Dashboard Blueprint.
Pick who the screen is for, and get the guide's recommended dashboard set: the dashboards, the widgets, the design rules, the alerts and the reports, each with its chapter to read and the official docs to build from.
The Level 1 / NOC set
What the guide recommends this persona sees, and why.
- Summary scoreboard with per-number thresholds, then 20 types of VM change in 3 sets: inventory, location (hot before cold migration) and state changes (Reset first, as least desired)
- Each set pairs a trend line with a scoreboard, sorted least-desired first
- Four heat maps: CPU, disk IOPS, disk throughput and network. The villain is the largest box; the victim is the red box
- Memory and disk space deliberately excluded (capacity problems, not performance)
- Performance: heat maps of the % of VMs facing CPU ready, CPU co-stop and RAM contention, with fixed box positions so they cross-compare; 10% of the population unserved shows full red as an early warning
- Utilization: ESXi CPU and memory saturation with two memory metrics, Consumed and Ballooned (ideal: Consumed red, Ballooned green)
- Think of TV, not monitor: zero interaction, auto-refresh about every minute, auto-rotate
- Large fonts (design for 14 inches, not 24); numbers ideally in % where 0 is bad and 100 perfect
- All green by default: if the wall is red most of the time, viewers ignore it
- Action, not information: the NOC screen is not your to-do list; park planned downtime in a "planned down time" group so the wall is not red for hours
A ready-to-import Cluster Performance 2.0 dashboard from the VCF Operations vCommunity pack, matched to this persona. It needs 13 super metrics, so import those first, then the dashboard.
Super metrics in this dashboard (13)
- Import the super metrics first. Open Operations Configuration › Super Metrics (labelled Configure in some builds), use … › Import, then enable them in your active policy for the target object types, or they collect no data.
- Open Infrastructure Operations › Dashboards & Reports › Dashboards (a.k.a. Visualize), click Manage, then … › Import and select the dashboard file.
- Share the dashboard to the group that owns this screen.
A widget showing a spanner icon or no data means its adapter, or a custom View the export does not carry, is not present in your environment.
Dashboards and super metrics from the VCF Operations vCommunity Management Pack, © its contributors, licensed CC BY-NC 4.0. Shared here for non-commercial use with attribution; a persona’s super metrics are combined into one import file.
The shape of the screen
The wall: a threshold scoreboard on top, the four heavy-hitter heat maps below.
The rules that never change
The guide's dashboard doctrine, whatever the audience.
VCF Operations 9.1 documentation, each page verified. The dashboards above are described in the guide; these are the product docs you build them with.