Managing Objects in Your Environment

An object is the individual managed item in your environment for which VMware Aria Operations collects data, such as a router, switch, database, virtual machine, host, and vCenter Server instances.

The system requires specific information about each object. When you configure an adapter instance, VMware Aria Operations performs object discovery to start collecting data from the objects with which the adapter communicates.

An object can be a single entity, such as a database, or a container that holds other objects. For example, if you have multiple Web servers, you can define a single object for each Web server and define a separate container object to hold all of the Web server objects. Groups and applications are types of containers.

Categorize your objects using tags, so that you can easily find, group, or filter them later. A tag type can have multiple tag values. You or VMware Aria Operations assigns objects to tag values. When you select a tag value, VMware Aria Operations displays the objects associated with that tag. For example, if a tag type is Lifecycle and tag values are Development, Test, Pre-production, and Production, you might assign virtual machine objects VM1, VM2, or VM3 in your environment to one or more of these tag values, depending on the virtual machine function.