As part of my new role with VMware I’m currently spending time with the vCloud suite, recently I found myself playing around with the vCenter Operations Manager adapter for NetApp, being a long time storage guy I thought it would be nice to have important storage metrics displayed as part of the vCOps dashboards.

How to install the adapter is out of the scope of this post, there’s a guide that comes with the adapter that is pretty self-explanatory, I would like instead to show you an example dashboard that can monitor the overall component status, the CPU busy% and the volume latency of a NetApp system.

First things first, make sure your adapter is correctly collecting the metrics, browse to Environment > Environment Overview and select your NetApp adapter instance, the resulting list should look like this:

Now let’s create a new dashboard by clicking on the small “+” button near the dashboard tabs, give the Dashboard a name and insert the Heat Map, Resources and Generic Scoreboard widgets.

After clicking ok we have our new dashboard with all the widgets unconfigured, let’s start with the Resource widget, edit its properties by clicking on the small wheel on the widget bar.

Now let’s give this widget a name, make sure that the mode is set to Self, set the refresh to on and choose your NetApp adapter instance from the list, as the last thing, order the list by Health and click ok.

Moving onto the Scoreboard, edit the widget and give it a name, make sure it’s marked as self provider and have it automatically refresh every 30 seconds, search for your NetApp systems in the searchbox and add the System > CPU Busy (Percent) metric to the list (I added two as they represent our NetApp HA Pair in the lab), fill the boxes as shown by giving the metrics a label, a measurement unit and Y/O/R boundaries.

Lastly we’re going to configure the Heatmap widget to show the latency of our volumes, edit the widget, as usual give it a name and make sure it’s refreshing itself after 30 or 60 seconds, group by Net App Volume and select it also as the Resource Kinds to show, size the heatmap by Capacity > Total Capacity (MB) and color by Volume > Average Larency (Millisecond). Put 0 and 150 (anything above 150 is above the pain threshold when it comes to disk latency) at the ends of the color bar as shown in the picture below and finally save the configuration by clicking the small icon with the “+” button marked in the picture. After saving this configuration you can either click OK or create another one (maybe using LUNs instead of Volumes) so you can switch between the two in the heatmap.

If you’ve done everything correctly, this is how it should like, obviously you can rearrange the widgets in every way you want and you can create more heatmaps or scoreboard as needed using these instructions.