What's New in vRealize Operations 8.6

October 5, 2021

Reading time: 4 minutes

Today, VMware is announcing vRealize Operations 8.6 which includes a ton of additional features and capabilities. These updates include numerous enhancements to public cloud support (including support for monitoring ALL AWS services including custom metrics), a revamped user interface, support for defining custom email notices within the user interface (FINALLY!), new methods to define customer groups, the inclusion of vRealize True Visibility compute and storage management packs for all editions, and new sustainability-related dashboards.

True Visibilty Compute an Storage Management Packs

VMware will now be providing customers of all vRealize Operations editions free access to the compute and storage management packs from the vRealize True Visibility Suite. No additional license key will be required to install and configure these management packs. These management packs will be available to all vRealize Operations customers with the next release of the management packs. For additional information, please see my blog post vRealize True Visibility Suite Compute and Storage Management Packs Available to All vRealize Operations Customers.

This release of vRealize Operations includes a new simplified user interface that not only makes navigating the product much easier but also allows for a customized interface for non-administrator users.

Custom Group Definitions Using Regular Expressions

vRealize Operations 8.6 will now allow you to defined customer groups using new criteria including:

Regular expressions
Starts with
Does not start with
Ends with
Does not end with

The regular expressions are based on Java 8’s regex implementation and can be applied against object names, relations, and tags.

Email Payload Templates

The new Email Payload Template feature allows you to define custom templates to be utilized when sending email notifications from vRealize Operations. These templates can be defined using a rich text HTML editor, support parameters for alert properties, object metrics, and custom inputs, and also include support for new, updated, and canceled alerts. Additionally, support will exist to import, export, and clone, the templates, and notifications rules.

Sustainability Dashboard

The new Sustainability Dashboard will highlight your organization’s sustainability efforts through responsible operations. The new dashboards are grouped into three categories: Green Supply - carbon footprint savings achieved, Clean Demand - recommendations for additional carbon footprint reduction, and Lean Operations - maximize utilization without compromising performance.

Certificate Store Monitoring

One problem frequently encountered by users of vRealize Operations is the expiration of endpoint certificates resulting in the loss of monitoring for endpoints. While methods exist for creating custom monitoring of certification expirations, vRealize Operations did not include a native method of monitoring for these expirations. vRealize Operations 8.6 will now include support for early warning of expiring endpoint certificates. This new feature will cover all native management packs (except public cloud), as well as the vRealize Orchestrator management pack. The addition of all non-native management packs is planned for a future release of vRealize Operations.

Also, the SDDC Health Monitoring feature will now monitor for the expiration of all vCenter certificates, machine certificates, VMCA root certificates, ESXi certificates, and additional SDDC components (planned for a future release). Implementation of the expiration notifications will include customizable thresholds as a global setting. The certificates will be evaluated daily after midnight.

Application Performance Management Integration

Previously available within vRealize Operations Cloud, you can now integrate application performance management toolsets within the on-premise version of vRealize Operations 8.6. This option allows you to leverage application insights using existing tools, does not require in-guest agents, provides better collaboration between application and infrastructure teams, and supports popular application performance management tools including Dynatrace, Datadog, New Relic, and AppDynamics.

Support for Open Source Telegraf Agent

Similar to application performance management, support for using the open-source Telegraf agent was also limited to the vRealize Operations Cloud. Now with vRealize Operations 8.6, you can monitor over 200 applications through the use of the open-source Telegraf agent. You now have the option to continue to use the curated applications and operating systems included in vRealize Operations along with complete lifecycle management of the vRealize Operations Telegraph agent, or you can use the open-source Telegraf agent and its plugin ecosystem for hundreds of applications as well as your own custom developed Telegraf plugins. This feature supports monitoring both virtual machines and physical servers.