Reporting from an integrated stack

Governance at platform level

Infrastructure has always served multiple stakeholders: administrators, developers, security officers, auditors, and procurement teams. In most environments, however, the platform only directly served the first group. Insights for everyone else were organized afterwards through exports, standalone monitoring tools, or reports compiled manually by someone within the organization.

Because VCF 9 integrates all layers of the infrastructure stack, those data flows are already available within the platform itself. The platform can report across the entire environment without requiring intervention from administrators or developers.

As a result, governance evolves together with the architecture itself, without the need for separate tooling or manual processes.

Compliance: a continuously running control framework

Frameworks such as ISO 27001/27002, NIS2, or sector-specific standards can be loaded into VCF 9 as compliance profiles. These profiles are translated into a set of controls that are continuously validated against the actual configuration of the environment.

Which measures are active, which are not, and which require action are all visible within a dashboard, without the need for manual exports or separate audits.

The profiles are customizable. Not every control applies to every environment, so a subset of controls can be activated based on industry or organizational requirements. Through Fundaments, customers can implement sector-specific profiles that are already aligned with common requirements in healthcare, government, or financial services.

The platform also includes a complete audit trail. Every request, configuration change, and modification, including who performed it and when, is fully traceable within the platform itself.

Sustainability: CO₂ per application available by default

In public sector and healthcare tenders, sustainability reporting is increasingly required as a standard part of documentation. In environments built from separate components, providing a concrete answer to this question is a project in itself: collecting data from multiple sources, correlating it, and exporting it.

In VCF 9, sustainability reporting is a built-in capability. Based on the actual energy consumption of the underlying hardware, the platform calculates CO₂ emissions per VM, per VDC, or per application. It is configurable to the specific environment and can be exported directly.

What previously took hours can now be done in just a few clicks.

Financial and capacity insights: right-sizing without manual effort

Costs and capacity are continuously transparent. End users can see how their workloads perform within the allocated configuration. The platform identifies overprovisioning and underutilized resources and provides recommendations for right-sizing.

The data is already available within the system; the only requirement is to act on it.

For CSPs and MSPs, the perspective is broader. The TCO of the platform itself becomes transparent: hardware utilization, resource distribution across customer environments, and opportunities for optimization. This overview is available as an integrated view.

Signals about under- or overutilized resources can be proactively forwarded to a SIEM or external monitoring environment, ensuring the reporting layer aligns with existing operational workflows.

The decision that needs to be made

Those aiming to achieve the same level of insight on an alternative stack often end up combining five to ten separate tools. Each comes with its own configuration, update cycle, and integration layer. Licensing costs may appear lower at first, but the combined effort of management, integrations, and manual work rarely is.

In the public cloud, another factor comes into play. Monitoring services such as AWS CloudWatch and Azure Monitor charge per metric. Anyone wanting full observability pays for it per data point. The base price may look attractive, but the bill scales with the level of insight you require.

In VCF 9, data streams from all virtual machines, network components, and storage systems are already part of the platform. The reporting layer is not an add-on but an integrated capability, and its cost is included in the platform pricing.

The comparison that needs to be made is therefore not just about licensing. It is about operational effort, management overhead, and the question of which insights an organization wants to have available by default, for whom, and at what total cost.

Insight as part of the architecture

In VCF 9, compliance, sustainability, and financial insight are a direct result of the way the platform is built. All relevant data is already present. The reporting layer simply makes that data usable for the different stakeholders within the organization, from the security officer who needs an ISO report to the procurement manager who requires a CO₂ overview for a tender.

Curious what VCF 9 means for your environment, compliance, and platform costs? Get in touch for an exploratory conversation and technical assessment.

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