Before you start creating views, it is beneficial to have an understanding of the components that they are comprised of.

A view consists of the view type, subject, and data components:

In this example, the view is a trend view, which gets its data from the CPU Demand (%) metric.

The subject is the object type, which a view is associated with.

A view presents the data of the subject. For example, if the selected object is a host and you select the view named Host CPU Demand (%) Trend View, the result is a trend of the host's CPU demand over a period of time.

Let's walk through what parts are needed to define and build our own custom views, and then apply them to real work situations.