(Formerly vRealize Operations)
You may have heard that a few things around VMware have been changing lately (for example – the product name for this blog). And while change can be hard in some instances, we need to remember that innovation is impossible without change. I look forward to sharing our innovative new features with you as we introduce Aria Operations 8.10.
As I mentioned during our most recent Aria Operations release, SaaS releases will happen throughout the year, with on-premises receiving updates later in the year. That’s right – Aria Operations 8.10 will be available this fall, and because it’s VMware Explore time, we get to talk about everything that will be coming in the release.
Management Pack Builder
Earlier this spring we announced the beta program for the new Management Pack Builder. We had an overwhelming number of beta users (thank you!) and I am excited to announce that the general availability of the Management Pack Builder is coming soon for Aria Operations Advanced and Enterprise.
Management Pack Builder is a no-code solution to expand your operations visibility to anywhere you want to (given there is a rest API). That’s right, don’t know how to code? Not a problem. The management pack builder allows a user to connect to a data source using an HTTP or AWS data source, make API calls, create objects, and build out relationships to other objects in Aria Operations.
Run basic actions on public clouds
Next, I want to highlight a few features that were released for Aria Operations earlier this year, and now will be available for Aria Operations 8.10. We continue our expansion to public cloud by adding the capability to initiate an action automatically via the Aria Operations 8.10 UI for a specific AWS, Microsoft Azure or GCP CE instance. This enables cloud admins to have a single pane of glass where they can gain actionable insights to manage their distributed cloud infrastructure. You will now be able to Start, Stop, or Reboot VMs for all 3 native public clouds – for either single or multiple instances.
Rule based application discovery
Now you can easily discover multiple applications running in all or specific areas of infrastructure and view associated resources with simple user defined rules. Discover applications based on tags, properties, and object names.
Enhanced capacity planning
When you need to look to the future, you can give your crystal ball a rest with the ability to reserve resources for upcoming projects using ‘commit’, in tandem with what-if analysis for capacity planning. You’ll be able to view results of what-if analysis based on your allocation model and even specify business hours for capacity calculations.
Alerts
Last year, we introduced a new alerting component called Conditions. Unlike Symptoms which can be used across many alert definitions, Conditions are tied to a single definition. This may seem like a small distinction, but it is not without purpose. For example, say you have three teams responsible for vSphere cluster A, cluster B, and cluster C and each team should be notified if any of their hosts gets disconnected. In this case, you can create a symptom that will trigger an alert if a host gets disconnected from vCenter. You then create three alert definitions to notify either team A, team B, or team C depending on which host went down, and apply your new symptom to each. Later, the teams say they do not want to be notified if a host goes offline when it is in maintenance mode. No problem! Just update the symptom. This way, you only need to make the change once rather than updating each of the three alert definitions. On the other hand, if you are just creating a simple ad-hoc alert to let you know when one or more metrics go above a threshold you would use a condition. That way you do not clutter vROps with more symptoms and you can easily make modifications to your thresholds right within the alert definition itself. With this update in Aria Operations 8.10, we now apply this best practice to alerts created from within the Troubleshooting Workbench or an object’s metrics tab. Plus if you create an ad-hoc alert that uses the same metric as another, Aria Operations will prompt you to update the existing metric rather than creating duplicate alert definitions that could otherwise lead to unnecessary alert storms.
User Access Management
We have also improved how users and groups are configured in Aria Operations with the introduction of scopes. Scopes are a collection of objects that can be used as templates when assigning roles to users and groups. Previously, you would assign roles to specific objects for each user or group. However, there was not a good way to duplicate this across multiple users or groups. Now, for example, you can build out a scope for all your public clouds. When you create a new user or group, simply assign the access role to the scope rather than having to select each public cloud for every user.
Support for Raw Device Mapping Storage
Raw Device Mapping (RDM) allows virtual machines to access storage LUNs directly and can be useful in some situations such as clustered services where more than one virtual machine needs access to the storage device. Now, with Aria Operations, you’ll be able to get configuration details about your RDM’s such as compatibility mode, disk sharing, SCSI Bus Sharing, and the number of RDM’s associated with a VM.
Looking for more?
This blog is a highlight of the features released this quarter. For full details on the most recent Aria Operations release, be sure to check out the release notes. If you want to learn more about how Aria Operations can help you and your organization then head over to VMware Pathfinder. Request a trial of Aria Operations, engage in an Aria Operations hands on lab, or request a conversation with one of our experts today.
