Consumption
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.
Live! vSphere VM ChangesWhat just changed?
- 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
Live! Heavy Hitter VMsWho is misusing the shared infrastructure?
- 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)
Live! Cluster Performance + Live! Cluster UtilizationIs our IaaS performing? Is it working hard?
- 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)
Design rules for this audience
- 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
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.
§One question per dashboard; be specific about the metric and its visualisation§The 5-second test, and KISS: remove anything you can§Colour as meaning: green to red for performance; dark grey means wastage on capacity; grey means data error§Summary, then list, then detail; heat maps and scoreboards show the present only§Headline with 3 to 5 numbers; NOC screens never scroll§Alerts are Rapid, Real, Rare: for each one ask what action must be taken today by the person seeing it
Official Broadcom docs
↗Dashboards in VCF Operations (create and manage)↗Widgets in VCF Operations (the widget vocabulary)↗Creating and configuring a View (list, summary, trend, distribution)↗Alert definition best practices↗Understanding alerts (health, risk, efficiency)↗Create a new alert definition↗Reports in VCF Operations↗Create a report templateVCF Operations 9.1 documentation, each page verified. The dashboards above are described in the guide; these are the product docs you build them with.