Yup, caisson is right. As long as the dots stay white, you are in an acceptable range. Try to keep them in an average size. If you exceed this, they first become yellow (warning) and then even red (alert).

Like caisson said, the outer rim is for specular light, the inner centre for diffuse light, because you can adjust those light components seperately in different ways.

However you must take care to put the meter close to the object, but not in it's shadow. Don't forget you can resize it, so for close distances just scale it down and for large landscape scenes place it where it is most important (or place even two or three of them anywhere) and scale it up so you can still see it in the render.

BB's Gamma Meter is also helpful, working the same way, but the outer rim indicates wether or not you have activated Gamma Coorection in render settings. A red rim indicates your render settings have GC active, a black rim tells you are rendering without GC activated.

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