Could we have a little more context?
The standard FAA answer is:
Ceiling means the height above the earth's surface of the lowest layer of clouds or obscuring phenomena that is reported as “broken”, “overcast”, or “obscuration”, and not classified as “thin” or “partial”.
However, the NWS no longer uses "thin" or "partial" to describe cloud layers. So any broken or overcast layer or how high up the VV is is your ceiling. You can't have a higher layer with less coverage than a lower layer, so if you have a broken layer with 6/8 coverage and a higher layer above, the higher layer will be coded as overcast even though it could only obscure 2/8.