, we provide the capability to view additional details for chosen objects by adding columns to our Object Lists. For added detail, we added an Object Relationship widget to show other VM’s on the Host to see what might be causing the Host stress, or what other VM’s might be affected by the Host having problems. It’s a simple dashboard, but one that provides immense value.
Here are instructions for creating the dashboard. They focus on moving through the chain of objects. Once you have the relationships, you can decide what types of metrics to show.
Taking the approach of working from the end user’s impact to understand the chain of system components and application inter-dependencies can really help out your XenDesktop administrator. I encourage you to explore the wide range of visualizations available through Blue Medora management packs for vRealize Operations. For assistance customizing dashboards to meet your environment’s unique composition, reach out to Blue Medora Professional Services.