Today marks major milestone, the general availability of vRealize Operations 8.1. Every release gets better and better, and this release won’t let you down. There are so many features in this release, that I would like give you some highlights of a few of them.
Support for vSphere 7.0 with Kubernetes
I’m sure you’ve heard of vSphere 7.0 with Kubernetes. In vRealize Operations 8.1, you get visibility into the new vSphere with Kubernetes constructs. This awareness gives you the ability to troubleshoot, manage capacity, manage drift, reduce risk, and more for your Supervisor Clusters, Namespaces, vSphere Pods, and Tanzu Kubernetes Clusters.
Alert Importance
The alert importance feature is a new AI powered feature that helps identify the most important alerts to investigate first. One dimension is uses is the rarity of the alert. The rarer the alert is in your environment, the more important vRealize Operations considers the alert. Another dimension is access frequency of the object. That means the system things the objects you look at the most are the most important objects. As you can see in the screenshot, the alerts are ranked by their importance as determined by the system.
Simplified Alert Creation
Creating alerts has never been easier. The new alert creation wizard guides you through creating a new alert along with the symptoms, recommendations, policy association, and notifications in a single flow. 
Slack Integration
Speaking of alert notification, you can now send alert notifications to Slack. Slack is a great tool to collaborate on troubleshooting alerts, and what better way than to start from the alert details sent right to a Slack channel?
Logs as Metrics
Yes, you read that right. Logs as metrics from vRealize Log Insight 8.1 are available. You can read more about the new exciting features, including logs as metrics, here.
vRealize Network Insight Integration
Do you have both vRealize Operations and vRealize Network Insight? If so, you must check out the new management pack. This management pack integrates the alerts from vRealize Network Insight with the related NSX-V and NSX-T objects in vRealize Operations. This gives you additional network visibility in the AI powered Troubleshooting Workbench. If you find an object that you need to investigate, actions to launch vRealize Network Insight in context will take you directly to the object in vRealize Network Insight to continue troubleshooting the network.
Efficient Capacity and Cost Management
New cost reports are available out of the box. The Virtual Machine Cost Report is a popular one for creating showback reports. You can run it against your entire environment to see the cost of all of your VMs, or you can run it on more granular objects (e.g. VM Folder, Custom Group, Resource Pool, etc.) to get a showback report for a group of virtual machines.
Rate Card based Pricing
Not only does vRealize Operations calculate the cost of your VMs, but if you have vRealize Automation 8.1, you can now use vRealize Operations to calculate the price of your VMs. The easiest way to understand the difference between cost and price is to think of cost as how much you spent to run a VM and price is how much you charge the VM owner for running their VM. It’s up to you if you want to set the price based on cost or define your own pricing structure. If you want to read more about VM pricing, check out this blog post.
VMware Cloud on AWS
VMware Cloud on AWS is available as a native Cloud Account type. What this means is that once you provide a Cloud Services Portal API Token, the wizard will automatically discover your SDDCs and walk you through configuring vCenter, NSX-T, vSAN, and Service Discovery for each discovered SDDC. Yes, you read that right, you can monitor NSX-T in VMware Cloud on AWS now too.
Once you have your VMC Cloud Account added, you will see brand new VMC specific dashboards, which include monitoring the management VMs and the cost of your environment from the invoices available in the CSP portal. Don’t forget that vRealize Operations treats VMC as though it’s another vCenter, so all the pages, dashboards, and reports you use today for your on-premises vCenter applies to VMC as well.
Google Cloud
In addition to the native support for AWS and Azure this release adds support for Google Cloud. You can download the management pack from Solution Exchange. With this new management pack you can create true multi-cloud monitoring dashboards across all your clouds, from vSphere to VMC, AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud.
CloudHealth
If you’re a CloudHealth customer, the Mangagement Pack for CloudHealth includes support for perspectives will make monitoring your costs even easier in vRealize Operations. This is a great companion to our new Management Pack for Google Cloud, because support for Google Cloud costs is now available. This is in addition to the existing support for AWS and Azure costs.
There are many more great features in this release. Be sure to stay tuned here as we’ll have even more blogs about vRealize Operations 8.1 coming soon. As with any new release, please be sure to read the Release Notes. If you don’t have vRealize Operations today, be sure to download a trial of vRealize Operations and try it in your own environment! You can find more demos and videos on vrealize.vmware.com.
