VMware Aria Operations : Journey To Success

Introduction to VMware Aria Operations

Hello from VMware Aria Operations, and welcome!

You can use this site as a roadmap for your VMware Aria Operations Journey To Success. It includes a variety of use cases from getting started to becoming a power user. You can navigate as you want; you are not required to read it in order, but you may do so as needed. Besides, if you are looking to expand your operations skills, we can help. Skip to the last section and let the fun begin!

If you’re wondering how other customers are using VMware Aria Operations, please visit the Product webpage.

Getting Started

Maximize your value with VMware Aria Operations

Here, you will learn about the key features and capabilities of Aria Operations that you can use within the first few mins! Topics covered will include an overview of the user interface and the Launchpad, troubleshooting problems via out-of-the-box alerts and troubleshooting dashboards, understanding your current capacity needs and reclaiming unused resources, rightsizing your workloads for optimal performance, understanding your spend and costs, and leveraging out of the box reports.

A Simple Guide to User Interface

See how to quickly navigate around the Aria Operations user interface and learn how you can find what you are looking for quickly and easily.  

Leveraging Out of the Box Dashboards

VMware Aria Operations comes with a plethora of options for out-of-the-box dashboards!  Come learn how to utilize these dashboards to control your budgets, troubleshoot a challenge, get the most out of your resources, or improve your sustainability and Green Score.

Mastering Monitoring and Troubleshooting Essentials

Learn the features of VMware Aria Operations that can drastically shorten your mean time to resolution and allow you to act more proactively to resolve issues before they become outages.  Topics covered will include alerts, troubleshooting with out-of-the-box dashboards and flows, and troubleshooting with logs.

Gaining Insight into your Capacity

Aria Operations provides capacity management and planning. This session provides an overview of how you can get quickly started with capacity management for your environment. The session will include out-of-the-box capacity dashboards to get a comprehensive overview of capacity in your environment.

Reclaiming Unused Resources to Save on Capacity and Cost

Aria Operations provides capacity management such as the ability to reclaim unused resources. This lesson covers how administrators can reclaim unused resources to gain the most out of their environment.

Running a Safe and Compliant Cloud

Basic compliance and the vSphere Hardening Guide will be covered to make sure you are operating within guidelines and industry best practices for data protection and governance.

Using Sustainability in VMware Aria Operations for Running a green cloud

Awareness is the first step to sustainable development. Make informed decisions and choices for the future by monitoring your green score with VMware Aria Operations. Aiming for a lower score is the goal to reduce your overall carbon footprint for a greener future. Topics Covered include - How to setup and configure, Metrics involved, Monitor Greenscore, Carbon footprint, Power Consumption, and Environmental Impact. How to optimize your green score – reclaim and rightsize resources.

Understand your Cloud Costs and Save Money

Make sure you’re fully informed when making cost decisions with our cost dashboards for multi-cloud.  

Generating Reports for Cost, Capacity, Compliance, and More

Reports can help you track performance, scrutinize overall health, and gives you the knowledge to make more informed decisions.  This lesson will go into running and scheduling, as well as customizing reports in VMware Aria Operations. 

Using Workload Placement to Run an Efficient Data Center

Implementing a proper workload placement strategy is crucial for getting the full efficiency out of your resources.  Come learn how to use VMware Aria Operations to configure your Operational and Business Intent to generate a plan that will optimize your data centers and mitigate risk. 

Getting More Out Of

Extending your Solution with Management Packs!

Come learn how management packs can extend the capabilities of VMware Aria Operations and give greater depth to your troubleshooting sessions and proactive monitoring sessions.  We will cover the installation and configuration of management packs as well as what we can do for endpoints that don’t already have a management pack built (yet!)

Monitoring and Troubleshooting Kubernetes

Come learn how you can leverage the k8s management pack and extend the capabilities of VMware Aria Operations to monitor Kubernetes distributions like VMware Tanzu Kubernetes Grid Integrated, VMware Tanzu Kubernetes Grid, vSphere with Tanzu and Red Hat OpenShift.

Advanced Capacity Management

Managing physical resources and capacity in your environment is an ongoing battle. Learn how Aria Operations’ capacity management models can help you save on hardware and dial down cost to make your hybrid-cloud environments lean and mean. 

Integrating and Troubleshooting with Logs

Troubleshooting with metrics only gives you half the story. Learn how to bring your log events into VMware Aria Operations from Aria Operations for Logs and use the combined power of metrics and logs to solve your most complicated issues. 

Configuring Costs to Match Your Business Needs

Learn how to configure cost variables for your environment (server, storage network) to better understand where your I.T. spend is going, and how to offer showback and chargeback to users that will help keep costs in line.  

