Now it is time to start building your own super metrics, and we can walk through the process of doing so. The first step in designing and building a super metric is to have a clear use case or problem that you are trying to solve. In our example, an administrator is keen to know if the CPU percent ready (or CPU contention) is increasing on all VMs in a cluster as the amount of provisioned VMs increases. Because the administrator wants to know the maximum value of a metric that is present on all virtual machines, a rollup super metric is the most appropriate.

When creating rollup super metrics, understanding parent/child relationships is critical as it helps determine the depth of the looping algorithm that is being defined. The parent/child relationships can be seen in the All Metrics view, the relationship widget, and the object relationships section under administration. An example of these relationships is shown in the following image:

In our example, the...