There are two sections I will cover in this post: ‘Group Types’ and ‘Object groups’.  An example of when you might want to consider creating a group type …lets say you have multiple data centers, a group type could be used as a way to group all objects types of that data center into one folder.  In other worlds: The group type for the data center in Texas would be used as a sorting container for the group objects such as data stores, vCenters, hosts, virtual machines, etc.. and keep them separated from the data center in New York.

The way you can do this is by clicking on the Content icon, selecting group types and then clicking the green plus sign to add a new group type.

Next you can click on the environment icon (blue globe), Environment Overview, click the green plus icon to create a new object group, and then in the group type drop down, you can select the group type you just created.  As far as policy selection goes, the built in VMware policies are a great place to start.  You can easily update this selection later when you create a custom policy.  I would recommend checking ‘Keep group membership up to date’.

Define membership criteria section.  This is where the water can get muddy as you will have more than one way to target your desired environment objects.  In the drop down menu ‘Select the Object Type that matches all of the following criteria’, the object types selection can grow in number depending how many additional adapter Management PAKs are installed on the vROps appliance.  This selection will also be important because of the way vROps alerts off from the management packs.

– An example would be alerts on Host Systems.  One would assume you would select the vCenter Adapter and then select Host Systems, however  if you have the vCloud Director Adapter Management PAK installed for example, that PAK also has metrics for Host Systems that vROps will alert from,  you would also need to select Host systems under that solution to target those alerts and systems as well.

For this example, we will use the Host System under the vCenter Adapter.  There are different ways to target the systems, for this example I will showcase using Object name, contains option.  This option allows us to target several systems IF they have a common name like so:

You also have the option to target systems based on their Relationship.  In this example we have clusters of hosts group under the name of MGMT, so I chose Relationship, Child of, contains, MGMT – to target all systems in that cluster like so:

There is a Preview button in the lower left corner which you can use to see if your desired systems are picked up by the membership criteria you selected.

You can also target multiple system names by using the Add another criteria set option like so:

Depending on the size of the environment, I’ve noticed that it helps to make a selection in the ‘in navigation tree’ drop down as well

When you have the desired systems targeted in the group, click OK.  Groups are subject to the metrics interval collection, so the groups page will show grey question marks next to the groups until the next interval has passed.  Any policies that were applied to these custom groups will not change the alerts page until that metrics collection has occurred.

The added benefit to having custom groups is that vROps will also show you the group health, and if you click on the group name you will be brought to a custom interface with alerts only for that group of targeted systems.

In my next post I will go over the creating of policies and how to apply them to object groups.

 

Next Post: Creating vROps Policies and How To Apply Them To Object Groups.

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