Earlier this year, VMware updated its VMware Aria Operations Cloud virtual infrastructure management and monitoring solution with some useful new enterprise-level capabilities. In April of this year, an updated premium version of this product was also released – VMware Aria Operations 8.12. Let’s see what’s new in it:
New Launchpad
Let’s start with the new VMware Aria Operations interface, a redesigned Launchpad (formerly Quickstart) page that provides better multi-cloud management. Now you can quickly delve into any area of data presentation. For example, if you are looking at your current capacities and resources, you can click on the relevant card and you will be redirected to the Capacity page, where you can evaluate your current capacities, optimize your infrastructure, or plan for your future needs for new equipment.
Change product name from vRealize to Aria
You may have noticed in the screenshot above that the product name has officially changed from vRealize Operations to VMware Aria Operations. All interface elements now contain only Aria labels, so the vRealize name is now gone from both the cloud and on-premium versions.
Sustainability features
The VMware Green Score is a metric organizations can use to track their progress towards sustainability over time. It gives insight into how green a data center is and how it can be optimized even more. This metric (higher is greener) measures energy consumption, carbon footprint and environmental impact to determine how sustainability goals can be improved. The Green Score is calculated as follows:
- Workload Efficiency – 22.5% weight in Greenscore calculation
- EffIciency = Wastage / (Wastage + Non Wastage)
- Resource usage – makes up 12.5% of the weight in the Greenscore calculation
- Virtualization – makes up 15% of the weight in the Greenscore calculation
- Power Source – makes up 37.5% of the weight in the Greenscore calculation
For Green Score, 15 new metrics have been added that cover workload efficiency, CO2 emissions, energy usage and equipment efficiency.
High availability for application monitoring using Telegraf
A new high availability option for application monitoring using Telegraf was also introduced. Previously, the only option was to collect data from endpoints and pass it to VMware Aria Operations through a single cloud proxy connected to that endpoint. There is now an option to select a new option that allows you to select collector groups – this way if one cloud proxy in a group goes down, your application’s monitoring data can still flow through another cloud proxy in that group.
A new high availability option for application monitoring using Telegraf was also introduced. Previously, the only option was to collect data from endpoints and pass it to VMware Aria Operations through a single cloud proxy connected to that endpoint. There is now an option to select a new option that allows you to select collector groups – this way if one cloud proxy in a group goes down, your application’s monitoring data can still flow through another cloud proxy in that group.
VMware Cloud Foundation Operations
The latest release of VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) can be deployed as part of a native cloud account. Now that the VCF implementation process has been simplified, VMware has made a native page in VMware Aria Operations that evaluates the overall health of your VCF accounts and domains. From this page, you can identify availability and performance issues by browsing workloads and VCF management domains and going to management servers (in the case of management domain only) and specific compute and storage clusters to find and fix the problem.
Integrating VMware Aria Operations with VMware Aria Operations for Logs
VMware continues to develop ways to integrate tools that increase monitoring depth and data context. Log analytics is an important capability of IT operations, which is why VMware implements these views in the same interface with the same UX in on-prem and SaaS deployments. You can see in the picture below that you can view the logs right in VMware Aria Operations. You can also create custom log dashboards in VMware Aria Operations.
You can also select an object in VMware Aria Operations and view the logs associated with it by selecting the new Logs tab.
Multicloud Operations Dashboard
In the image below, you can see the new page for multi-cloud operations, which lists all VMware cloud platforms and public cloud services that you can monitor. Depending on which cloud account you click on, you’ll be able to see a summary view of what’s going on with the root objects associated with that cloud.
For VMware Cloud accounts, you’ll see summary information that displays capacities and costs under the top-level object map.
There is also a separate page dedicated to the Total Cost of Ownership, where there is information about capacities, cost items and data centers:
Also, if you use one of the VMware Cloud solutions, you can read about its benefits, create an account there and go through the steps to set it up:
For public cloud accounts, you can see the locations you use, the main services in them, as well as their growth trend and the number of alerts that are triggered there:
New granularity settings for conservative risk level
The last feature worth mentioning is the new granularity settings for the conservative risk level. There is now a new setting for risk assessment when predicting capacities when the risk level is set to conservative. The strength of conservativeness can be adjusted in levels from 1 to 5, where level 1 is the least conservative and level 5 is the most conservative. Conservative strength level 3 is the default level, which works the same as the conservative risk level in previous versions. If you think capacity forecasting does not take into account enough historical data, you can increase the conservativeness level to 4 or 5. For less critical environments, such as development or testing, you can decrease the conservativeness level to 1 or 2, where more risk can be afforded. .
