Although metrics in their essence have remained the same in the past few vRealize Operations releases, metric operators got a huge enhancement boost in vRealize Operations 6.3. It might seem like a somewhat trivial enhancement, but these operators are game changers for super metrics. With the introduction of vRealize Operations 6.3 and the new super metrics operators, it is now even easier to transform or create new metrics from the already collected metrics.

The new operators are as follows:

It may be difficult to grasp the value these operators bring at first, so let’s jump straight to an example.

In vRealize Operations, you can get VM uptime. The inconvenience with uptime in vRealize Operations is that it is an ever-growing number until a reboot of the monitored object takes place. This means that for any given time period you will end up with some number that might be very high or very low, and as such it becomes very hard to make sense of it in terms of uptime statistics. Just look at the following graph:

Every time there is a drop in the chart, the VM's OS has been restarted. vRealize Operations every 5 minutes (cycles or 300 seconds). It means that for every data point, 300 seconds is added to the previous value if the VMs OS has been up for the entire period. If not, the number will be lower, as the metric is reset on a reboot of the OS. Although not shown very clearly in the graph, the lowest number is 40.3  (around 03:30 PM) and the highest is 3.884 (around 2:20 PM).

With the help of super metrics and the new operators, we turn these data points into something useful in the context of VM OS uptime statistics, which we can use for management or customer reports. As you can see, the VM OS has been up most of the time for that period:

I will explain how to create the VM OS uptime % super metric shown with the help of the comparison operators later in this chapter.