A view presents collected information for an object in a certain way, depending on the view type. Each type of view helps you interpret properties, metrics, alerts, policies, and data from a different perspective.
Another way to interpret this is—a view is a window or a container that takes data from an object or group of objects and presents it in a way that provides useful information to the administrator. The first thing to take away from this statement is that a view is a container or object in its own right. It is the smallest component of a dashboard or report, but it can be linked to or used on its own.
It is also important to point out that views can be applied to any object type from any adapter. Different object types can be combined or compared in the same view if the objects have the same data types. These views can then be added to different parts of vRealize Operations to ensure they are available to administrators at the right time. We will discuss how to link views to other parts of the UI shortly.
vRealize Operations provides several types of views. Each view type helps you interpret metrics, and properties of various monitored objects, including alerts, symptoms, and so on from a different perspective.
Data in dashboards and reports can be displayed and transformed in several different ways using views.
Although many prebuilt views are available to choose from, any user with the correct privileges can create custom views. A view can be attached to an object of any type. Any data that is collected by any adapter can be used in a view or report.
Views are useful aids for the following tasks:
- Diagnosing and troubleshooting issues
- Gathering information about your environment
For example, the Cluster CPU Diagnose view provides trend information about CPU demand and contention in a cluster, which can be helpful for diagnosing system health issues.
An example of an informational view can be the Virtual Machine Guest OS Name view, which categorizes virtual machines by the guest operating system that they are running on.
Views are available from the following sources:
- Built into the product
- Installed management packs
- User-created (custom)
These are the only two view types available in vRealize Operations. The Cluster CPU Diagnose view is from type Trend, presenting information in a graph form. The Virtual Machine Guest OS Name view is from type Distribution, presenting information in a pie chart form. We will go through all available view types later in this chapter.
Views are accessible from a variety of places:
- From an object’s Details tab
- From the Analysis section on the object Analysis tab
- From a custom dashboard
- From prebuilt or custom reports
- From the Dashboards tab under the Views section