Management Pack Builder 1.1
Last fall, VMware released Aria Management Pack Builder as a no-code solution that makes it easy to create your own custom extension packs to get data into VMware Aria Operations. The latest release introduces an improved user interface and easier control over the design of your packages. Now you can also add your own content with dashboards and super metrics.
Search for metrics
You can now start your search with metrics or feature types, and then use search queries to add conditions using multiple metrics. The search results page has also been updated to allow you to explore the metric in depth or go directly to the VM for troubleshooting.
Alert improvements
The VMware team did an extensive analysis looking at all types of notifications to understand how to reduce noise and put more emphasis on the notifications you need to focus on. With this improvement, the team was able to remove over 30% of notifications causing noise. Now you can also group your notifications so you only see what’s important to you.
Dashboard sharing and group editing
Quite a long time ago it was possible to share toolbars by sending links within your organization. But it’s now easier to create groups and grant editing privileges to those groups or individuals. So, if you have dashboards that you would like the development team to be able to see and edit, you can put them in a group and assign them permissions for specific objects.
Automation Central improvements
You now have the ability to select a specific snapshot based on name and size to delete as part of a scheduled task in Automation Central.
Support for advanced authentication mechanisms for the Webhook plugin
VMware has expanded the webhook plugin authentication types, now supported: Basic authentication, OAuth 2.0, Bearer token, client certificate and API key. Once created, the credential lifecycle will be managed by VMware Aria Operations for applicable credential types. For example, VMware Aria Operations will continuously refresh the token in the case of an OAuth 2.0 credential type.
Simplified UX for collector groups and cloud proxies
Simplified UX for collector groups and cloud proxies
- Move collector groups to a new tab next to cloud proxies in data sources for consistency
- Added a Collector Group column to the table for easy filtering and sorting along with individual cloud proxies
- Easier editing and detail viewing, showing Cloud Proxy and Collector Group details in the right pane
- Additional statuses for high availability collector group configuration for easier troubleshooting
VMware Cloud Cost Analysis Features
VMware Cloud Cost Analysis Features
Google Cloud VMware Engine
Google Cloud VMware Engine (GCVE) is evolving and is now easier than ever to use. GCVE is available in 15 regions and will continue to grow. This update introduces a simplified process for pairing VMware Aria Operations with GCVE, with the ability to add a dedicated cloud account that uses a project ID, which means you will have unique IDs for all of your projects in GCVE. With these new capabilities, you can automatically discover new SDDCs and add them to VMware Aria Operations for easy monitoring.
In addition, you can now view costing per GCVE account and view cost metrics at the project level, giving you detailed insights into the specific projects you run in GCVE. This is all available for an account managing multiple GCVE SDDCs including vCenter, vSAN, and NSX.
Horizon infrastructure monitoring
With the increase in the number of instant clones used in the Horizon environment, many users are experiencing problems due to the large number of created virtual machines as monitoring objects for VMware Aria Operations. VMware has added a property to VMware Aria Operations that will allow you to determine if an object is an instant clone or not. A hidden global parameter has also been added to specify the retention period for instant VM clones. If you do not set a retention period for instant VM clones, they will be treated as regular objects.
19.Horizon Management Pack
Cost and cost metrics have been added for the following items in Horizon:
- VDI Pool
- RDS Farm
- VDI Desktop Session
- VDI App Session
- RDS Host
- User
Load Placement Improvements
Many users work on distributed networks, which can make it difficult to place workloads. A policy has now been added that requires target network parameters as a criterion for load optimization. To enable this feature, select Configure > Policies and select “Generate a Target Network mapping”.
Вторая функция – это поддержка allocation-модели в WLP. Это позволит избежать перегрузки выделения ресурсов кластеров после WLP.
“What-if” scripting improvements
The first update for “What-if” scripts is the ability to run legacy scripts, eliminating the need to manually update the start date for frequently run scripts. Keep in mind that although the start date may be in the past, the end date must be current. The second update is that you can now run what-if scripts with up to 100 custom virtual machine (VM) profiles. This way, if you have custom profiles, you can easily assign a profile instead of individual VMs.
Data Persistence for Cloud Proxy
All metrics data received from the vCenter CP will be retained during the outage. The saved data will be transferred to the vROps objects when the connection is restored, and the gaps will be filled with the saved data for all metrics of the vROps objects, including super metrics.
You can read more about the new features in VMware Aria Operations 8.12 in the Release Notes. A trial version of this product can be downloaded from this link.
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