Finally, we are up to the last stage of applying our recently created super metric into a policy and applying it to active objects.

When you associate your super metric to an object type, the super metric is calculated for the objects in that object type and appears as a metric for the object type.

After you have saved and closed your super metric, while focused on the metric, select the Object Types tab at the bottom of the screen and select the Add Object Type button.

Browse or search for the object type you wish to add to the super metric. This will allow us to specify that the super metric will only apply to certain object types and therefore not attempt to be calculated on the object that will not support it, such as Datastores, for example.

In this example, we want to monitor the entire vCenter Cluster (with a depth of 2), therefore we will select the Cluster Compute Resource object from the drop-down menu.

Now, we have to apply this metric to an appropriate policy from the policy library. To add the super metric to a policy, navigate to Policies | Policy Library.  For the purpose of this example, we will be using the vSphere Solutions Default Policy. Select the policy and click Edit Selected Policy.

On the Edit Monitoring Policy window select Collect Metrics and Properties. Filter by Attribute type and leave only Supermetric.

Finally, find your created super metric that matches your resource type and set the state to Local (enabled). Save and close the policy.

After a few collection cycles (5-10) your super metric should show some values on the selected object types within the inventory. As we have applied the metric to a computer cluster resource object type, we must navigate and select a vSphere Cluster from the inventory. We can find all metrics on the All Metrics tab. We can filter the available metrics to find what we are looking for more easily.

In certain scenarios, tracking a single super metric is easier than tracking the metrics on several separate objects. In this example, all the virtual machines on all hosts in the vSphere Cluster.

It is worth noting that you will find this metric for all objects in your environment. As we have associated this metric only with the Cluster computer resource object type, and enabled it only with that object type in the policy, the metric will only show data for that object type.

For example, if we look at the metrics at a virtual machine level and not vSphere Cluster level, we will still find our Cluster CPU Ready % Max (USR), but it will not show any data.