The boys at CloudPhysics are working hard behind the scenes at adding new features to their current stable of Analytic Cards based on data collected from their Probe VA’s hooked into vCenter environments.

Check out this post on their DataStore Contention Card:

For a general overview, go here: I am a massive fan of analytics and trend metrics and I use a number of systems to gain a wide overview of the performance and monitoring of our Hosting and Cloud Platform.

A few weeks ago, the CloudPhysics team released to a limited number of users a Custom Card Designer. This pretty much lets you construct custom cards based on a huge number of metrics presented via a builder wizard.

Cards you design and save are listed on the page above. From here you can view your custom cards and edit them if they require tweaking. Once you click the Create Card + button you are presented with a list of property data metrics from which to construct your card.

Properties fall under four main categories and there are a large number of available metrics under each category. The wizard lets you drag and drop items into the builder window. From there you can preview and then save your custom card for future use.

As a quick example I needed a quick way to see which datastores where connected to their respective hosts in each cluster so that consistency in datastore availability was maintained. It was as simple as dragging across Host:Name and Host:Datastore, putting in a filter to only view hosts of a certain name it was ready to go.

You have the option to preview and continue editing, or saving to the Card Designer main page. From that page you can execute the query. The results of my quick test card are shown below.

One thing I would like to see is an option to export the results to a csv or excel document…but other than that it’s a great example of what CloudPhysics is all about…data and how to get the most out of it as efficiently as possible.