XML

If you spend a good amount of time in vROps either at your place of work or with customers (like me) you will likely have had to create some custom XML (metric configuration) for custom dashboards. In the past you would either use the sample/examples to get them started and then go and find the specific metric names while, this was usually quite time consuming. In recent versions of vROps however, VMware have introduced a “builder” to help you properly format and slect the corect adapters/adapterkinds and metrics.

Recently, I’ve had a bit of a SOAP baptism of fire - the project I am working on makes hundreds of SOAP calls to multiple SOAP APIs on multiple hosts. During this time I’ve encountered some common and rare problems and troubleshooting them seems to be a bit of a black art, if the number of results in Google is any measure. To demonstrate some of these troubleshooting methods I will use a global weather SOAP service, http://www.