A super metric is an administrator-created custom metric based on a mathematical formula, using existing metrics that can then be applied via a policy. A super metric can be derived from either a single object or multiple objects across multiple environments.

A super metric is usually defined when an administrator notices a gap in the available metrics on a given object. For example, an administrator notices high CPU ready value on a virtual machine, and is curious to know if it may be common across all VMs on the host or even the vSphere cluster. The administrator might check what the average CPU ready value is for all VMs across the cluster to see if this has changed recently or has progressively been getting worse.

Unfortunately, a suitable metric to perform this analysis is not available on a vSphere host or cluster (although other useful metrics may be available) and, therefore, the administrator is forced to look through several VMs individually...