All though I am using vCOPS On and Off for last couple of months. I thought, a short description of each widget will help to remember, what they do and how we can use them in the dashboard.

Advanced Health Tree Widget
The Advanced Health Tree widget shows the section of your resource hierarchy around any resources that you select. The widget shows the selected resource and its parent and child resources.

Alerts Widget
The Alerts widget lists alerts for selected resources and provides a convenient way to view and manage alerts. When you double-click an alert in the Alerts widget, the Alert Summary page appears and shows more detailed information about the alert.

Application Detail Widget
The Application Detail widget shows information for a selected application. The top of the widget shows the number of tiers, resources, and metrics that the application contains and the number of Smart Alerts and classic alerts on the application. The Application Detail widget does not show information for child resources

Application Overview Widget
The Application Overview widget can list all of the applications in the enterprise, or only applications that you select. The widget shows a health graph for the last 24 hours, the current health score, the current health of each tier, and the number of alerts for the application itself. You can double-click an application to open its Application Detail page.

Configuration Overview Widget
The Configuration Overview widget shows the current uptime functional status of defined resources, applications, and collected metrics for the environment.

Data Distribution Analysis Widget
The Data Distribution Analysis widget shows a graph for selected metrics. For each metric, the graph shows the data distribution of the metric, including how often it had a particular value.

Generic Scoreboard Widget
The Generic Scoreboard widget shows the current value for each metric that you select. Each metric appears in a separate box. The value of the metric determines the color of the box. You define the values for each color when you edit the widget. If you point to a box, the widget shows the source resource and metric data.

GEO Widget
If your configuration assigns values to the GEO Location resource tag, the GEO widget shows where your resources are located on a world map.

Health Status Widget
The Health Status widget shows the health score for selected resources. Health status is a 0 to 100 ranking that vCenter Operations Manager determines for each resource. For each resource, the widget includes the current health score and a graph that shows how the health score has changed over time.

Health Tree Widget
The Health Tree widget shows the section of your resource hierarchy around a resource that you select. The widget shows all of the parent container resources that hold the resource. If you select a container resource, the widget shows all of the child resources that the container holds.

Health-Workload Scoreboard Widget
The Health-Workload Scoreboard widget shows the health or workload score of selected resources. The icons for each resource are color coded. Green indicates best performance, which is 100 for health or 0 for workload. Red indicates worst performance, which is 0 for health or 100 for workload.

Heat Map Widget
The Heat Map widget contains graphical indicators that show the current value of two selected attributes for resources that belong to tag values that you select.
Mashup Charts Widget
The Mashup Charts widget contains charts that show different aspects of the behavior of a selected resource. By default, the charts show data for the past six hours

Metric Graph Widget
The Metric Graph widget shows a graph of the recent performance, and predicted future performance, of a metric. The important metrics count, which a vCenter Operations Manager administrator sets, determines the number of metrics that appear in the Metric Graph widget.

Metric Graph (Rolling View) Widget
The Metric Graph (Rolling View) widget shows a full chart for one selected metric at a time. Miniature graphs for the other selected metrics appear at the bottom of the widget.

Metric Selector Widget
The Metric Selector widget shows attribute packages for one or more resources that you select in the Alerts, Generic Scoreboard, Health Status, Health Tree, Health-Workload Scoreboard, Heat Map, Resources, Root Cause Ranking, VC Relationship, or VC Relationship (Planning) widget.

Metric Sparklines Widget
The Metric Sparklines widget shows simple graphs that contain the values of selected metrics over time and provides a quick view of the trends in KPIs.

Metric Weather Map Widget
The Metric Weather Map widget provides a graphical display of the changing values of a single metric for multiple resources over time. The widget uses colored icons to represent each value of the metric. Each icon location represents the metric value for particular resources. The color of an icon changes to show changes in the value of the metric.

Resources Widget
The Resources widget lists the resources that are defined in vCenter Operations Manager.

Root Cause Ranking Widget
The Root Cause Ranking widget provides an instant view of the probable causes of health degradation for a selected resource. The widget shows information about metrics on related resources that contributed to alerts on the resources, including the percentage likelihood that the metric contributed to the cause.

Tag Selector Widget
The Tag Selector widget lists all defined resource tags and tag values. You can select one or more tag values to change the information that appears in the Alerts, Configuration Overview, Health Status, Root Cause Ranking, and Health Tree widgets.

Top-N Analysis Widget
The Top-N Analysis widget lists the top five items, or another number that you specify, of a type that you select. For example, you might select the five metrics that show the highest volatility or the five most or least healthy tiers in an application.

VC Relationship Widget
The VC Relationship widget provides performance and relationship data for objects in your virtual environment. It uses badges to represent derived metrics and give you a high-level, broad view of the performance and condition of your virtual environment.

VC Relationship (Planning) Widget
The VC Relationship (Planning) widget provides use and available badge metric information (risk, time, capacity, stress, efficiency, waste, and density) for the resources in your virtual environment.

