vROps Webinar Series 2017 - Part 3 - What's New with vROps 6.6.

Hello!!! Hope you enjoyed the last episode of vRealize Operations Webinar Series.This time around we spoke about the all new version of the product : vRealize Operations Manager 6.6, which is recently released by VMware.

We started with an overview of all the cool new stuff and then drill down into individual areas. We then jumped into a Live Demo as usual to see the new features in action.

We would highly appreciate if you could spend 30 seconds to fill up this quick and simple survey to provide us your feedback. You can also request topics of your choice through this survey.

https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/2J2G82S

Here is the recording!

Note : It is recommended that you watch the video in HD quality for a great experience.

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New Contest : Share Your vROps 6.6 Upgrade Story & Win Exciting Prizes

The VMware Communities just started a contest on vRealize Operations Manager 6.6. Make sure you check it out and participate by sharing your experience with vRops 6.6.

Reference Link - https://communities.vmware.com/message/2688638#2688638 

If you are all excited about our new release of vRealize Operations 6.6 and have already upgraded, please share your story. We are running a contest through July 2017 to spotlight the top 3 stories in our upcoming blog. The top 3 winners will be selected to have a 1:1 training workshop for your entire team with our product experts.

>> Watch this 5-min video for simple upgrade steps!

Top 5 reasons to upgrade to vROps 6.6:

1. Simple process and more efficient
2. Fully automated workload balancing
3. More Dashboards Out of the Box
4. Tighter Integration with VSAN, vRealize Log Insight, vRealize Business for Cloud
5. Better look and feel with HTML5 Clarity UI

Please post your success story in the VMware Communities forum with the answe to the following 3 simple questions:

• Why you upgraded to vRealize Operations 6.6?
• What benefits have you experienced from this upgrade?
• Can you share best practices with your peers?

>> Judge Criteria: Most interesting best practices, upgrade themes into any of the 5 categories above.

>> Watch these videos to get the most out of vROps 6.6

• Getting Started Dashboards http://bit.ly/2tRDNbY
• Troubleshooting of VM http://bit.ly/2ufsNYu
• Workload Balancing http://bit.ly/2uX6dBJ

Look forward to exciting stories! Go vRops Ninja!!

What's New with vROps 6.6 on VMware Communities Roundtables Podcast

Podcast are the modern blogs. The only difference is that you hear the opinion of the person instead of reading them. I guess that makes it powerful since you can be anywhere, doing anything and tune into a podcast and hopefully learn from it.

If the topic is of your interest, then it is like music to ears, if not, then you switch over to a different channel. The learning never stops...

While I am No Podcast pro, I have been involved in a couple and the one I enjoyed a lot was with cloudinsiders.fm. No points for guessing that the topic was "How is your IT infrastructure being managed?" Tune into that one if you want to hear my ramblings on where is Operations with all things cloudy going and how would one create a strategy around Cloud Operations.

In my recent Podcast adventure , I skope about the motivation behind vRealize Operations Manager 6.6. 

I was honored to be invited on the VMware Communities Roundatbles Podcast to discuss about my blog, my journey into the virtual world and ofcourse the latest release of vRealize Operations Manager 6.6.

Special thanks to the wonderful hosts Eric, Katie and Noell for inviting me to the show and all the wonderful work they do for the VMware Communities.

Here is the link to the Recording - http://recordings.talkshoe.com/TC-19367/TS-1192094.mp3 

Hope you enjoy the podcast and most importantly learn from it. If you have any questions, feel free to leave them in the comments section.

Have a Great Day!!

vROps Webinar 2017 - Announcing Part 3 : What's New with vROps 6.6

Welcome to the next episode of vRealize Operations Manager Webinar Series. This time around we will talk about the latest release of vROps released in the month of June. 

With this release, VMware has made drastic changes to the product and the initial reviews of the product have been great. Since I was a part of the team delivering this new release, I thought it would be a good topic to discuss in the next episode of the Webinar Series.

As always, we will go through the slideware to give you a quick introduction and then do a live demo of the features in our environment. Since this is a big release, we will use the subsequent episodes of this series do give you a deep dive into some of the features which require a special mention and more time due to the depth and breadth of the topic.

