Working with Heat Maps

With the VMware Aria Operations heat map feature, you can locate trouble areas based on the metric values for objects in your virtual infrastructure. VMware Aria Operations uses analytics algorithms that you can use to compare the performance of objects across the virtual infrastructure in production using heat maps.

You can use predefined heat maps or create your own custom heat maps to compare the metric values of objects in your virtual environment. VMware Aria Operations has predefined heat maps on the Details tab that you can use to compare commonly used metrics. You can use this data to plan to reduce waste and increase capacity in the virtual infrastructure.

What a Heat Map Shows

A heat map contains rectangles of different sizes and colors, and each rectangle represents an object in your virtual environment. The color of the rectangle represents the value of one metric, and the size of the rectangle represents the value of another metric. For example, one heat map shows the total memory and percentage of memory use for each virtual machine. Larger rectangles are virtual machines with more total memory, green indicates low memory use, and red indicates high use.

VMware Aria Operations updates the heat maps automatically as new values are collected for each object and metric. The colored bar below the heat map is the legend. The legend identifies the values that the endpoints represent and the midpoint of the color range.

Heat map objects group by parent. For example, a heat map that shows virtual machine performance, groups the virtual machines by the ESX hosts on which they run.