Are you interested in visualizing the carbon emissions of your VMware environment?  Do you have regulations or requirements to show reduction of carbon emissions?  If so, VMware's Office of the CTO (OCTO) created this vROps dashboard to show the carbon footprint of your environment.

This Carbon Emissions Explorer dashboard shows your real-time carbon emissions trend over time for all environments monitored by vROps, as well as weekly snapshots.  You can get an overview of each vCenter, virtual datacenter, and cluster, or drill down to the ESXi host and VM levels to get granular to find the items producing the most carbon.

We've also included an "Oversized Clusters" super metric and heat map to show where your environment may be oversized, giving you visibility into where you may be able to reduce your carbon emissions even more.

This dashboard was demo'd in the VMware OCTO Sustainability booth at VMware Explore 2022.

For a video demo of the dashboard, please click here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uqe1zpoXXs8

Installation Instructions

Download the complete zip file and extract locally.  There will be three files extracted:

• VMware-Carbon-Emissions-Explorer-Supermetrics.json
• VMware-Carbon-Emissions-Explorer-Views.zip
• VMware-Carbon-Emissions-Explorer-Dashboard.zip

After the files are extracted, import them in the order below.

Super Metrics

Import the VMware-Carbon-Emissions-Explorer-Supermetrics.json:

• Left side navigation pane -> Configure -> Super Metrics
  
• Click the three dot menu and select Import
  
• Browse to the json file and select "Overwrite existing Super Metric"
  

  • You may have to enable the Super Metric in a policy to collect data.

  • To enable the super metric, edit the Super Metric, navigate to Policies, and select the policy to enable the Super Metric.
    
    

  • You can verify the Super Metrics imported successfully by searching "carbon" and "cluster"
    
    

  • You can verify the Policies enabled for the Super Metrics by navigating to it
    

  • Once enabled, you'll have to wait for a polling interval for the dashboard to display data.

Views

Import the VMware-Carbon-Emissions-Explorer-Views.zip:

• Left side navigation pane -> Visualize -> Views
• Click Manage under the Views pane, then the three dot menu and select Import
  
• Browse to the zip file and select "Overwrite existing View"
  
• Verify the Views were imported by searching "carbon"
  

Dashboard

Import the VMware-Carbon-Emissions-Explorer-Dashboard.zip:

• Left side navigation pane -> Visualize -> Dashboards
• Click Manage under the Dashboards pane, then the three dot menu and select Import
  
• Browse to the zip file and select "Overwrite"
  
• After the Dashboard is imported, you can locate it by searching the Dashboards section
  

Notes

If you navigate to the Dashboard and every widget is blank, stating select a resource or view, as Ace Venture once said, "If I'm not back in five minutes, just wait longer" (please wait at least 10 minutes for the collection cycles to complete)