Higher level here means data center, vCenter, and World objects. Measuring at this level is useful in a large environment where you have many clusters. In a small environment with fewer than five clusters, it makes more sense to manage at cluster level.

By now, we know that vCenter provides very little information at these levels. It does not provide information about CPU, RAM, disk, or network. vRealize Operations provides a set of key counters, which are useful in overall management. For example, the following 2 counters quickly tell us the state of CPU demand and contention for the entire infrastructure managed by a vCenter:

When looking at an object higher than the cluster level, there is no more automatic load balancing. If you have 10 clusters in a single vCenter data center, and the workload is not balanced among the 10 clusters, vSphere will not load balance for you. As a result, it makes more sense to capture peak by taking the highest value from the...