Last week I was fortunate enough to attend a briefing from VMware on new upcoming releases of our beloved vRealize Operations, and today I can talk about them! vROps has really advanced tremendously in the last years and it is now for me the solution for monitoring in a VMware multicloud environment. The platform is well positioned for HCI operations (think vSAN, vxRail), hybrid cloud monitoring, app-aware operations, compliance use cases and the aforementioned multicloud.

vROps Cloud has been announced today. All SaaS offerings are now simply named ‘cloud’, so Log Intelligence will become Log Insight Cloud. Watch for other announcements this VMworld…. There will be a tech preview in Octobre – around VMworld EMEA I guess – and a beta early next year for launch around mid next year. It will require simple installation of a proxy in your network and registering a vCenter. VMware on AWS will be even simpler.

vROps v8 will also be available around Octobre. There are a lot of improvements in Workload optimisation and cost to include cloud services such as Amazon. The AWS and Azure management packs will now come with the product out of the box. I think there is a blog post necessary only to talk cost or workload optimisation. Let me concentrate here on a few other remarkable new features in intelligent remediation. Still my favourite use for vROps…

Troubleshooting workbench.

I will try to avoid some popular marketing terms here, but it is hard to do since this is an incredible new feature, with some stuff that learns … (get it ?) and one dashboard with all info to quickly troubleshoot a problem from app to infra…It gathers and correlates info on events, anomalous metrics and property changes. You can change time and topology to find out more and you can run multiple workbenches at once.

troubleshooting workbench

Application monitoring.

The new application monitoring using Telegraf agents is extended with 20 new applications and services! NTPD, Java, and Websphere are now supported and you can write custom monitoring scripts. These options bring vROps more and more in the APM space, along with the following novelty!

Native Service Discovery.

vROps now has built-in agent-less service discovery for 41 known services through vmtools! You can also add your own services to a white list. It will build application relationships and you can run agent-less VM actions for troubleshooting, like getting top-n processes.

Continuous availability.

vROps can now go beyond HA and replicate between sites over a layer3 network connection. So you can have a site failure and still access vROps. I know this is an important feature for large corporations with worldwide datacenters.

All in all vROps 8 and the SaaS offering offer some great new features. If you are a vSphere customer and are moving towards SDDC on prem and cloud offerings such as AWS, you would be well advised to take a closer look!