What about vCenter Operations Manager foundation?

There are now four versions of vCenter Operations Manager. With the newest version release (v5.6) there is a new foundation edition introduced. I saw some people in twitter asking some questions about the foundation edition and how you can get this one licensed. vCenter Operations Manager operates in Foundation mode if the evaluation license key is applied (see release notes)

vCenter Operations Management Suite has 4 different editions:

Foundation Edition – will give you insights and visibility into performance and health of your vSphere infrastructure. Features included are:

• vSphere Health Monitoring
• Self-learning Performance Analytics
• Intelligent Operations Groups (NEW)
• Proactive Smart Alerts.

vCOPS Foundation is a good start at least to monitor your environment but for the analysis and recommendations or capacity management you will need to look at a more feature rich edition.

vCenter Operations Standard: Performance management with capacity and change awareness for VMware vSphere-virtualized and cloud environments.

vCenter Operations Advanced: Adds more advanced capacity analytics and planning to vCenter Operations Standard’s performance management for VMware vSphere-virtualized and cloud environments.

vCenter Operations Enterprise: Performance, capacity and configuration management capabilities for both virtual and physical environments and includes customizable dashboards, smart alerting and application awareness.

The newly released vCOPS 5.6 includes being part of the new Web Client which is a great change.

You might want to Compare all four editions or check out the full product page here!