A Target is a resource or workload management service in your virtual environment that you have connected to Turbonomic. For example, a public cloud account on AWS (Amazon Web Services) can be a target, as can an on-prem datacenter managed by VMware vCenter Server.
For each target that you configure, Turbonomic communicates with the service via the management protocol that it exposes — a REST API, SMI-S, XML, or some other management transport. Turbonomic uses this communication to discover the managed entities, monitor resource utilization, and execute actions.