Please note:- I have got the above mentioned information from the VMware’s Enterprise Getting started Guide”.

vCOPS documentation is not really good and information is scattered all over the place. It would be really nice, if VMware does justice to this product and puts in more resources for documentation.

It is very hard to understand all the metrics that are in “All Metrics” tab under “Operations” tab, when you click on a VM. After some research, I found few nice links – which explains few of those counters. I will keep on adding them as I find.

1. -Metrics
2. http://communities.vmware.com/docs/DOC-5600

Hope this helps, when we are trying to decipher those cryptic counters.

When ever we delete/de-commission a VM/Resource from the vCenter Server, we need to remove those resource from vCOPS otherwise, there will be a blue icon with a question mark. I wish, it could have updated automatically. But as of vCOPS 5.3 we don’t have that option. If anyone knows  a better way, please let me know about it.

To remove the resource, we need to go to

1. Custom UI i.e https://ip_address_of_vcOPS/Custom

2. Click on the Environment Tab

3. Click on “Recently Added Resources”

4. Select the resources by number of Days – I prefer to go with last 30 days

5. Sort via “Health” column

6. Select all the resources, which have blue icon

7. And click on Delete Resources.

To understand vCOPS and its metrics one needs to understand the below mentioned metrics. I thought to add this on my blog site to help me. Hope this helps you too.

Provisioned

Amount of a resource that the user configures.The provisioned metric might apply to the amount of physical memory for a host or the number of vCPUs for a virtual machine.

Usable

Actual amount of a resource that the object can use. The usable amount is less than or equal to the provisioned amount. The difference between the provisioned amount and usable amount stems from factors such as hardware capacity and virtualization overhead. This overhead might include the memory that an ESX host uses to run the host, to support reservations for virtual machines, and to add a buffer for high availability. The usable metric does not apply to virtual machines.

Usage

Amount of a resource that an object consumes. The usage amount is less than or equal to the usable amount.

Demand

Amount of a physical resource that the object might consume without any existing constraints. An object becomes constrained because of under provisioning or contention with other consumers of the
resource.

A virtual machine might need 10GB of memory but can only get 5GB because the virtual machine must share resources with other virtual machines on the host.When the demand amount is less than the usage amount, the environment might have wasted resources. When the demand amount is greater than the usage amount, the environment might incur latency and exhibit decreased performance.

Contention

Effect of the difference between the amount of the resource that the object requires and the amount of the resource that the object gets.
This metric measures the effect of conflict for a resource between consumers. Contention measures latency or the amount of time it takes to gain access to a resource. This measurement accounts for dropped packets for networking.

Limit

Maximum amount that an object can get from a resource. The limit sets the upper bound for CPU, memory, or disk I/O resources that you allocate and configure in vCenter Server.
The usage amount is less than or equal to the limit amount. The demand amount can be greater than the limit amount. The limit amount is less than or equal to the provisioned amount.

The default limit amount is unlimited.
Rules: Usage <= Limit
Demand can be greater than Limit .

Reservation

Guaranteed amount of resources for an object. The object does not start without this reserved amount. The default amount is 0.

Entitlement

Amount of a resource that a virtual machine can use based on the relative priority of that consumer set by the virtualization configuration. This metric is a function of provisioned resources, limit, reservation, shares, and demand. Shares involve proportional weighting that indicates the importance of a virtual machine.
The entitlement amount is less than or equal to the limit amount. The only case in which entitlement is less than provisioned is when the total provisioned amount is greater than total capacity.

The entitlement metric applies only to virtual machines.
Rules: Entitlement <= Limit <= Provisioned
Entitlement >= Reservations

Source vCenter Operations Advance Getting started Guide.

For last couple of months we were evaluating vCenter Operations Manager 5.0.  We were facing couple of issues with it. Thought to share it with the community about this issue.

Internet Explorer running slow/crashes

We have a corporate standard and we have to use Internet Explorer. But few of the widgets in dashboard were running very slow OR it used to crash the IE itself. Earlier, we thought it might be an issue with my computer, so we tried it on my laptop then my  colleagues desktop, they all faced the similar issue.

On the same box, Firefox version 10.0 was working fine. So, we knew, it is a IE issue or something with the plugins. To fix the problem we did the following but that did not help

1. Uninstalled/Disabled the anti-virus

2. Disabled Add-on in IE

3. Compared IE security settings

4. Added vCOPS in trusted zones

3. Tried IE on a Windows 2008 server VM and it worked fine. So we ran RSoP trying to figure out if group policy is causing the issue but that did not help either.

VMware says, they have never seen something like this and it is a problem with our environment – Who is going to say that to upper Management . Finally, we came up with an idea and created ThinApp version of IE 8 to check, if it is a problem with IE or a problem with our environment.

When, we ran ThinApp version of IE and connected to dashboards it worked fine. So, now we know the problem is with our environment. I have a feeling this has to do with security settings/certificates, will let you know about my findings.

Finally, we were able to figure out the problem, the problem is related with McAfee and when we disabled the McAfee from the desktop it worked fine. We had to disable Framework Service and McAfee McShield.

To resolve the issue we configured the McAfee to avoid the scan of the UI URL.