It’s that time again! It’s release time for VMware Aria Operations! This is always an invigorating time for us as we get to learn and play around with all new features. This release, as with others in the past, presents quite a few great innovations to what is already a product filled with a plethora of powerful ideas. We have new features for application monitoring, public cloud enhancements, capacity settings, and synthetic monitoring to name a few.
The January release of VMware Aria Operations brings an exciting new ingredient. We now have HA for application monitoring! If you are familiar with application monitoring using Telegraf in VMware Aria Operations, you already know that it is highly dependent on Cloud Proxies. Any data that is being collected from endpoints is pushed to VMware Aria Operations through these Cloud Proxies and application monitoring ARC adapters are the only adapters that can push data from endpoints (all other management packs use the pull method). Previously, these ARC adapters didn’t support collector groups and the Cloud Proxy was a single point of failure for application monitoring. If the Cloud Proxy fails, data from the endpoints wouldn’t reach VMware Aria Operations. We sought to reconcile this limitation. To address the challenge, we added support for application monitoring through Collector Groups so that if one Cloud Proxy should fail, metrics can still flow from another Cloud Proxy in the Collector Group making this feature highly available. For more information on highly available application monitoring, check out this blog.
The July release of VMware Aria Operations gave us the ability to start, stop, or reboot our EC2 instances, CE instances and Azure Virtual Machines. In addition to scheduling actions to delete old snapshots, delete or power off idle VM’s, delete powered off VM’s and scale up or down undersized or oversized respectively, we can now schedule actions on our public cloud compute resources in Automation Central within VMware Aria Operations! Under “Additional Actions”, we can choose our adapter from vCenter, AWS, GCP, or Microsoft Azure. From there we can choose either EC2 instance, CE instance, or Azure Virtual Machine respectively and choose to power off, power on, or reboot the instance.
We have also cleaned up the UX for selecting the scope of the job to be scheduled and added the ability to expand or limit the scope to custom groups, custom datacenters, and business applications.
This most recent release brought us some new metrics and properties for Synthetic Monitoring in VMware Aria Operations, specifically at the business application level. Metrics aggregated to average at the business application level are Average Response Time, Average Content Transfer, Average DNS Lookup, Average Server Processing, Average TCP Connection, and Average TLS Handshake. The properties that have been added for synthetic monitoring that roll up to the instance level are API endpoint, Request type, synthetic monitoring activated (true/false) and synthetic monitoring configured (true/false).
The next new feature to talk about is the Oracle Cloud VMware Solution (OCVS). This fully customer-managed solution now has a simplified, dedicated cloud account to better discover Oracle Cloud VMware Solution SDDCs and configure the adapters to monitor vCenter, vSAN and NSX-T.
You can also:
- Traverse Oracle Cloud VMware Solution objects, view summary pages, configuration maximums and get alerts for configuration maximums.
- Plan workload migration using the What-if migration scenarios to migrate workloads to the Oracle Cloud VMware Solution.
- Run compliance analysis for vCenter Objects such as hosts and virtual machines against various benchmarks and review cost based on rate card costing.
- Optimize and rightsize workloads.
For more detailed information on the latest release for OCVS, see this blog post.
The last feature to talk about is new granular settings for the Conservative risk level. There is a new setting for capacity projections to control the conservativeness strength level when the time remaining risk level is set to conservative. The conservativeness strength can be configured from levels 1 to 5, where level 1 is the least conservative and level 5 is the most conservative. Conservativeness strength level 3 is the default, which behaves the same as the conservative risk level in previous releases. If you feel that the capacity projections don’t account for enough of the historical demand, you can increase the conservativeness level to 4 or 5. For less critical environments, such as development or test, you can lower the conservativeness level to 1 or 2 where more risk can be tolerated.
That wraps it up for the January release of VMware Aria Operations. We hope these new facets can help everyone maintain a solid infrastructure and keep VMware Aria Operations at the forefront of your monitoring needs. Be sure to check out the Release Notes for information on this and other past releases.
