Late last year we finished our blog series on VMware vRealize Operations (vROps), but we skipped one final section waiting on a couple bug fixes and a fairly substantial enhancement to the vSphere Optimization Assessment. Now that vROps 8.3 is GA, let's take a look.
From the Home - Quick Start page you'll see the VIEW MORE button at the bottom. This is the piece we skipped.
Once selected, you're presented with three tiles:
Extend Monitoring
Learn and Evaluate
Run Assessments
Version 8.3 fixed a couple bugs here, made a few changes, and provides a significant enhancement with the VMware vRealize Cloud Management Assessment (CMA). We'll start with the Extend Monitoring tile which contains two links:
SDDC Management Health
vRealize Operations Aggregator
The first link takes you to the VMware Marketplace and the VMware SDDC Health Monitoring Solution, which is a vROps management pack designed to monitor the VMware SDDC stack. It contains two dashboards, 15 Views, 52 Alerts, and more. Once installed, you'll create an adapter instance to collect the data and use the dashboards to assess the health of your environment. The SDDC Management Health Overview shows the overall health of your SDDC.
The second link, vRealize Operations Aggregator (previously called vRealize Operations Federation), takes you to the VMware Marketplace and the vRealize Operations Aggregator Management Pack 2.0. The dashboards contained in this management pack allow you to see your multiple vROps deployments on a single dashboard. There are seven dashboards and 24 views included here. Upon installation you'll have to configure the adapter instance, something like this.
Once configured, the Aggregate dashboards will show objects and metrics from both vROps deployments. The Capacity Summary will look something like this.
Moving to the Learn and Evaluate tile, we have four considerations.
vRealize Operations Guided Tour - this takes you to the VMware Product Walkthrough on vRealize.vmware.com for vROps.
Evaluate vRealize Suite - this takes you to the VMware Product Walkthrough on vRealize.vmware.com for the vRealize Suite.
Additional Learning - this takes you to a list of videos, whitepapers, and blogs related to vROps.
Evaluate Sample Dashboards - this is a list of vROps dashboards developed and contributed by the vROps community at large. These are also available at VMware {code}.
The third and final tile is Run Assessments. This is where you'll find the new VMware vRealize Cloud Management Assessment (CMA). This used to be the vSphere Optimization Assessment, which is still available, but has been deprecated. Matt Bradford, VMware Technical Marketing Manager, wrote a detailed blog on the CMA: https://blogs.vmware.com/management/2021/02/whats-new-in-vrealize-operations-8-3.html