3 things about VMware Aria you might not know and why they matter

By Adam Stretton, Lead Technical Consultant

VMware Aria Operations (formally VMware vRealize Operations) is a powerful platform that enables organisations to optimise and manage their on-prem and cloud environments efficiently. While many users are familiar with its core capabilities, there are several lesser-known features that can greatly enhance the value and effectiveness of Aria Operations. In this blog post, we will explore three hidden gems in Aria Operations that you may not be aware of, and how they can transform your virtualised infrastructure management.

Green Score

Sustainability is climbing further and further up the priority list for most (if not all!) organisations today. Aria Operations has been able to assist with the reduction of energy costs and carbon emissions for many years now via several features such as rightsizing, life-cycle management, capacity planning, workload balancing and reporting. The newest tool in the Aria Operations sustainable toolbox is the VMware Green Score.

VMware Green Score provides a way of tracking and progressing your sustainability journey with actionable recommendations.

The scoring is based on understanding the current state of workload efficiency, resource utilisation, virtualisation rate, power source and hardware efficiency. This acts as a stake in the ground to explore opportunities to optimise the Green score via the recommendations provided by Aria Operations.

Automation

VMware Aria Automation has a fully functional API which allows you to automate every action you can perform via the GUI. This allows us to utilise tools like Automation Central and VMware Aria Automation Orchestrator (formally VMware vRealize Orchestrator) to automate common and repeatable tasks.
Automation Central allows you to build an automated schedule for common housekeeping functions such as the deletion of snapshots, removing idle, right-sizing and power cycling VMs.

For the more advanced use-cases, we can also integrate with VMware Aria Automation Orchestrator to trigger workflows from alerts. Self-healing datacenter, here we come!

Integration with Third-Party Management Packs

I still see many customers with Aria Operations installed with just the VMware vCenter integration configured and no other management packs or third-party integrations. There are dozens of management packs (many of which are included with your existing licence!) located here. Each management pack provides visibility and monitoring of the target application with a wide range of out-of-the-box metrics, alerts, dashboards and reports. Whether it’s storage arrays, network devices, databases or applications, third-party management packs allow you to seamlessly leverage Aria Operations’ monitoring and analytics capabilities across your entire stack.

In summary, VMware Aria Operations is a feature-rich platform that offers far more than just VMware vSphere monitoring. Comms-care offers a wide range of services to ensure your business utilises Aria Operations to the full potential. We offer bespoke service design as well as having a variety of assessment services covering topics such as  Discovery, Optimise, Multi-Cloud, Security, Compliance, Sustainability and Strategy.

Visit our VMware Hub or contact your account manager for more details.