Building a Dashboard for the Hands on Lab Project

After finishing up my HOL Provisioning script I moved on to the second thing on my list of Todo’s since the first HOL event in Kansas City… Build a dashboard.

I found that about 10 minutes into the lab things were starting to act funny, like vcloud director not opening console windows, and it wasn’t until I opened the vSphere client and seen that we were using something like 24Ghz of CPU power and 94GB of ram, that I realized the hardware was tapped out. Well, this time we are going to know when we get close way before the cliff. You can check out the real-time dashboard at http://dashboard.vcloudlab.net

Dashboard showing HOL Stats in near realtime

The dashboard uses many different technologies to produce the finished product:

  • Google Visualization API’s for chart generation
  • PowerCLI for gathering stats from View, vCloud Director, and vSphere
  • MySQL to store the stats
  • PHP/Javascript/AJAX/JSON to get the stats from MySQL convert to Google API format and generate the charts
  • Apache web server to serve the finished product to you!

To say the least, this is the most I’ve ever dug into a few of these languages, but with the help of Google, we have something that works!

If you are interested in the code that makes this work let me know, I’m not just going to post a download link because it is pretty complex to setup and I haven’t created an install guide or even gathered all the parts and pieces into one area. If you need it though email me and I’ll get it together. [email protected]

 

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3 Responses to "Building a Dashboard for the Hands on Lab Project"

  1. would love to get more information. working with customer now on a 5K seat VDI deployment and getting such a simple dashboard like this would be great.

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