Writing Management Packs for SCOM: Adding Dashboards

The next step in extending our custom MP is taking it beyond the monitors and performance views and cleaning it up so we can look at different metrics in logical groups.  For an mP like Hyper-V you'll want to look at both the % Hypervisor Run Time and the % Guest Run Time in the same view so you can see how well they are comparing to one another.

To build out a dashboard is pretty straight forward, you simply need to decide how you want to view the data.  It's no different from building an HTML table, you specify the number of columns and rows then assign a performance view to each cell.

For the example, I'm going to create a Dashboard that combines 4 performance views into a 2 x 2 grid.

Using the Authoring Console:

1. Go to Presentation->Views
2. Right Click the Views pane and select New->Custom View
3. Give the dashboard an ID such as BridgeWays.Windows.HyperV.LogicalProcessor.Dashboard
4. Give it a friendly name such as Logical Processors
5. Set the Target to System.Entity
6. Click on the Configuration tab and click Browse for a type
7. Select Microsoft.SystemCenter.DashboardViewType from the list and click OK
8. Click Edit... on the Configuration page to launch our XML editor
9. The XML is pretty straight forward, set the <PanelConfiguration> XML to be:
   <PanelConfiguration Column="2" Row="2">
     ViewID="BridgeWays.Windows.HyperV.LP.TotalRunTime.Perf">
     ViewID="BridgeWays.Windows.HyperV.LP.HypervisorRunTime.Perf">
     ViewID="BridgeWays.Windows.HyperV.LP.IdleRunTime.Perf">
     ViewID="BridgeWays.Windows.HyperV.LP.GuestRunTime.Perf">
   PanelConfiguration>
10. Close the editor
11. Select the Folder tab and click the folder you want the performance view to be in.
12. Click OK

Let's deconstruct the XML a little, all I've done is defined a 2x2 grid with the <PanelConfiguration> element attributes.  Then I specified which performance view to put in each cell.  That's it, pretty straight forward and once we saved it we're done... almost.

Since we've build a dashboard showing 4 performance views there isn't much point in having both the dashboard and the performance views in the same folder.  So the last thing I would do is open the properties dialog for each contained performance view, go to the Options tab and toggle Visible to "false".  Now we'll only see the Dashboard that was created.

So how does our dashboard look when we add it to the MP?

 

At this point, you should have a pretty good handle on building monitors, performance views and dashboards.  These are the basic building blocks of MPs and the key here is to remember you can build these to extend existing MPs as well as for making your own MPs from scratch.

Part 1: Getting Started with writing a more robust Hyper-V MP
Part 2: Adding your own Monitors
Part 3: Adding Rules and Performance Views
Part 4: Adding Dashboards