I have been using vRealize Operations Manager for quite some time now. There is huge amount of data available to the admin in the form of views, reports, heat maps etc. to have a very clear picture of the vSphere Environment.
As much as I like the solution, I felt the need for some custom views/reports for my own ease.
Also, it’s nice to make use of such options and utilize Enterprise license features.

I recently created a custom view and report to monitor snapshot usage and age.

I will continue to create custom view/reports and update this page accordingly.

Custom Report for Snapshot size of the VMs

Every report is based on a view. If you want to create a custom report you can either use one or more of the many existing views in vROPs or create a custom view for yourself.

A View can be defined as a container that takes Data from a Subject and Presents it in a format desired by the admin.

In the below view created for snapshot usage the above terms are explained.

Subject is the entity for which the data is required. It can be a VM, ESXi host, Datastore or any other vSphere inventory object.

Data is the Metrics and Properties of the object that you are expecting. It can be IO, Memory Usage, VMtools status, Packet drop or any statistics of an object that can be measured.

As an example if you select VM as a subject you have 2 types of data available

• Metrics: If you select this you can list resource usage like CPU, Memory, disk space etc.
• Properties: If you select this you can list Properties of the VM like Memory reservation, VMtools status, Policy, custom tag etc.

In the view for snapshot usage select the subject as Virtual Machine

In Data, Select Metrics and Select Snapshot Space (GB) under Disk Space. Add a filter for Snapshot Space greater than Zero to list only VMs which has snapshots. Else the view would list all the VMs with snapshot size as 0 GB.
To include snapshot age, swap to properties under Data and select Snapshot Age.

This view now lists all the VMs which have snapshot size greater than Zero and mention snapshot age.

We can use this view to create a Custom report which can be emailed to the admin using a schedule.

• Uncategorized