Today, the inventory service in MTV is accessible via an API that returns JSON data. While this is useful for machine to machine communication, it is not user friendly and doesn't allow easy exploration of the inventory data, and even less run analytics on it.

This epic covers the creation of a user interface to explore the inventory data, add search capabilities, generate reports and create migration plans from the reports.

The first use case is the ability to explore the inventory holistically. If a user has more than one VMware provider, exploring all of them requires opening the vCenter UI for each one of them. The MTV inventory has the data for all the providers, so it is able to build the single pane of glass experience. It should allow following the relationships between the resources, e.g. list all the networks for a given host with links to inspect the networks individually.

The second use case is the ability to search the inventory. Because the inventory can be large, finding the right resources can be difficult. And the data representation we will choose for the data explorer will be opinionated, e.g. by folders, by namespace etc... A search feature allows the user to define its own criteria to find the resources, even criteria we didn't anticipate.

The third use case is the ability to generate reports. Once the user has identified search criteria, it may be painful to fill the form everytime. A reporting feature allows the user to save searches as reports. The reports can be run on demand, or scheduled for no latency answer. The reports are not saved, only the search criteria.

The fourth use case is the ability to generate migration plans from search results or reports. The experience should be similar to the plan wizard in the MTV UI, apart from the fact that the VM selection is already done. The user still needs to map the networks and storages.

The fifth use case is an extension of the migration plan creation. The analytics tool would leverage the validation service to pre-select and sort destination networks and storages. The validation service will need to propose a scoring mechanism in addition to identifying concerns.