VMware Aria Operations shows the relationship between objects in your environment. Most relationships are automatically formed when the objects are discovered by an installed adapter. In addition, you can use VMware Aria Operations to create relationships between objects that might not normally be related.

Objects are related physically, logically, or structurally.

  • Physical relationships represent how objects connect in the physical world. For example, virtual machines running on a host are physically related.
  • Logical relationships represent business silos. For example, all the storage objects in an environment are related to one another.
  • Structural relationships represent a business value. For example, all the virtual machines that support a database are structurally related.
Solutions use adapters to monitor the objects in your environment so that physical relationship changes are reflected in VMware Aria Operations . To maintain logical or structural relationships, you can use VMware Aria Operations to define the object relationships. When objects are related, a problem with one object appears as an influence on related objects. So object relationships can help you to identify problems in your environment quickly.

Apart from the parent-child relationship, you can also define new relationships in VMware Aria Operations . The relationship between objects in your environment can be one-to-many, many-to-one, or one-one, the relationship can be defined in horizontal , vertical, or diagonal levels.