*Formerly vRealize Operations
I am very excited to announce several updates for VMware Aria Operations. We’ll be talking about updates that range from improved search experience, Microsoft Azure Government subscription operations, cloud proxy CLI updates, and much, much more. In fact, there are so many new announcements that we will be following up with deep-dive blogs for some of these topics to give you the full technical details. These new features have been released to all customers running VMware Aria Operations deployed as SaaS on July 3. To find out more about how you can make the switch to SaaS, talk to your VMware representative today.
Microsoft Azure Government
This feature has been targeted primarily for US Government agencies and their partners and offers IaaS, Paas, and SaaS services. This feature allows for physically isolated data centers and networks located in the US only and meets government security and compliance standards. Note: Support for Azure Government Secret is not available at this time.
- Support for Azure Government subscriptions.
- Support for 5 regions:
- US Gov Arizona
- US Gov Texas
- US Gov Central
- US Gov Virginia
- US Gov East
- Support for 5 regions:
- Subscriptions are managed through the native Microsoft Azure integration.
- Choose between commercial or government subscriptions with the respective services and regions.
- If you use commercial subscriptions, you can leverage dashboards, alerts, and content available for commercial subscriptions and use them for government subscriptions without any additional configurations.
Azure Dashboards
Cloud Proxy Command Line Interface
Cloud Proxy command line interface is enhanced to include connectivity checks. It includes capabilities to perform connectivity checks to predetermined end points such as Gateway, S3, and cluster nodes depending on whether the cluster is on-prem or SaaS. It also includes capabilities to check the trace route and view the environment details. VMware Aria Operations also has a background job that runs to check for the connectivity of these end points.
For more details, see Using the Cloud Proxy Command-Line Interface.
Notification Heartbeat
Notification heartbeat allows you to leverage the Notification Rules to resend active alerts to desired endpoints repeatedly as long as they remain active. By default, this checkbox is not selected. Once this option is set the system constantly evaluates the status of the alerts that match the notification rule.
Note: Setting this option to Active can cause a potential surge in the notifications that are generated.
For more information, see Notification Rule.
Metric search in Troubleshooting Workbench
- Enhanced capability to search for objects using queries.
- Use metrics, properties, or super metrics associated with object types.
- Add conditions using multiple metrics and conditions.
- Auto-complete options to help build queries and learn the syntax quickly.
- Automatic syntax checks of the query to help guide you to build the correct query.
- New page for search results:
- Deep dive into the metric
- Perform roll-ups
- Launch the Troubleshooting Workbench
- Filter search results to help you narrow down the search results.
- Search is saved automatically for the session duration as a tile on the troubleshooting workbench.
For more information, see Discovering Potential Evidences Using the Troubleshooting Workbench.
Compliance Pack Upgrades
- CIS Compliance Pack is updated to support the following benchmarks:
- CIS_VMware_ESXi_6.7_Benchmark_V1.3.0
- CIS_VMware_ESXi_7.0_Benchmark_V1.2.0
- We also now have version specific alert definitions.
- NSX-T Compliance pack is updated to support the following standards:
- NSX-T 3.2 Security Configuration Guide
- NSX-T 3.1 Security Configuration Guide
- NSX-T 3.0 Security Configuration Guide
- Updated alert definitions for automated compliance assessments.
Launchpad
The Learn More action on some cards now have a video to explain the feature.
New Availability Metric for Application Monitoring Objects
A new metric called ‘Telegraf availability’ is added for Application Monitoring objects to understand whether data is being received from the Telegraf agent. It is applicable for both curated and open source Telegraf agents. For more information, see Operating System Metrics.
PowerShell Scripts Collect Data for Credential-less Service Discovery
Service Discovery will now leverage PowerShell scripts to collect data from Windows VMs in credential-less scenarios.
Platform Safeguards
And last but not the least VMware Aria Operations has added built-in safeguards to the product to monitor changes to Management Pack metrics or properties where frequent changes to a metric string value or a property value are observed they are reported as a Platform Safeguard alert. Note: In the current release this has to be enabled by the administrator, but that could change to being enabled by default in future releases.
Looking for more?
This blog is a highlight of the features released this quarter. For full details on this exciting new release, be sure to check out the release notes. If you want to learn more about how VMware Aria Operations can help you and your organization then head over to VMware Tech Zone. Request a trial of VMware Aria Operations, engage in a VMware Aria Operations Cloud hands on lab, or request a conversation with one of our experts today.
