Introduction

There are often occasions when it is not desirable to use colour coding for certain metrics on scoreboard dashboards. These are often metrics for which there is no obvious change in state such as the amount of memory configured or amount of provisioned disk space. These metrics rarely change value, but more importantly a change in value does not necessitate a change in health state. For these metrics it can be more useful to not display colours on a scoreboard widget as they can distract end users from important state change data. Additionally, these metrics may have values that have valid reasons for varying between object types, thereby making assigning colour changes very challenging.

Dashboard Overview

The image below shows a dashboard with three widgets:

1. Object picker
2. Self providing scoreboard
3. Scoreboard with the object being derived from the object picker and the metrics from a metricconfig.xml file

Each scoreboard widget has four metrics with one (co-stop) deriving its state from symptoms, two (ready time and swap wait) from custom colours and the fourth (total capacity) utilising no colours as it makes little sense for this metric to display colours as a) it could vary between hosts and b) is unlikely to ever change.

Defining state and colour changes via the widget

As a reminder, the colours for metrics that are defined directly on the scoreboard widget are configured by selecting the appropriate setting under ‘Color Method’ when editing the widget:

Defining state and colour changes via a metriconfig.xml file

To achieve the same result via a metricconfig.xml file the following code is used:

Specifically the following is added to the end of each Metric entry:

showState="false"