Reporting on services not working

Back to the original question:

Yes, the VMs can take a few min to populate, depending on how you created the service.

To help you with this, first, how did you create the service?  Did you create it under the Virtualization category, or did you create a new category, which would be the preferred method?  (Anything created under the Virtualization category can be overwritten during upgrades.)

As far as troubleshooting, if in Service Builder you expand down under your service to components, open that and you see the VMs desired, that means you have the service configured correctly.  Make sure the service is configured to be associated with the VMWare domain.  Then, try the following next, substituting your service name.

For example, I recently created a Citrix VM service as follows:

+ Virtualization (FSMCategory)

- Citrix (FSMCategory)

     - Citrix_Non-Prod_VMs (FSMService)

          - Citrix_Dev (FSMDynamicManagedComponent)

Within Citrix_Dev, I created a rule associated with VMWare. I selected Virtual Machines and gave it the condition:

name not like 'wtxep%' and name like 'wtx%'

When I hit the test button, I can see about 200 VMs listed.

Saving it, I can then go to a drag and drop dashboard, select the data tab on the right, look under services, select all services, hit the search magnifying glass, type in Citrix, click on Citrix_Dev, drag it to open space on the Dashboard, select Template -> Virtual Machines in Service (for example), hit finish, and I have a list of just the 200 VMs from that service on the Dashboard.  (Not all templates show all VMs, some are Top N, Bottom N, etc. even if they don't mention it in the title.)

My rule condition is as follows:

name like '%srv001%' or name like '%srv002%'

This works if all hosts is the root query but returns nothing if vmware -> virtual machines is the root query...

Take a look at this video I posted on creating a UI query.  If you follow that and use the parameters above you should be able to make one.  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m8HMUKIIvKk

I'm no authority on this, but I can share what I have found to work.

First, "Service" in Foglight means grouping of objects, that's all.  Quite unlike what it means in an OS context, where it implies activity.

When I create a service, I create an FSMCategory, then within the category, one (or more) FSMService.  For example, Prod and NonProd.

The FSMService has 2 tabs on the creation wizard, Create Basic Information, and Assign Domains.  On Create Basic Information, only the Name is really needed, although best practice would be to enter description information.  On Assign Domains, you can select from various domains, depending on what's installed on your system. For vFoglight, always select VMware.

Once you finish, you have the service, but no objects have been assigned to the service.

You select the green + (Add) on the FSMService, and get 2 options:  Add components to the service, or Create a Child Service.  Creating a child service is powerful, but not needed here. 

Add components to the service leads to two further options, Add specific component, or Create a rule.  For consistency, I always use Create a Rule, even though it's simpler but less flexible to just add specific components.

(Anyway, that's why I said I had created a rule associated with VMWare, probably was a bit too much shortcutting.  My bad.)

So, when you Create a Rule, you have to chose the object context to apply the rule to. "All Hosts" is definately not what you want to use for VMWare, since that only refers to the Foglight host object wrapper around the VM objects, not to the VM object itself.  Instead, select VMware -> Virtual Machines. as your Root Query. 

What rule conditions are you using?

Thanks for the steps..

Can you explain what you mean by "I created a rule associated with VMWare". My service was using "all hosts" as the input components for the rule and the rule conditions worked...finding the 110 vms I want to group by their name. If I change the input components to virtual machines with the same rule condition - only 10 vms are showing in the service...I don't understand why that is.

When I setup the drag and drop dashboard I see the same list of only 10 vms.

I'm really surprised that foglight supports grouping vms into services but this feature only seems to be designed to group alerts, and not reporting or dashboards.. Why are so many convoluted steps required to get the data out of this system?

Hmmm..since it's working for me, not sure where to go with this. 

Not saying All Hosts won't work for some data elements (name, for example), since it will, but some things about VMs are not available if you use All Hosts.

Might have to get some more expert assistance on this.

Yep - it was capitalization issue. Thanks for your help - phew we got there!