VMware dropped new releases for their Aria Suite this past week: Aria Operations, Aria Operations for Logs, Aria Automation, Aria Lifecycle Manager, and more. I upgraded my lab yesterday, today I'm going to dig into what's new in Aria Operations, let's go!
Let's start with the new Launchpad!
I notice a few things right away: new organization of content, the three tabs, the new search bar at the top, the yellow KB warning, and the new blade on the left for Developer Center. Let's explore them!
The Launchpad has been redesigned to more efficiently organize content:
Pillars of Operations
Applications
Infrastructure
VMware Cloud
Public Cloud
Integrations
Each tile takes you to detail for that particular function, some are new and some will be familiar. For example, within the Pillars of Operations, Observability takes you here:
The familiar capabilities around Monitoring and Troubleshooting, Application Monitoring, and Application Performance Monitoring Tools are available here, including link to LEARN MORE. These are all familiar items, but the Log Analysis tile does present some new functionality.
You'll note that the Aria Operations for Logs now requires a credential, let's configure that. Once configured, you now get Logs in product (without an iFrame), much more seamless.
From here you have the ability to search logs, launch Aria Operations for Logs, and more.
From the Sustainability tile you can configure your Sustainability Greenscore Data.
Once configured, Sustainability will show your Greenscore, Power Consumption, Carbon Footprint, and your Environment Impact, among other scores.
The Applications tiles take you to the familiar places. The Infrastructure tiles take you to the relevant Dashboards. The VMware Cloud and Public Cloud tiles give you the ability to view and manage the respective constructs. Finally, Integrations allows you to quickly access powerful things like Automation Central, Outbound Plugins, Content Repository, and Developer Center, which is new.
Developer Center provides one-stop shopping for things like the API and PowerCLI. It provides insight into building Management Packs with the Management Pack Builder or the Integrations SDK. It also gives the user access to the VMware Aria Community: developer.vmware.com and communities.vmware.com.
Back to the Launchpad, you'll notice two more tabs: Multi-Cloud Overview and in my case Troubleshooting VMs v3, which was my previous Homepage Dashboard. Click on the Multi-Cloud Overview tab.
From here, you can see all Clouds: Private Cloud, VMware Cloud, and Public Cloud.
The third thing I noticed was the yellow banner indicating several out-of-the-box Alerts have been disabled. A link to the KB detailing the 20 Alerts that have disabled is quite helpful. These Alerts, while informative, have been disabled to reduce Alert noise. If you'd like to enable them, just go find them and enable them in the appropriate Policy/s via Alerts - Alert Definitions.
Finally, at the very top you'll notice a new Search bar, allowing you to search for anything you want: an object, an object type, a metric, a dashboard, virtually anything you want.
Beyond basic search capabilities, we now have the ability to put a little syntax into our search. For example, we can search VM CPU Usage for all VMs on a certain ESXi Host.
If you're having issues with the Search you are prompted for potential auto-complete possibilities, but also give a link to the Enhanced Search Capability documentation. Beyond the new Launchpad in Aria Operations 8.12 there is so much more to explore, check out the Release Notes here!
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