vCenter Operations Manager – Major Badges – Health, Risk, and Efficiency

vC Ops has 3 major badges and their status depends on the minor badges whose scores get rolled up to make up the major badges. Those 3 major badges are Health, Risk, and Efficiency. Each of these 3 badges are weighted combinations of minor badges

vCenter Operations Health Badge

The vC Ops Health badge tells you how “healthy” your vSphere infrastructure is (if you are at the World level of the inventory) or it tells you how healthy a particular object is such as a virtual data center, host, VM, or cluster.

The health badge is a weighted combination of Workload, Anomalies and Faults badges.
The higher your health score, the better off you are. Thus, a “100″ is perfect health.

The Health badge summarizes workload, anomalies, and faults.

The Workload badge shows how hard an object is working. A higher workload score indicates that an object is doing more work. Obviously, you don’t want objects out there doing zero work, as that is waste but, as the same time, you also don’t want objects completely maxed out with a workload score of 100 either. Workload is an absolute measurement that calculates the demand for a resource divided by the capacity of an object. Resources might include CPU, memory, disk I/O, or network I/O.  vC Ops will help you to balance workload across your resource objects effectively.

The Anomalies badge indicates how the object is behaving currently compared to how it has behaved in the past. While small anomalies don’t always indicate something bad, large anomalies are likely an indicator of a problem. vC Ops uses anomalies to determine what is “normal” in the your vSphere infrastructure vs what is “abnormal”.

The Faults badge tells you if configuration issues have occurred for an object. Faults are given priority over anomalies and workload when calculating health. Faults are calculated based on the events received from VMware vCenter about an object. Examples of events that might generate faults are ESXi host memory errors, loss of network or HBA redundancy, a failover event in a HA cluster, or hardware events (like high CPU temperature) received from CIM events.

vCenter Operations Risk Badge

The second major metric that vC Ops report is Risk. Risk is a combination of its three sub-metrics - Stress, Time Remaining and Capacity Remaining. You can think of Risk as a rating of how “risky” the virtual infrastructure is in terms of it’s performance or capacity.The difference is that, with those scores, a lower number is a bad indicator where, with Risk in vC Ops, a higher number is a bad indicator.


With Time Remaining, you will be able to see the amount of time left before the object you are analyzing reaches its maximum capacity.  

The Capacity Remaining badge score indicated the number of remaining virtual machines you can fit in that object. For example, on a datastore the capacity remaining is pretty straightforward — how much capacity is remaining to hold VMs?(the lowest number is the capacity remaining).

Stress badge reports the stress that an object is under. Just as your stress level is related to your workload, so is the stress score in vC Ops.Stress is reported between 0 and 100 with 100 being very high stress and 0 being no stress.

vCenter Operations Efficiency Badge

The third major badge that vC Ops reports is Efficiency.

Efficiency Minor Badges – Reclaimable Waste and Density

 The Reclaimable Waste badge indicates what resources you can get back from your virtual infrastructure. Those reclaimed resources might allow you to provision more VMs.

The Density badge is measures your virtual infrastructure consolidation ratios to  to ensure that you are maximizing your virtual infrastructure investment.