6.4

Timeline Tab Overview
The timeline provides a view of the triggered symptoms, generated alerts, and events for an object over a
period of time. You use the timeline to identify common trends over time that are contributing to the current
status of objects in your environment.
The timeline provides a three-tier scrolling mechanism that you can use to move quickly through large
spans of time, or slowly and minutely through individual hours when you are focusing on a particular
period of time. To ensure that you have the data that you need, congure the Date Controls to encompass
the problem you are investigating.
It is not always eective to investigate a problem on an individual object by looking only at the object. Use
the ancestor, descendant, and peer options to examine the object in a broader environmental context. This
context often reveals unexpected inuences or consequences for the problem.
The timeline is a tool that provides you a graphical view of paerns. If a symptom is triggered and canceled
by the system at various intervals over time, you can compare the event to other changes to the object or to
the related objects. These changes might be the root cause of the problem.
Events Tab Overview
Events are changes in vRealize Operations Manager metrics that reect changes that occurred on managed
objects because of user actions, system actions, triggered symptoms, or generated alerts on an object. You
use the Events tab to compare the occurrence of events with the generated alerts to determine if a change on
your managed object contributed to the root cause of the alert or other problems with the object.
Events can occur on any object, not just the one listed.
The following vCenter Server activities are some of the activities that generate vRealize Operations Manager
events:
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Powering a virtual machine on or o
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Creating a virtual machine
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Installing VMware Tools on the guest OS of a virtual machine
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Adding a newly congured ESX/ESXi system to a vCenter Server system
Depending on alert denitions, these events might generate alerts.
If you monitor the same virtual machines with other applications that provide information to
vRealize Operations Manager, and the adapters for those applications are congured to provide change
events, the Events tab includes certain change events that occur on the monitored objects. These change
events might provide further insight into the cause of problems that you are investigating.
Creating and Using Object Details
The views and heat map details provide you with specic data about the object. You use this information to
evaluate problems in more detail. If the current views or heat maps do not provide the information that you
need, you can create one to use as tool as you investigate your specic problem.
vRealize Operations Manager User Guide
50 VMware, Inc.