An Operations Manager 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. It provides a summarized piece of useful information that would sometimes take an administrator hours or even days to collocate manually in the vSphere Performance Overview tab or a similar monitoring system.

Badges are seen as an important source of information rather than just data. If at anytime 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...