With the April 2023 release of the VMware Aria Operations product for On-prem (v8.12) as well as SaaS, we have made a few bold changes to the look and feel of VMware Aria Operations. We hope to effectively showcase the power of VMware Aria Operations from a truly multi-cloud perspective rather than being thought of as just a product to monitor VMware. With the new Launchpad overview we have constructively represented all the pillars of monitoring on the Launchpad giving the administrator and the CIO’s a wholistic view of their infrastructure –
- The product is laid out such that you need not be too technical if you want a view of your infrastructure components
- Or you could dig in to the rich feature set and truly perform your infra admin tasks by getting into the nuts and bolts of your infrastructure
I am not being modest when I say our transformation has been striking not to mention eye-catching yet very very functional, here is the before and after:
To this with this latest release:
The major highlights of this feature are:
- Really easy to get to the major pillars of operations and its highlights.
- Learn more banner at top of each page that provides more information about the Page and if there is any pre-configuration required.
- Some cards have Learn MORE that provides contextual information about the specific card.
- Quick access to overview of all cloud types including but not limited to AWS, Azure, VMC, AVS, GCVE in addition to the vCenter on-prem SDDC clouds.
- Easy access to information about the Business Applications configured or configure a new one.
- One click access to Integrations, developer center, Repository and Automation Central.
- Quick indicators of new features with the New Flags and much more
Has this got you excited! Let’s take a look at how to use this feature most productively:
When you login to the VMware Aria Operations product, you will land on the new Launchpad UI, right next to it is the tab for the Multi-cloud Overview( topic for another blog … stay tuned).The very first set of the top horizontal cards represents the different pillars of Operations in VMware Aria Operations and allows you to monitor and manage these pillars be it Capacity, Cost, Observability, Compliance or Sustainability… woohoo they are all on one page and you don’t have to click around trying to find a quick overview of the details of that pillar!! A huge win … The next set of Applications cards allow you to manage and monitor your business-critical applications, followed by a set of Infrastructure cards which help you too get a quick look at all the details of the different areas of your infrastructure components, like vSphere or VSAN, NSX etc.
If VMware infrastructure monitoring is not what you are looking to do, then the next set of cards allow you to monitor and manage the different flavors of VMware clouds or NPC’s you might have in your environment.
For example – From VMW cloud infrastructure category, let’s check VMware Cloud on AWS.
This page provides you a one stop page from where you can launch into key IT operations management areas to manage VMware Cloud on AWS infrastructure. You can get a high level overview of current operations, assess cost, get an understanding of total cost of ownership, identify opportunities for potential future cost savings, understand compliance of virtual machines according to regulatory benchmarks.
You can view the inventory of your virtual infrastructure showing inventory details for clusters, hosts, virtual machines and datastores, configuration of resource providers (clusters) and resource consumers (virtual machines), manage capacity from the top level SDDC object all the way to virtual machine objects, fine tune performance of key objects based on current CPU, memory, network and storage performance of SDDC and its child objects, get an overview of the vSAN performance, capacity and configuration details, and monitor all the NSX-T resources.
You can also view the current set of configuration maximums and any alerts that have been triggered and take actions to adjust your infrastructure to stay within the recommended configuration maximum limits, observe the health of your management VMs such as vCenter, NSX-T, etc, Understand outstanding expense, total expense, commit expense and on-demand expense trend from your VMC on AWS bills, understand VM cost distribution based on custom grouping definition (cost for the provider), and VM pricing distribution based on custom grouping definition (Price charged to the consumer).
The last set of cards on the new Launchpad of VMware Aria Operations, allows you to get to Automation Central, Manage Outbound Plugins, Content Repository or Developer Central with a click or two without having to figure your way around the UI.
Special praise and mention to the engineering and UX teams as they have laid out the different parts of everything you need to monitor about your infrastructure components in a very clear and systematic way in the form of the overview of your different pillars. Everything you need to know about your infrastructure is neatly laid out and very handy to get to without having to click around much.
A couple of other fantastic features that get a special mention is the Cost Overview from the Cost card or under Plan \ Cost shows a similar view like the multi-cloud overview page, thus allowing you checkout your Total Cost of Ownership for your different cloud environments at a glance!
And the other feature/ enhancement I’d like to call out is the new Sustainability view right from the Launchpad. This is what it looked like in the older versions –
And this is the new look –
Note: In the past releases the pillars of operations that the cards on the Launchpad point to were distributed all over the place and did not allow the administrator to get quick access to their infrastructure components … with this release you can …. and all without creating a lot of dashboards or views to manage and monitor your cloud infrastructure details. The Launchpad is bubbled up to all users of VMware Aria Operations that have the Launchpad page permissions assigned to their role. We have always had permissions for the Quickstart page and the Home page, which have now been enhanced into the Launchpad Page.
This feature will evolve in the future versions of the product in its breadth and depth of the functionality made available to you. Your valuable feedback will help shape the look and feel and functionality of this feature, we therefore encourage you to give this feature a try and report your feedback via any of the official channels! You can try the product or Hands-on-Labs here or You can also learn more about other VMware Aria Operations features on TechZone !
