A vRealize Operations badge is a graphical representation of the state of the current environment or object. A badge can range from using a few metrics, to millions of metrics, providing a summarized piece of useful information that would sometimes take an administrator hours or even days to collocate manually in the vCenter Performance tab or similar monitoring system.

Badges are seen as an important source of information rather than just data. If at any time an administrator wishes to understand more about a certain badge state or score, they can review the metrics or events that are behind the badge to get a more in-depth understanding of the environment.

One of the most unique and powerful aspects of badges is that they allow an administrator to view the same important information from the VM or Datastore level all the way up to the vCenter (or even higher) level. This is because all objects can have the same set of badges applied to them, it is just how they are calculated that may slightly differ. As all objects can have the same set of badges, this allows for badges to be rolled up to higher levels by leveraging parent-child relationships. For example, the Workload badge of an ESXi host includes all the workloads of its children virtual machines in its score. Similarly, the Workload badge of a vSphere Cluster includes all the workloads of its children ESXi hosts and virtual machines. This is not the case, though, for some badges such as the Health badge.

The badges in vRealize Operations 6.6 can be split into two distinct categories: major or minor. The major badges are Health, Risk, and Efficiency. Unlike the minor badges, the major badges do not contain a score (we will discuss this is the next section).

The Health badge indicates that current issues exist that need to be resolved immediately.

The Risk badge indicates that potential issues exist that might eventually degrade performance.

The Efficiency badge helps identify optimization opportunities in your environment.

The badges in vRealize Operations 6.6 are also represented by a color from red, to orange (amber), to yellow, and finally to green (red indicating an issue or alert). As we will be discussing later, minor badges also contain a score that determines their color representation.

Badge color	Icon	Description
Green colored badge		The object is in normal state, based on the set thresholds. For example, by default, the green infrastructure Workload badge indicates a score above 76.
Yellow colored badge		The object is experiencing some level of problems. For example, by default the infrastructure yellow Workload badge indicates a score between 80 and 89.
Orange colored badge		The object might have serious problems or is approaching its capacity. For example, by default, the infrastructure orange Faults badge indicates a score between 50 and 74.
Red colored badge		The object is either not functioning properly or will stop functioning soon. Most of the metrics are beyond their thresholds. For example, by default, the infrastructure red Risk badge indicates a score 100.
Gray colored badge		No data is available for this object or the object is offline. For example it this may indicate that there is no data for the Capacity Remaining of the object.

Badges on the Analysis tab provide specific information and guidance for when you troubleshoot issues encountered by an object:

The color of a badge on the Analysis tab is determined by its badge score. Badges change color based on badge score thresholds. These thresholds are defined in the policy used by the object.

A policy is a set of rules and base settings that apply to an object, such as threshold values that are used to evaluate badge scores.

As shown in the following table, several badges exist on the Analysis tab, identified by their icon. Like Health, Risk, and Efficiency badges, the color of these badges indicates the severity of an issue:

Name	Icon	Description
Workload		The Workload badge combines metrics that show the demand for resources on an object as a single value. These metrics include CPU utilization, memory usage, and so on.
Anomalies		The Anomalies score is calculated using the total number of threshold violations for all metrics for the selected object. A low Anomalies score indicates that an object is behaving according to its established historical parameters.
Faults		The Faults score is calculated based on events published by the vCenter Server. The scores are computed based on the severity of underlying problems. When more than one fault-related problem exists on the resource, the Faults score is based on the most severe problem.
Capacity		The Capacity badge represents the capability of your virtual environment to accommodate new virtual machines. vRealize Operations calculates the Capacity score as a percentage of the remaining virtual machines count compared to the total number of virtual machines that can be deployed on the selected object.
Time Remaining		The Time Remaining score indicates how much time is remaining before the resources of the object exhaust. It takes into account the configured provisioning buffer in days. The Time Remaining score allows you to plan the provisioning of physical or virtual resources for the selected object, or reorganize the workload in your virtual environment.
Stress		The Stress score indicates the historic workload of the selected object. The Stress score is calculated as a ratio between the demand for resources and the usable capacity for a certain period.
Reclaimable Capacity		The Reclaimable Capacity score indicates over-provisioning in your virtual infrastructure or for a specific object. It identifies the amount of resources that can be reclaimed and provisioned to other objects in your environment.
Density		The Density score indicates consolidation ratios, such as virtual machines per host, virtual CPUs per physical CPU, virtual memory per physical memory, and so on. You can use the Density score to achieve higher consolidation ratios and cost savings.
Compliance		The Compliance badge value is a score based on one or more compliance templates that you run in vRealize Operations against the data collected from vRealize Operations. You can use the alert-based compliance that is provided, or, if you also use VMware vRealize Configuration Manager (VCM) in your environment, you can add the adapter that provides Configuration compliance information in place of the alert-based compliance. With vRealize Configuration Manager, the Compliance badge value is a score based on one or more compliance templates that you run in vRealize Configuration Manager against the data collected from vSphere objects that are managed by vRealize Operations and by vRealize Configuration Manager.

Each major badge also has associated minor badges that are part of the same discipline. The relationship of the major and minor badges is as follows:

• Health:
  • Workload
  • Anomalies
  • Faults

•  Risk:
  • Capacity Remaining
  • Time Remaining
  • Stress
  • Compliance
• Efficiency:
  • Reclaimable Capacity
  • Density

Alert and symptom definitions define the state of a badge for a particular object type. This, in turn, allows for more intelligent alerting based on key symptoms that can be observed from multiple sources providing an informed recommendation to administrators.

This symptom-based approach, which was introduced in vRealize Operations 6.0, allows solution pack creators to define a series of alerts on particular observed Metrics, Messages, Faults, and so on and then link them to an overall alert and possibly even an automated remediation action to resolve the issue.

Although the badges were originally introduced in Operations Manager 1.0, they were limited to the vSphere UI and therefore to vSphere objects. There were a few exceptions, such as the Health badge for certain objects; however, as a general principle badges were for vSphere only.

One of the major aspects of vRealize Operations 6.0 and later versions is that all objects are treated as first-class citizens, or in other words, all solutions and adapters are treated and respected equally. This concept of equal weighting for all solutions is one of the driving factors behind the merged UI. This has allowed all objects to support the badges, allowing a consistent reporting and troubleshooting experience, no matter what the source of the data is.

The ability for non-vSphere objects to provide data to the full badge set will vary depending on the maturity level of the associated solution (adapter). In most cases, this will allow administrators to create dashboards that display common badge dashboards, no matter the context of the object.