Here are the details: 👇👇👇

Session Title	Part 3 - What's New with vROps 6.6
Date	Thursday, 20th July 2017
Time	1:00 PM to 2:30 PM Pacific Time
Speakers	Sunny Dua & Simon Eady
Webinar Link	Click here to join the session when it's time
Save Invite	Click here to save invite  👈

See you at the Webinar!!  👋👋👋👋

Part 9 - Using data roll-ups for longer retention period in vROps 6.6

Hope you are enjoying the What's New with vROps 6.6 series. With this post, I wanted to share a little gem of a configuration which has not been in the lime-light with all the new and cool things available with this new release of vRealize Operations 6.6. 

This feature is about data retention which has not changed much since the initial days of vROps (infact it was called vCOps back then). If you remember, Time Series Data Retention is one of the key features of vROps which allows you to retain the metrics data in the FSDB for upto 10 years. This means that you can retain data without any rolls ups for months and go back in time whenever you want to. 

While I have never seen a customer with a requirement of 10 year data retention, I have often come across customers who have a 2 year worth data retention policy. Specially in the healthcare or government space where historical data retention is a compliance requirement. In such cases, your storage requirement for saving all this data increases exponentially. 

I have had a number of customers ask if we can purge or archive this data or even create roll ups to minimize the disk space requirements while ensuring compliance requirements of long term data retention. 

This will also help with reduction of their backup and DR foot print which is key to enterprises running vRealize Operations Manager in a large scale production environment. With the release of vRealize Operations Manager 6.6, you now get a couple of options for data retention. You can find these options under the Global Settings option.

Let's find these settings and drill down into the meaning of these:

1- Login to vRealize Operation with admin privelleges.

2- Click on Administration -> Management -> Global Settings

3- Click on the Edit icon to view the settings in edit mode.

Here you can see 2 settings:

Time Series Data Retention : This is the existing setting from the previous versions and is set to 6 months by default for 5 minutes interval data retention.

Additional Time Series Retention : This is a NEW setting with vROps 6.6. This is set to 36 months by default. This setting will ensure that after 6 months of normal retention (5 minutes), the 7th month data is rolled up into a ONE HOUR (1 Hour) roll up. You can set up this option upto 120 months for data roll ups.

With this setting in place, one can easily, setup the 5 minute interval data to 3 months which is enough for capacity predictions and performance troubleshooting and use the additional retention setting to 3 months or more based on the compliance requirements. 

So go ahead, re-think your data retention policy and see how you can make the footprint of your vROps instances smaller with the benefit of longer term data retention.

More to come.. Stay Tuned!!

Part 8 - vROps 6.6 : Creating queries with Metrics & properties using Metric Groups

"Troubleshooting is an Art and not Science"

I remember this statement from the time I started my career as a desktop support engineer. Fast forward 14 years to today's date and we all know that the statement still holds water!

While no tool in the world will give you a 100% accurate root cause analysis, it is important that you have a tool which helps you with the rule of elimination in your troubleshooting process. If you have quick and easy things which you can check and move forward, this would definitely make the troubleshooting process faster and reduce the time required to drill down to the root cause.

Queries in vROps is one such way by which you can easily reach from the source to destination in the troubleshooting process.

With the release of vRealize Operations Manager 6.6, you can now create metric groups which not only use metrics, but can also consist of properties. Using the concept I created some new groups which work as queries. 

These queries can help answer simple questions through vROps metrics which can help an administrator significantly while they are in a fire fighting mode to quickly find and solve problems. Here are the custom queries which I have created in my environment, you can use the same and make your troubleshooting process quicker and simpler. For ease of use, I have created queries for all the key Object Types. You can see the Object Name, Queries and the Metrics which make that query:

Datacenter

Cluster

Hosts

Virtual Machines

These are just examples of what I created for myself. You being an application, database or OS experts, you can use any metrics collected by vROps and create meaningful queries.

Once you have the desired queries you can easily double click on them and look at the key metric and properties with a single click. Hopefully this will help you with your troubleshooting style and decrease the mean time to resolution.

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