The Object List widget configuration options, as shown in the following screenshot, include some of the more common options, such as Title, Refresh Content, and Refresh Interval.

Options also exist that are specific to this widget:

• Mode: You can select Self, Children, or Parent mode. This setting is used by widget interactions.
• Auto Select First Row: This enables you to select whether or not to start with the first row of data.
• Select which tags to filter: This enables you to select objects from an object tree to observe. For example, you can choose to observe information about objects managed by the vCenter Server instance named VCVA01.

You can add different metrics using the Additional Column option during widget configuration.

Using the Additional Column pane, you can add metrics that are specific for each object in the data grid columns.

Perform the following steps to edit the Object List widget in our example dashboard:

1. Click this on Object List and the Edit Object List window will appear. In here edit the Title, select On for Auto Select First Row, and select Cluster Compute Resource under Object Types Tag. We should have something similar to the following screenshot. Click Save to continue.

With tag selection, multiple tags can be selected, if this is done then only objects that fall under both tag types will be shown in the widget.

2. The next thing we want to do is click on Widget Interactions on the left pane; this is where we go to link the widgets, for example, we select a virtual machine from an object list widget and it would change any linked widgets to display the information of that object.

3. We will see a Selected Object(s) with a drop-down list followed by a green arrow pointing to our widgets. This is saying that what we select in the drop-down list will be linked to the associated widget.
4. Here our new Cluster List will feed Metric Picker, Scoreboard, and Heatmap, while Metric Picker will feed Metric Chart. Also we will notice that a widget like Metric Chart can be fed by more than one widget. Click APPLY INTERACTIONS and we should end up with something similar to the following screenshot: