New Features with the Latest 8.18 Release of Aria Operations

by · 09/09/2024

As most of you know that Aria Operations (previously known as vRealize Operations) has been a great tool for Capacity Monitoring, Rightsizing, Reclaim, Cost, and etc. Today I just wanted to put some of great features that released with the latest version. I’ll put most important ones below and I’ll create separate blogposts about them in the near feature.

Remote Collectors

Cloud proxies have been established as a long-term solution for data collection. In future releases, the introduction of new features will be exclusively limited to cloud proxies, if relevant. The announcement regarding the expiration of support for remote collectors and the prohibition of deploying new remote collectors has already been added in the 8.10 Release notes and accompanying documentation.

VMware Aria Operations 8.14 is the last release supporting remote collectors. In the 8.16 and later releases, upgrades will not be allowed if there are remote collectors in use. To upgrade to the next version or a later one, it is imperative to replace all remote collectors with cloud proxies.

Complete the following steps:

  • If you are using a collector group, you must add new cloud proxies to it and remove the remote collectors.
  • It is recommended that if you are not already using a collector group, create a new collector group and deploy cloud proxies into it. Reassign all adapter instances that were previously associated with remote collectors to the collector groups and remove the remote collectors.

Deprecation of the XML Media Type from VMware Aria Operations REST APIs

The current REST APIs in VMware Aria Operations 8.18 support both JSON and XML types. In the next major release, new APIs or new functionalities of existing APIs will not support the XML type and will support only JSON. It is recommended that you use JSON for data interchange. However, support for the XML type in all existing APIs will continue.

vRealize Application Remote Collector

vRealize Application Remote Collector is not supported from vRealize Operations 8.10 and above. Migrate all Telegraf end points to cloud proxy before upgrading to vRealize Operations 8.10 and above. For information about migrating from vRealize Application Remote Collector to cloud proxy, see KB 83059.

VMware Cloud

  • The VMware Cloud on Dell EMC adapter has been deprecated from VMware Aria Ops 8.18. As a result, the current deployment might not work.

Key Features and Capabilities

Advanced Navigation Menu

  • The new navigation focuses on jobs to be done and introduces the VMware Cloud Foundation stack management features like certificate updates, configuration drifts, and diagnostics.
  • The Overview tab on the homepage provides VMware Cloud Foundation stack management and monitoring capabilities. For more information, see Monitoring Multiple Cloud Accounts.

Diagnostics for VMware Cloud Foundation

  • Diagnostics Findings
    • Ability to gain insights into known issues impacting VMware software. This includes the following:
      • vCenter, ESXi host, vSAN, NSX, SDDC manager, and VMware Aria Automation
      • vMotion, Snapshots, Workload provisioning, HA, and DRS
    • Ability to view objects impacted by known issues along with remediation steps based on KB articles.
  • Health Monitoring
    • Ability to gain insights into the operational state of key VMware Cloud Foundation use cases to determine whether they are working as desired. This provides an in-depth view of individual operations along with success and failure status. This includes:
      • vMotion, Snapshots, and Workload Provisioning.

For more information, see What is Diagnostics.

Configuration Drifts for vCenters

  • Ability to derive desired configurations for vCenter using a golden standard vCenter that is configured with the required settings. 
  • Ability to associate these desired configurations with vCenters across the environment. 
  • Ability to check for drifts against the desired state and view a drift report across all vCenters connected to the VMware Cloud Foundation admin console.
  • Support for on demand drift detection. 

For more information, see Managing Your Environment Configurations.

Single Sign-On (SSO) for VMware vSphere Foundation

  • VMware vCenter can be used as a VMware SSO provider.
  • Support for users and groups imports from the SSO identity provider.

For more information, see Configure VMware Single-Sign On.

License Management and Consumption

  • Ability to manage VMware Cloud Foundation and VMware vSphere Foundation licenses by adding them in VMware Aria Operations.
  • Ability to access consumption for all your licenses across multiple vCenters from a single pane of glass. 
  • Existing VMware Aria Operations licensing has been moved under Legacy Licensing. 

For more information, see About Licenses, Managing Licenses, and License Usage Analytics.

Certificate Management

  • Fleet management of all VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) Component Certificates
    • Introduction of centralized certificate management to monitor certificates across all VMware Cloud Foundation components.
  • Certificate Inventory Display
    • Ability to obtain information of certificates from the VMware Cloud Foundation infrastructure from status as well as appliance perspectives.

For more information, see Monitoring VMware Cloud Foundation Certificates.

Audit Events

  • Introduction of a new framework that provides improved transparency, control, and accountability across your vCenter resources including vSphere, vSAN, and NSX. Improved monitoring to aide overall security, compliance, and operational effectiveness.
  • Ability to view audit information for your vCenter resources by leveraging the rich integration capabilities of VMware Aria Operations and VMware Aria Operations for Logs.
  • Efficiently reduces audit cycles by helping scout through historic audit data present in VMware Aria Operations for Logs.
  • Carefully curated audit information to report authentication, authorization, and security based audit events. 

For more information, see Viewing and Configuring Audit Events.

Inventory Experience

  • Simplified user experience to support viewing of inventory from the following perspectives:
    • Compute, Storage, and Network
    • Management Pack integrations
    • Logical Groups: Custom groups, Custom Data Center, and Business Applications
  • The following sections of the Inventory UI have been deprecated:
    • Details > Workload
    • Details > Heat maps
    • Reports > Report templates
    • Reports > Generated reports
    • Environment > Overview
    • Environment
    • Reports

For more information, see Inventory Page and Inventory Detailed View, Inventory: List of Objects, and Topology.

Alerts Noise Reduction

  • 20-second peak metric
    • A set of VM level metrics providing 20-second granularity without consuming 15x the data storage. The peak metrics report the highest 20-second period within the 5-minute internal. 
    • The metrics are enabled out-of-the-box. They are also used in both alerts and dashboards, giving 15x sharper visibility compared to the 5-minute average. 
  • Alerts
    • Major improvements in alerts, resulting in less noise while providing more coverage. Less noise is achieved via sharper conditions. More coverage on new areas such as Guest OS and Resource Pool.
    • Easier to see the big picture, via consistent alert naming conventions and consistency in alert conditions.
    • Alerts are no longer the start of operations. Use the NOC dashboard, the Daily Check dashboard, and the Quarterly Performance Profiling dashboard to prevent alerts in the first place. 
  • NOC Dashboards
    • The vSphere VM Changes dashboard is a new dashboard that tracks changes in VM inventory, location, and state. For more information, see the vSphere VM Inventory Dashboard.
    • The vSphere Cluster Performance dashboard, the vSphere Cluster Utilization dashboard, and the vSphere Heavy Hitters VM dashboard are updated dashboards that provide better visibility with 20-second peak metrics and richer interaction.
  • Proactive Daily Check dashboard
    • Use the vSphere Daily Check dashboard to gain insights into the environment, with the goal of preventing alerts during the day. Ensure the numbers shown are well within expectation of that day, matching the recent change requests and business workloads. For more information, see the vSphere Daily Check Dashboard.
  • Quarterly Performance Profiling dashboards
    • Use the Guest OS Performance Profiling dashboard and the vSphere Performance Profiling dashboard to conduct a deeper/broader exercise to baseline and improve the overall performance. 
    • The Guest OS Performance Profiling dashboard covers the Guest OS. Use it with the VM owner to better understand the application behavior within Windows and Linux.
    • The vSphere Performance Profiling dashboard covers the shared infrastructure. Use it to better understand the performance of various clusters and datastores. For more information, see the vSphere Performance Profiling Dashboard.

Capacity

  • Custom Metrics for Capacity Computation
    • Ability to override default metrics used to compute capacity using super metrics or other out-of-the-box metrics.For more information, see Capacity Details.
  • Capacity Computation Insights
    • Ability to obtain insights into rightsizing recommendations and capacity computations in the rightsizing table and Capacity Remaining tiles.
    • Ability to obtain recommendation guidelines for risk level settings in the capacity section of the policy.
    For more information, see Using Rightsize to Adjust Resource Allocation.

Costing

  • VMware Software License Cost Driver for Core Based Licenses
    • Ability to manage expenses for VMware software licenses like VMware Cloud Foundation and VMware vSphere Foundation, per core.For more information, see Edit Monthly Cost of License.
  • Project Cost Management
    • Availability of cost metrics for VMware Aria Automation projects and deployments.
    • Native show-back, Chargeback, and cost versus price dashboards for projects and deployments under the VMware Aria Automation adapter.For more information, see Project Chargeback, Project Cost vs, Price, and Project Showback.
  • Business Application Cost Management
  • Cost Analysis Enhancements
    • Cost Analysis now shows cost metrics distributed per month (not an aggregated value for all months).For more information, see New or Edit Cost Analysis.

Platform Scale & Performance Enhancements

  • Enhanced the overall platform scale on objects and metrics
    • Ability to collect double the existing collection size for objects and metrics. For the most current information about sizing and scaling, see KB 2093783.

Improved Operational Efficiency and Reliability

  • Telegraf Migration
  • Firewall Hardening
    • Restrict incoming network connections to the VMware Aria Operations cluster to only accept connections from trusted sources within the cluster.
    • Implement measures to prevent unauthorized access and potential attacks, including denial-of-service (DOS) attacks.
    • Address the recurring detection of self-signed certificates by a vulnerability scanner (Qualys).
    • Specifically resolve the issue of self-signed certificates being detected on ports within the ranges of 10xxx and 20xxx.
    • Firewall hardening is deactivated by default. For information about activating firewall hardening, see Activating Firewall Hardening.

vSAN Operations Feature Enhancements

Enhancements to the Widget Experience

  • Inclusion of ancestor and descendant information for objects in List Views.
    • List Views now have the ability to include ancestor and descendant information of objects as columns.
  • Ability to filter by the age of objects in List Views using the Timestamp transformation
    • List Views now include Timestamp transformations in the filters. This can be used to filter objects by their age.
  • Ability to filter by Alert Definitions in the Alert List widget.
    • The Alert List widget now includes Alert Definitions as a filtering criteria.

For more information, see List View, Summary View,  Trend View,  Distribution View,  Text View, and Alert List Widget.

Enhancements to the Homepage Experience

  • Ability to add up to 5 dashboards to the homepage and reorder dashboards.

For more information, see Dashboards.

Reporting Enhancements

  • Ability to add a custom image to the front page and preview reports.

Compliance Packs

  • Upgrades 
    • VMware Aria Operations Compliance Pack for CIS is upgraded to support the following versions:
      • CIS ESXI v7.0 version 1.3.0 Release: 26 Sep 2023
      • CIS ESXI v8.0 Version 1.0.0 Release: 24 Oct 2023
    • VMware Aria Operations Compliance Pack for DISA is upgraded to support the following versions:
      • VMware vSphere 7.0 Version 1 Release 2: 26 July 2023
      • VMware vSphere 8 Version 1 Release 1: 03 November 2023

Native Public Cloud

  • The integrations for Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, Oracle Cloud VMware Solution, and Google Cloud Platform are no longer be available natively. They will be accessible via the Marketplace.Note: If you are upgrading from VMware Aria Operations 8.14.x to 8.18 and you have configured the Google Cloud Platform account, Google Cloud Platform will stop collecting data after you upgrade to VMware Aria Operations 8.18. To workaround this issue, the Google Cloud Platform adapter must be upgraded to version 8.18 immediately after cluster upgrade. To avoid data loss, before you start cluster upgrade, ensure that the Google Cloud Platform 8.18 management pack is available in the Marketplace.

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