Although dashboards are a powerful concept, a dashboard on its own is just a blank canvas. It is the ability of a dashboard to host widgets and their associated configuration that makes the difference. Widgets display the information we want to show in a variety of different ways. In vROps 6.0, we have 42 widgets available to us out of the box, which is up from the 26 widgets that were available in vCOps 5.x.

Most widgets display metric information in the form of scores, graphs, or lists. Widgets can also be linked by interactions, which means that when an object like a virtual machine is selected in one widget, the linked widgets will change their data based on the selected object. Some widgets though do require the use of an additional XML file to show the specific information that may be required.