Yesterday, a bunch of the vExperts got a briefing on the release of vCenter Operations. I'm a known fan boy for VMware, but this product is probably on the bottom of my list. Please note that I have not had the time to test this product yet, this is just an opinion of mine from yesterday's briefing.
Take a read at Eric Sloof's article vCenter Operations – Your Future Performance Dashboard so you can get an understanding of what it has to offer. Done yet? OK, let's continue.
vCenter Operations has a few things going for it. Remember, that this wasn't a completely in-house product from the ground up. This was an acquisition of Integrien and has bits and pieces of Ionix thrown in. First, the deployment method. VMware is really starting to kick the tires on the Appliance model and this is the first product released that shows it in the wild (you will see more to come). Unlike other competitors, there is no windows based install so you're not burning up a license and the integrated database makes it good for small to medium sized deployments.
Secondly, the GUI is pretty nice. It's very simple, intuitive, and detailed. Lastly, vCenter Operations has a few more views that you don't get in competitor products, such as how all the RAM on a host is split up into a single logical view. I also can appreciate the learning curve and algorithms it presents to calculate the health of a VM. Granted, it takes time to learn 
these things to oversee your environment, but VKernel products can do this too, to see if you are over allocating RAM or vCPUs. Overall, this product like all other monitoring products, pulls information from vCenter and packages it into an easy to see GUI with their own mixes of calculations to produce their metrics. It's a fairly common product and I don't see where they are trying to differentiate themselves.
One thing that irks me compared to competitors is the price point. We were told yesterday that the pricing is going to be $50 per VM. $50 is nice for your important VMs, but not when you have 50-80% of your VMs are dev/test or tier 3. vCenter Operations doesn't have the ability to pick and choose the VMs you want to monitor. It's a grab all scenario at the moment and I firmly believe that will hinder the product from making real traction. We were told that the product will emerge to a point where it can be licensed per VM where you can choose a specific vCenter, Datacenter, Cluster, Resource Group, etc. For the time being, do I really want pay that kind of premium?
If you are seriously looking at vCenter Operations I would suggest doing a bake-off with all the competitors. This is VMware's first attempt at a fully integrated monitoring product, yet companies like VKernel, Veeam, VMTurbo, Xangati, Quest, and others have been doing this since their inception and are all based on per socket licensing (for the moment). This per socket licensing model can make monitoring solutions much more affordable. Let's take an environment with 500 VMs on 15 hosts (dual socket). vCenter Operations = $25,000 where as a competitor with $250/socket (30 sockets) = $7,500. Heck, $500/socket = $15,000, still $10k less.
Do you have anymore insight that can justify the price point? I would love to hear everyone else's opinion. I like the GUI and management approach of vCenter Operations, but the price is just too hard for me to swallow.