6.3

Managing and Administering Policies for
vRealize Operations Manager
A policy is a set of rules that you dene for vRealize Operations Manager to use to analyze and display
information about the objects in your environment. You can create, modify, and administer policies to
determine how vRealize Operations Manager displays data in dashboards, views, and reports.
How Policies Relate to Your Environment
vRealize Operations Manager policies support the operational decisions established for your IT
infrastructure and business units. With policies, you control what data vRealize Operations Manager collects
and reports on for specic objects in your environment. Each policy can inherit seings from other policies,
and you can customize and override various analysis seings, alert denitions, and symptom denitions for
specic object types, to support the service Level agreements and business priorities established for your
environment.
When you manage policies, you must understand the operational priorities for your environment, and the
tolerances for alerts and symptoms to meet the requirements for your business critical applications. Then,
you can congure the policies so that you apply the correct policy and threshold seings for your
production and test environments.
Policies dene the seings that vRealize Operations Manager applies to your objects when it collects data
from your environment. vRealize Operations Manager applies policies to newly discovered objects, such as
the objects in an object group. For example, you have an existing VMware adapter instance, and you apply a
specic policy to the group named World. When a user adds a new virtual machine to the vCenter Server
instance, the VMware adapter reports the virtual machine object to vRealize Operations Manager. The
VMware adapter applies the same policy to that object, because it is a member of the World object group.
To implement capacity policy seings, you must understand the requirements and tolerances for your
environment, such as CPU use. Then, you can congure your object groups and policies according to your
environment.
n
For a production environment policy, a good practice is to congure higher performance seings, and
to account for peak use times.
n
For a test environment policy, a good practice is to congure higher utilization seings.
vRealize Operations Manager applies policies in priority order, as they appear on the Active Policies tab.
When you establish the priority for your policies, vRealize Operations Manager applies the congured
seings in the policies according to the policy rank order to analyze and report on your objects. To change
the priority of a policy, you click and drag a policy row. The default policy is always kept at the boom of
the priority list, and the remaining list of active policies starts at priority 1, which indicates the highest
priority policy. When you assign an object to be a member of multiple object groups, and you assign a
dierent policy to each object group, vRealize Operations Manager associates the highest ranking policy
with that object.
Table 3‑3. Configurable Policy Rule Elements
Policy Rule Elements Thresholds, Settings, Definitions
Workload Enable or disable the demand for memory, CPU, and disk space. Enable or disable the rates
for network I/O and datastore I/O, and set the vSphere conguration limit. Congure
symptom thresholds for the Workload badge score.
Anomalies Congure symptom thresholds for the Anomalies badge score.
Faults Congure symptom thresholds for the Faults badge score.
Chapter 3 Customizing How vRealize Operations Manager Monitors Your Environment
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