VCF Operations policies: priority, inheritance and what they control

A policy is the set of rules VCF Operations uses to analyse and display data for the objects it is applied to; policies drive what you see in alerts, dashboards, views and reports.

What a policy controls

Policies are read-only towards the environment: they change how VCF Operations analyses objects, not the objects themselves.

Types of policy and inheritance

• Base Settings: the umbrella at the top of the policy library, made of the settings that installed adapters and solutions provide for all objects.
• Default Policy: inherits all base settings and applies to any object not covered by another policy. It is marked D in the priority column and always has the lowest priority. If you set a second policy as Default, it becomes the lowest priority and the earlier one moves to second lowest.
• Policies provided with VCF Operations: for example efficiency, health and risk alert policies and CPU and memory overcommit policies, usable as they are or as a starting point.
• Custom policies: created in Configurations > Policy Definition > Add, choosing a policy to Inherit From, then overriding the settings you need. You can also apply an additional policy to override some inherited settings.

Assignment and priority

• A policy is active only when it is assigned to an object or a custom group. Assign by dragging objects (optionally with child objects to a depth of up to 10) or custom groups onto the policy card.
• New objects automatically receive the policy of the group they belong to.
• Priorities are 1, 2, 3 and so on, with 1 the highest; reorder them with Reorder Policies (available only with more than one active policy).
• When several policies apply to an object, the highest-priority policy wins - except that a policy assigned directly to the object is enforced even if its priority is lower.
• After an upgrade, check new default settings (new alerts and symptoms); manually modified settings are kept.

Common trap: Assuming the policy with priority 1 always wins - a direct assignment of a lower-priority policy to an object overrides group-based assignments of higher-priority policies.

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