Part 2 - Introduction to vRealize Operations Manager 6.6 User Interface.

In my previous post I gave you a high level overview of What's New with vRealize Operations 6.6. In continuation to that post, I will deep dive into each of the areas which are worth noticing in this release and will help you learn more about how you can use vROps to make day to day operational tasks simpler and quicker.

In my last post, I spoke about the different personas and how they matter. One common theme across all the personas running operations was ease of use and time to value. vROps 6.6 user interface was made with this design goal in mind.

The major changes done with this release were primarily around the following areas:

New HTML5 User Interface

This interface within VMware is called Clarity User Interface. For the last couple of years, all the VMware products are moving towards this common user interface to ensure that the look and feel of all VMware products is consistent. This helps in 2 ways, one, as a user you can jump between products which are tightly integrated to each other without impacting the user experience. Secondly, since all the products use the same standards, if you have learned one product, you can pretty much use other products, reducing the overall learning curve.

This is how vRealize Operations Manager looks like with this release:

Enhanced Menu Options

Along with the HTML5 changes, the menu options within vROps are consolidated and re-arranged. I have been using the new user interface with these options for just over a month and now, and I find it hard to use the user interface of the previous releases. This signifies that the changes are for better and they will make it easier and simpler for you to do tasks within the product. I think this is another big step towards improving the user experience and reducing the time to value.

This is how the new options within the high-level menus are arranged:

Quick Navigation using the Getting Started Dashboard

The Getting Started dashboard provides a guide to answering the most frequent questions of the IT staff. The dashboard breaks tasks into broad categories including Operations, Capacity and Utilization, Performance Troubleshooting, Workload Balance and Configuration and Compliance.

With each of these categories you can drill down into specific use cases and problems you are trying to solve. Each problem statement associates to an out of the box dashboard which you can access through this page. To view a dashboard, click the dashboard name listed on the right side of the Getting Started Dashboard.

⏯See Getting Started Page in action here.

Persona Based Dashboards

    

With this release, a complete refresh of all the out of the box dashboards has been done to meet the technical and business requirements of multiple personas within an organization. With the Getting Started page, it is quick and simple to get to different dashboards which answer specific questions pertaining to a persona. The dashboards are designed to ensure that they can meet multiple use cases and scenarios. Be in a troubleshooting war room or a NOC environment, meaningful dashboards help you with day to day operations at all levels in the organization. As mentioned before here are categories and the corresponding dashboards within them. With each dashboard link, you get a quick overview of the associated use case on this page.

I will dive into each of these categories in the upcoming posts of this series.

Out of the Box Integration with vSAN & vRA

With every release of vROps, a massive effort is made to integrate the various products of VMware into the platform out of the box to provide you a seamless experience and quick time to value. With the previous releases, vRealize Business and vRealize Log Insight were natively integrated in vRealize Operations Manager. With this release, the solution is extended further to integrate monitoring and management of other VMware products such as vSAN and vRA.

With the massive increase in demand for Virtual SAN, it was required to provide deep insights into the vSAN platform for our customers. As we all know that data is the most critical asset of any organization, IT teams want full insight onto the platform where your data sits. While vROps has provided management packs in the past to monitor vSAN, with this release the capabilities are built into the product without a requirement of downloading and installing any management packs.

All you need to do is to point to your vCenter and vSAN is monitored right away. This enhancement has also been made to incorporate vRealize Automation out of the box. Once you deploy a new instance or upgrade to the vROps 6.6, you will see the following out of the box solutions which can be easily configured.

There is too much goodness which you will realize with vROps 6.6. This is just the tip of the ice-berg. Stay tuned for more posts in this series.