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VMAN features lacking

We recently switched from the VMAN appliance to the VMAN integrated with Orion, and for lack of a better word, I'm incredibly disappointed. Most of the reporting functionality I had with the appliance version is essentially gone in Orion. I can no longer report and explore any of the logical components of vCenter. VMAN will capture metrics of VMs, and Performance Analyzer is great, but if don't monitor an individual VM as a node, to which we do not have the licensing for, then there's not much I can do with it as everything regarding a VM is in context to the host or datastore it lives on.

For instance we organize all of our VMs based on the folder they're in, but I can't query that information. Nor can I query based on tags, categories, or notes. To us this a huge drawback and has me looking at possible alternatives to the product.

What, if anything, is on the product roadmap to address these lack of features?

omri

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chrisorourke

Couple the lackluster functionality with the high cost of deployment (in our case it would be $240,000+/year) makes it a non starter. The licensing costs are on par with adding storage shelves to large stacks which is nonsensical for a monitoring tool.

There needs to be a smaller version that eliminates the active tools that integrate with vcenter and instead exists as only a monitoring solution. For security's sake there is no reason to have delete/vmotion/take snapshop within monitoring. We have processes for remediation that shouldn't be forced to work with the product.

omri

Hey @jstrack. Thanks for the message; certainly understand your frustration. The motivation behind VMAN on Orion was deeper integration with our broader monitoring portfolio and core platform, which we see as a significant value to our customers. As you see here, now that VMAN is on Orion, we are working to make sure that the product's feature set is staying up to date with the market - with recent improvements such as Nutanix monitoring.

But that doesn't mean that we are turning our back on a lot of the value that we were providing through the appliance. We are working through such parity requests as we also go through other feature requests related to net new functionality.

You can expect to see additional value from the appliance migrate to VMAN on Orion over time. Messages like this, calling out specific appliance features customer's really miss, go a long way towards our doing that right.

cfizz34

The VMAM reporting is lacking many basic things that are free with rvtools that I wish SolarWinds would incorporate into their product.

Also, when will VMAN integrate with vcenter and pull in the notes/annotations/tags section so I can add those to my reports?

itengineer

Yes, Chris, I agree with you, the cost is very much more expensive and the benefits or gain is not that much compares to the smaller and more useful feature like VeeamOne.

itengineer

Yes, this is what I found very lacking of the basic functionality.
even with the latest update 2019.4, no feature update to include this yet.

edsando

We are now on to 2020.2 and almost 2020.2.1.
I still do not see any reporting or ability to utilize the VMware tags.