Creating a dashboard is a relatively simple exercise, creating a good dashboard will require tuning and some tweaking. The tricky part is displaying the information needed on a single screen, this is one of the biggest challenges when creating a dashboard; placing all the relevant information on a single pane of glass. The number one goal when creating a dashboard is to get all the information across in a glance.

Out of the 46 widgets vRealize Operations 6.6 has available, we will only use a handful of them regularly. The most commonly used widgets, from experience, are the scoreboard, metric selector, heat map, object list, and metric chart. The rest are generally only used for specific use cases.

There are basically two types of dashboards that we can create, an interactive dashboard or a static dashboard. An interactive dashboard is typically used for troubleshooting or similar activities where you are expecting the user to interact with widgets to get the information they are after. A static or display dashboard typically uses self-providing widgets such as scoreboards and heatmaps that are designed for display monitors, or other situations where an administrator is keeping an eye on environment changes.

Each of the widgets has the ability to be a self-provider that means we set the information we want to display directly in the widget. The other option is to set up interactions and have other widgets provide information based on object or metric selection in another widget.

Until the end of chapter, we will focus on the interactive dashboard; we will be looking at creating a dashboard that looks at vSphere cluster information, which at a glance will show us the overall health and general cluster information an administrator would need.

Working through this will give all the knowledge needed to be able to go away and create either type of dashboard. The dashboard we are about to create will show how to configure the more common widgets in a way that can be replicated on a greater scale.

When creating a dashboard, you will generally go through the following steps:

1. Start the New Dashboard wizard from the Actions menu.
2. Configure the general dashboard settings.
3. Add and configure individual widgets.
4. (Optional) Configure widget interactions.
5. (Optional) Configure dashboard navigation.