Select the widget source with an interaction or through the self-provider configuration on some widgets in Dashboard in Aria Operations

Products

• VMware Aria Suite

Issue/Introduction

You see the below message on certain widgets in default dashboards in Aria Operations

Select the widget source with an interaction or through the self-provider configuration

 

Example from the vSphere Daily Check Dashboard. You can see that the the bottom 3 widgets are displaying this message. Further information can be found in the resolution section of this KB

Environment

Aria Operations 8.x 

Cause

This is expected behavior since dashboards display data based on widget interactions, where 'child' widgets are populated based on the selection in the 'parent' widget. 

Resolution

We don't recommend modifying the default dashboards, because the out-of-the-box content will be reset during an upgrade. If the default dashboard does not fulfill your requirements you can always customize and create your own dashboards.

 

When you're working with an unfamiliar dashboard, you can edit the dashboard and display the interactions within the dashboard. Please be aware that this is not available on Aria Operations licensed with the older Standard type license, as customizing content is not available when Aria Operations is licensed with a Standard license.

Select Actions > Edit Dashboard from the Actions menu to the right of the dashboard name. Then select Show Interactions that will appear to the right of the Actions drop-down menu. You will be presented with the Interactions view of the dashboard, as displayed in the screenshot below:

You can see that the Outgoing Object Interaction (circle with arrow) has lines going down to Incoming Object Interaction (circle with dot) in the widgets below. This way you can determine what is the source of the widget interactions, in this case the source of the widget interactions is in the vSphere Clusters widget.

 

Exit out of the dashboard by selecting Cancel, and choose any of the entries in the vSphere Clusters widget as displayed in the example below. 

You may have more than one vSphere cluster in your environment, and will be able to select individual clusters in the vSphere Clusters widget.

 

This demonstrates how widget interactions work in Aria Operations dashboards.

Additional Information

Also see Widget Interactions as per Aria Operations documentation.

If there are no selection available for the widget that is configured with Outgoing Object Interactions, this means that there are no objects found of the specific type configured in the widget. This would most likely be due to collection failures preventing object of that type from being collected.