The Supply Chain
Workload Optimizer uses the information it gathers from targets to stitch together a logical dependency mapping of all entities in the customer environment, from the business application at the top to the containerized and/or virtualized workloads in the middle to physical hosts, storage, network, and facilities (or equivalent public cloud services) below. This mapping, called the supply chain (see Figure 9-3), is the primary means of navigation in Workload Optimizer.
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Figure 9-3 The Workload Optimizer supply chain
The supply chain shows each known entity as a colored ring. The color of a ring indicates the current state of the entity in terms of pending actions—red if there are critical pending performance or compliance actions, orange for prevention actions, yellow for efficiency-related actions, and green if no actions are pending. The center of each ring displays the known quantity of the given entity, and the connecting arrows illustrate consumers’ dependencies on other providers.
Clicking on a given entity in the supply chain opens a context-specific window with detailed information about that entity type. For example, in Figure 9-4, the Container entity in the supply chain has been selected, and you can see many container-relevant widgets, as well as a series of tabs for policies, actions, and so on.
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Figure 9-4 Accessing additional details by clicking in the supply chain
Furthermore, the supply chain is dynamic, meaning that if a particular entity, such as a specific business application (for example, AD-Financial-Lite-ACI in Figure 9-5), is selected, the supply chain automatically reconfigures itself to depict just that single business application and only its related dependencies (including updating the color of the various rings and their respective entity counts). This is known as narrowing the scope of the supply chain view and is extremely helpful for focusing on a specific area of concern or work. Clicking on the Home link at the top-left of the Workload Optimizer screen or selecting Optimize > Overview on the main Intersight menu bar on the left returns you to the full scope of the supply chain.
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Figure 9-5 Scoped supply chain view of a single application