If you have ever worked with VCF Operations, you might have noticed a discrepancy in the power consumption readings compared to out-of-band management interfaces like Dell iDRAC. This difference occurs because VCF Operations displays power consumption in 5-minute cycles, whereas Dell iDRAC aggregates this data hourly. To align these metrics and display hourly power consumption within VCF Operations, a custom Super Metric must be created. In this blog post, I will guide you step-by-step through the process of setting up this Super Metric to ensure consistent and accurate energy reporting across your environment.
In the following example we create a new Super Metric named [VRMWARE] Host Power consumed per hour. This Super Metric multiply the metric Total Energy Consumed in the collection period (Wh) with 12. Assume that the default collection cycle of 5 minutes is used. This way, you can display the current power on an hourly basis instead of the standard current per 5-minute cycle.
This example is created in a VCF 9.1.1 environment. It also works fine in Aria Operations 8.18.x. Be aware that in Aria Operations, Configurations can be find under Operations. Let’s start with building the new Super Metric.
In VCF Operations:
Administration > Configurations > Super Metrics Add
Select the object type Host System
Formula (Unformatted):
If we move the Unformatted button to the right we can copy the following unformatted Super Metric code:
${this, metric=power|energy_summation_sum_hourly}*12
Unit (Optional) Wh
When we move the Unformatted button back to the left we see the Super Metric as displayed in the next screenshot.
Validate the formula
Preview the formula.
In the next example screenshot is power 0 Wh because of this is a nested ESXi server in the lab.
Policies
Mark a policy. In my lab there only the default policy. So we continue and hit the Create button.
The Super Metric is now created
Now also we want to include the Super Metric in a host list view. To do this, we clone the ESXi Inventory view. It can be found under Dashboards > Views > Manage > Filter on ESXi Basic.
In this example we rename the cloned view to [VRMWARE] ESXi Basic Inventory and add the Super Metric to metrics list and renamed the Metric Label in Host Power consumption per hour.
Finally we add a Summary so the total power of all listed hosts in the view are counted. In the Configuration window select Sum as Aggregation.
The new cloned view is visible in the filtered Views list.
If we open the view see the Column with Host Power consumption per hour. Since we added the “Total” summary to the view, we can see the total power usage of all servers in the list.
The Super Metric collected data is also usable as historical data and available in graph form as well.
I hope this blog post helps you gain clearer daily and historical insights into your environment’s host power consumption.
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