Before you can track data associated with the applications running in your environment, you must first define those applications and associate them with the appropriate assets. You can associate applications with the following assets: hosts, virtual machines, volumes, internal volumes, qtrees, shares, and hypervisors.

This topic provides an example of tracking the usage of virtual machines that the Marketing Team uses for its Exchange email.

You might want to create a table similar to the following to identify applications used in your environment and note the group or business unit using each applications.

The table shows that that Marketing Team uses the Exchange application. We want to track their virtual machine utilization for Exchange, so that we can predict when we will need to add more storage. We can associate the Exchange application with all of Marketing's virtual machines: