The annual VMworld conference is only live for two hours as I write this, but already my head is buzzing with announcements. The pace is furious this year! My favourite topic gets an update of course…

First of all the vRealize apps are really getting even more ready for multicloud. vRealize Operations now has full support for VMware Cloud on AWS, Azure VMware Service, Google Cloud VMware Engine, VMware Cloud on Dell. For public clouds we get monitoring for all AWS services, including custom metrics and enhancements to Azure and GCP monitoring. Integration with CloudHealth extends costing capabilities to the cloud.

And yes… we have a new UI… Honestly I have mixed feelings about another change in the interface, but apparently it is there to simplify the interaction, so let’s hope that works out. The menu is now simplified based on personas:

To be fair there are a lot of changes to improve the user experience. I must admit I always hated the mess of the dashboards section, well that has now been completely redesigned. There is a new dashboard browser and you can manage your own favourites.

And talking about another annoyance … Cloud accounts! Well, here too everything is now neatly under integrations. Very clean and oversee-able.

A great new feature is that in VMC on AWS you can now activate a 30-day trial for vROps Cloud ( SaaS obviously) with one button. It is an integrated experience that comes with self-guided tours that help you improve your TTV (Time-To-Value obviously). I think it will bring Operations to a whole new bunch of customers.

There is support in the on-prem version for the opensource telegraf agents, this was introduced in the SaaS version in v8.4 (they warned you SaaS would have the cool stuff sooner). This means you can pulll data from 200 applications into vROps.

There are more changes like sustainability dashboards and a new cost overview. What stands out is that you can now use regular expressions as criteria for custom groups, we all love regular expressions, right ? As a bonus here is a resource to check those expressions before you use them in a custom group…

Another fine thing is the ability to customise email notification templates more. You can even include fields. I think this will help me greatly in the OTRS integration I am doing for a customer.

There is also great – almost shocking – news on the True Visibility Suite, but I need to see an announcement and confirmation at VMworld before I will write about that. Stay tuned.

As for the release date, an internal source told me “soon, very soon”… I am looking forward to it! What about you? Let me know your questions. And as always at Comdivision we are VMware Premier Partner, we can help you with all vRealize Operations projects! Get in touch!