VCF Operations Improvements in VMware Aria Operations

With the April 2023 release of the VMware Aria Operations product for On-prem (v 8.12) as well as SaaS, we have made some improvements to the SDDC management pack together with the representation of VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) Operations in VMware Aria Operations.

What we have been able to bring to you the user -:

1. Users should be able to understand the availability of management applications of VCF. The list of management applications include:
   • SDDC applications: vCenter, NSX-T
   • VCF applications: SDDC manager, Aria Suite Lifecycle
   • VMware Aria applications: VMware Aria Operations, VMware Aria Automation etc.
2. For each management application, user has the ability to understand availability across the five dimensions:
   • Application availability
     • This is a simple ping test. Indicates if the app is up/down.
   • Services availability
     • Availability of constituent services of each application. Eg: Postgres, casa, NTP etc.
   • Appliance availability
     • Availability of the VMs that host the management applications.
   • Password availability
     • Availability of passwords associated with management applications.
   • Certificate availability
     • Availability of certificates associated with management applications.
3. For each application and for each availability dimension, users can configure an alert when the application availability is affected. For example:
   • vCenter application password is about to expire.
   • NSX-T application certificate has expired.
   • VMware Aria Automation application service availability is affected etc.

Note: 

VMware Aria Operations is collecting data from SOS utility, which is supported starting VCF 4.3.x. But VCF cloud account works for all VCF 4.x onwards.

In the Multi-cloud Overview select VMware Cloud Foundation as the cloud type to see the account overview details –

This page provides you a one stop page from where you can get a high level overview of current operations, assess cost, get an understanding of total cost of ownership, identify Capacity and Time remaining, understand the list of top objects in your VCF inventory.

In addition to this we also have a dedicated VCF Operations page under Environment to give you deep insights into your world of VCF Operations.

At a high level for each VCF Account configured this shows the availability of your applications, your virtual machines, services. It even shows you if any passwords or certificates have expired and last but not the least the active alerts in your VCF environment.

You can go a level deeper to the management domain and view the inventory of your virtual infrastructure showing details for applications, virtual machines, and services. It indicates the service or application name and if it’s Up or Down and a quick trend to indicate its recent availability, a huge win for infra-admins to ensure their SLA’s are being met. At the top it even shows you how many services are down out of a total number of services.

Next up are details of the workload domain(s) of your VCF account, where again it shows ​details for applications, virtual machines and services. It indicates the service or application name and if it’s Up or Down and a quick trend to indicate its recent availability.

If your VCF environment has multiple workload domains, those are also clearly represented showing details of each workload domain – Note: Colors are quick indicators of the health status of various infrastructure pieces.

And last but certainly not the least … we have a bold new look for VCF Compliance at a glance on the Optimize \ Compliance Page –

This VCF Compliance page explicitly reports the compliance score and associated details of VCF and its resources. The existing SDDC or vCenter page only reports non-VCF resources compliance reporting.

This feature will evolve in the future versions of the product in what it brings to you the consumer in terms of the functionality made available to you. So, 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 !