Customizing Alerts and Leveraging Notifications

This video will show you how to customize alerts in VMWare Aria Operations to make sure you can spot the real issue instead of just noise.  The video will help with setting up proper notification channels using the Standard Email Plugin. 

Creating views for better Visibility

Views can be unrivaled when creating dashboards and reports that give you the information you need and none of the fluff.  Learn how to create and work with these views to customize the information you want to see.

Using Metrics and Charts for Troubleshooting

Metrics and metric charts give you the details you might not view in a dashboard.  When you really want to dive in to a particular aspect of your environment, there are many ways to visualize your data.  This lesson will discuss widgets, metric picker, trend lines, anomalies, anomalous metrics and the various options that can help display your data the way you need it. 

 

Advanced Troubleshooting Techniques

Out-of-the-box dashboards not showing you deep enough insight into challenges that are arising?  Use the Troubleshooting Workbench to get to the heart of your challenge.  Come learn how the Workbench can use events, configuration changes, anomalous metrics, and metrics correlation to discover the true root cause of your challenge.  

Saving Time by Automating Remediation

Automation Central, within VMware Aria Operations, can provide a way to automate deletion of old snapshots, idle VM’s, power off idle VM’s, downsize oversized VM’s, and scale-up your undersized VM’s.  There are also additional options power off, power on, and reboot your public cloud resources. 

Driving Better Performance and Compliance with Cluster Based Workload Optimization

Making sure your workloads are running efficiently is crucial for managing your environments.  VMware Aria Operations can help make sure your workloads are optimized and in the correct spot for maximum efficiency.  Covered in this lesson is Cluster Based Workload Optimization including setting a business intent, use of the “Optimize Now” feature, scheduling workload optimization and automating placement of workloads. 

COMING SOON!!

Achieve Optimal Performance with Rightsizing

Oversized VM’s can be costly to run while undersized VM’s aren’t able to maintain their workloads effectively.  Learn how to properly size VM’s based on the workloads that are assigned.  Covered topics include configuring policy settings, assessing risk level, and automating your rightsizing actions.

Enabling Chargeback for your Business

Determining who is responsible for what costs can be a daunting challenge.  VMware Aria Operations can assist in chargeback of costs by setting rate cards that will give the price of a given resource.  This video will cover these rate cards along with dashboards associated.

Plan for your Future Capacity Needs

Do you want to make sure that the capacity changes to your environment are actually going to help? Then run the ‘What If’ scenarios from our workload planner to make sure you’re making the right decisions before putting them into production.

Application Monitoring

Learn how service discovery, agent-based application monitoring, and third-party integrations with existing application performance management (APM) system will help you the user with Application Monitoring in VMware Aria Operations. 

Becoming a Power User

Configuring and Managing Alert Notifications

Learn to add, manage, and edit your notification rules and configure and activate the settings for outbound alerts.

Creating a Custom Alert Definition

Learn to create a Custom Alert Definition and configure notifications on it. 

 

Application Monitoring with VMware Aria Operations

Learn to monitor Applications and troubleshoot slow or problematic Services. 

 

Integrating VMware Aria Automation with VMware Aria Operations

Learn how VMware Aria Automation can work with VMware Aria Operations to perform advanced workload placement, provide deployment health, virtual machine metrics, and display pricing.

Workload Placement - Running Host based Optimization

Learn  about Tag and Host based workload placement. 

 

Report Generation using VMware Aria Operations

Learn to create a Report and Schedule it to run or download it. 

 

Recover From Unexpected Changes in the Environment

Recover from unexpected changes in the environment by implementing a beacon and reactor system that will trigger a scripted reaction when certain events occur in the system. Reactors can be defined to respond to events like service status, file system changes, shell activity and more. Incorporate auto-remediation into your automation strategy for better uptime and consistent operations.

 COMING SOON!!

 

Creating Custom Dashboards for VMware Aria Operations

Come learn how to create custom dashboards for use in VMware Aria Operations.  Covered topics include widgets, widget configurations, dashboard drivers, interactions, and depth of relationships.

Enhancing depth of VMware Aria Operations with Supermetrics

This lesson till teach you how to create super metrics; mathematical formulas that contain a combination of one or more metrics (for one or more objects) that will then persist over time and can be used for different interactions just like any other metric.

Leveraging Your DevOps Skillset to Create Custom Actions

VMware Aria Operation’s integration with VMware Orchestrator allows us to create and run custom actions to automate everyday tasks in your environment.

COMING SOON!!

 

Build your own Custom Integrations with VMware Aria Operations Management Pack Builder

VMware Aria Operations Management Pack Builder is a stand-alone appliance that enables the creation of custom management packs for use in VMware Aria Operations.  This lesson covers this no-code solution for bringing in data from an external API and either creating new resources or extending your VMware and third party resources with new Data, Relationships, and Events.