Creating Relative Metrics in Aria Operations to Track Growth

One of the more common challenges my clients encounter in Aria Operations is creating time relative metrics. What do I mean by time relative metrics? I'll give you an example to explain: I recently had a customer who was trying to calculate drive space usage growth. They wanted to take a data point, y - storage usage %, and then compare that to the prior data point, x storage usage %. A simple y-x formula would show any positive or negative growth. This concept could then be scaled out to show changes over any time range, whether it was two data points 20 seconds apart or twenty weeks apart.

My first instinct when I encountered this problem was to use supermetrics. After banging my head against the supermetrics wall for half a day, I realized the secret was not in supermetrics, but rather you could do the desired growth calculations natively in Views; the secret: expressions!

In the View, under Data, select the subject (object) that you want to calculate growth against. In this case I selected datastore as the base object and Capacity | Used Space (GB) as the base metric. Under Configuration > Transformation > select Expression. Here you can do mathematical operations using relative data points (i.e first, last, current, max, min, etc.). I choose to use: current-first

To ensure a proper preview, move on to the Time Settings tab and set the time range to be the past 90 days.

I have also attached the view that I created for reference. (Please also note that you can add color bounds which might also help emphasize significant growth!). 

I found this blog article to be uniquely helpful: https://veducate.co.uk/vrops-dashboard-vm-growth/ Hope this helps!!