With vRealize Operations Manager you can create a metric configuration file. This is an XML file that contains predefined metrics that can be used in different widgets. With the XML file you can skip the process of manually picking the required metrics and attributes over and over again. Another advantage is that you can reuse this XML file in different widgets for different objects in your environment.

The metric configuration file contains 3 important tags:

<Adapterkind>

The AdapterKind tag determines which adapter is required for the metrics you want to include.

<ResourceKind>

The ResourceKind tag determines the resource type, e.g. cluster, datastore, virtual machines, host.

<Metric attkey>

The Metric attrkey tag determines which attributes and/or metric are included in the configuration.

In previous versions of vROPS if you wanted to create a metric configuration file you needed to know the true adapter kind name , resource kind name and metric value name in vROPS instead of the display names. You could get these names using the API browser of vROPS. An excellent blog post on how to get these names can be found here.

In vROPS 6.4 they made life a bit easier, it is now possible to use a metric picker to get the right metric in you metric configuration file. Depending in which line you are in the metric configuration file, the applicable metric picker will be available.

First create the metric configuration file and select the applicable adapter kind. In my case I only have the vCenter Server solution configured.

Next select the resource kind of which you want to use the metrics.

And finally, select the metrics you want to add to you metric configuration file.

The metric configuration file is now configured and can be used in widgets. More information on how to use the metric configuration file in a widget can be found here.

I personally think this is a very welcome addition to the vROPS GUI. Creating a metric configuration file used to take a lot of time looking up the name of the metric you wanted to use. This will save you time and maybe even some frustration when you had found out that the metric you selected was not the right one.

Update: Forgot to mention my coworker Johan van Amersfoort for discovering this new feature. Visit his blog on vhojan.nl for EUC awesomeness!