Admin Portal Views

This page provides details on what you can access from the Commander Admin Portal Views menu.

The functionality available to you is based on your user role; some commands are restricted to certain user roles. For information, see Commander Access Control.

Inventory

The Inventory allows you to monitor, manage, and report on your IT assets and resources through the following subviews:

Infrastructure view

The Infrastructure view displays your IT assets hierarchically in your actual infrastructure location. For example, when you view an AWS EC2 instance, you can determine that it belongs to a particular Amazon cloud account, region, and VPC.

Cloud Account Type

Details

AWS

A hierarchy of AWS regions, stacks, Virtual Private Clouds (VPCs), Auto Scaling Groups, VMs (Amazon EC2 instances), load balancers (Amazon Elastic Load Balancers), and databases (Amazon RDS database instances). Doesn't include templates (AMIs).

Stacks don't have children in the tree, because stack resources are already displayed in the appropriate location in the tree.

GCP

A hierarchy of GCP resources, grouped by region and zone. Because this view is region-centric, you should use it when thinking about geographic distribution. GCP deployments are not shown in this view.

Kubernetes

An infrastructure-centric view showing the logical grouping of pods and containers, based on the node where they reside.

Azure

A hierarchy of Azure regions, resource groups, virtual networks, VMs, and templates (images). Because this view is region-centric, you should use it when thinking about geographic distribution.

Resource groups are created in a specific region, but the contents of a resource group can span regions. Therefore, in the Infrastructure View, resource groups don't have children (in contrast to the Applications view). When you click a resource group in any view, you can see a list of its resources on its Resources tab.

Hyper-V SCVMM

Hosts, clusters and any folders or datacenters that you have created in the hierarchy. Shows VMs and templates in the hierarchy.

vCenter

Hosts, clusters, resource pools, and any folders or datacenters that you've created in vCenter. Shows VMs and templates in the hierarchy.

To support both VPCs and EC2 Classic in AWS cloud accounts, Commander displays instances running in a VPC as children of the VPC, and instances not running in a VPC as children of "EC2-Classic".

Applications view

The Applications view displays your deployed resources hierarchically by their membership in a logical group, not by location.

Cloud Account Type

Details

AWS

A hierarchy of AWS templates, VMs, and stacks. For each AWS region, this view shows:

  • The Private Templates folder, containing private AMIs (Amazon Machine Images) created in the AWS console. AWS provides a set of public AMIs; any AMIs you create in the AWS console are private AMIs. Only private AMIs are available in Commander for deployment and for addition to the Service Catalog.
  • Availability zones, containing Amazon EC2 instances (identified as VMs in Commander), AWS CloudFormation stacks and Amazon RDS databases. Does not include load balancers or Auto Scaling Groups, which can span availability zones; these objects are displayed only in the Infrastructure View.

Note that stacks don't have children in the tree, because stack resources are already displayed in the appropriate location in the tree.

GCP

An application-centric view of GCP resources (including VMs and deployments), logically grouped by organization, folder, and project.

Note that deployments don't have children in the tree, because deployment resources are already displayed in the appropriate location in the tree.

Kubernetes

An application-centric view of the Kubernetes cluster, composed of pods, containers and other resources, broken down by namespace.

Azure

A hierarchy of popular public Azure images, resource groups, private templates, virtual networks and VMs. Because this view is resource group-centric, it's the view you should use for lifecycle management.

Commander supports only VM images, not OS images.

Resource groups are created in a specific region, but the contents of a resource group can span regions, so regions are not shown in this view. In the Applications view, the children of a resource group are shown beneath the resource group in the hierarchy (in contrast to the Infrastructure View). Because virtual networks may not be in the same resource group as the VMs within it, virtual networks and VMs are displayed at the same level in this view, right under the resource group.

Note that when you click a resource group in any view, you see a list of its resources on its Resources tab.

Hyper-V SCVMM

Templates in the SCVMM library.

vCenter

A hierarchy of all folders, VMs, and templates.

Storage view

A view of storage resources in the Infrastructure hierarchy.

Cloud Account Type

Details

AWS

Shows both the EBS and S3 datastores. For more information, see Supported AWS Resources .

GCP

Shows storage resources grouped by region. For GCP, all storage resources are displayed under the Managed folder. Both regional and zonal storage resources are organized into Commander datastores, which are logical groups aggregating persistent VM disks. When you look at a datastore, you can see which VMs have persistent disks, as well as the total storage usage in that zone or region. Disks for images and local disks are not attached to any datastore, so they're not visible in the Storage view. For more information, see Supported GCP Resources.

Kubernetes

Provides a storage footprint view of all volumes in the cluster, as well as a list of volumes for each pod, broken down by volume type. It doesn't show volume backings or storage classes.

Azure

Shows both managed and unmanaged storage. The view is region-centric, which means that it doesn't provide a resource group–centric view of storage accounts. For more information, see Supported Azure Resources.

vCenter

The Unmanaged folder in this view shows out-of-inventory VMs (VMs that exist on a datastore but don't exist in vCenter's inventory).

Terraform view

The Terraform view allows you to access the state of Terraform configurations stored in backends that reside in Terraform Cloud, AWS S3 buckets, and Azure Blob Storage containers. You can also view details such as the outputs, variables, and resources for your Terraform deployments.

For more information, see Terraform.

Cost Analytics

Cost Analytics allow you to see the cost of all services across all cloud accounts, providing you with the data you need to make informed cloud cost decisions. Costs include both the costs for VMs and other services that are managed by Commander and the costs for resources and services that aren't managed by Commander, but will show up on your bill.

For more information, see Cost Analytics.

Service Requests

This View menu selection will take you to the Service Requests page. In Commander, you can set up a process to help you manage service requests received from Service Portal users (as well as from Commander users). You can create and use a service request form by itself or add workflows to create a complete service request process from the initial user request through to deployment and final release of the service to the user.

On the Service Requests page, you can:

For general information on managing service requests, see Self-Service.

Solutions

This View menu selection will take you to the Commander Solutions page.

Service Portal

This View menu selection will take you to the sign in page for the Service Portal — the self-service portal that allows authorized users to do things such as power services on and off, request new services, request changes to existing services, monitor VM performance, resource usage, and service costs.

Through the Service Portal, you can provide your users a view of the resources that they need without allowing access to the underlying private or public cloud infrastructure.

For information on how to set up the Service Portal for users, see Configure the Service Portal. For information on how to use the Service Portal as a user, see Service Portal.