Can ESA be used to monitor arrays that have nothing to do with vmware?

It depends on the array.  For instance VNX supports the use of physical hosts.  You can add any VMAX array, though without VMware you won't get metrics below the storage group level.  If you can be more specific about your needs I can be more specific with the answer.

Thanks for the response.

Environment is VMAX3, XtremIO and Isilon. Customer wants to know if he can use ESA  for the arrays instead of other tools such as SRM, Unisphere from VMAX and also XtremIO XIO.

Question: Are there metrics in  ESA that customer can't get from  SRM?

No, as ESA gathers a subset of metrics of those available in something like Unisphere for VMAX.

ESA is based on VMware vRealize Operations Manager (vROps) and ESA in general are plugins called management packs (MP) for vROps (I am not sure if vROps itself is bundled with ESA for the same price).

vROps itself is a great product, which moves something that everybody knows as monitoring to the next level which is IT Operations Analytics: based on metrics being monitored it can can automatically discover anomalies and based on number of anomalies it can show you how important it is for your infrastructure, most importantly it can predict something before it can have impact on your infrastructure.

vROps is supposed to be IT environment wide, that means gathering information from all the leyers (storage, compute, netowork, applications) and all the vendors not only EMC.

So with vROps you can monitor everything you can imagine:-)

This is great so far, but as always there are some caveats. Depending on if what you monitor is part of vsphere, and in which layer it is and which vendor you want monitor, you need to pay for a specific vROps license (with Advanced you can monitor everything that touches vSphere, and Enterprise is required for applications and monitoring outside vsphere) and management pack that allows for monitoring different stuff eg. for Oracle, MSSQL, SAP you need MP from Bluemedora (company that specializes in creating MPs for vROps also for EMC, Cisco), for Brocade you need Brocade MP, for Juniper you need Juniper MP etc.

All the management packs you can find here: https://solutionexchange.vmware.com/store/category_groups/cloud-management?category=cloud-operations&nanosite_id=3&cloud…

So to fully answer your question I suppose one needs to see:

• Does ESA comes with vROps and which license level?
• If ESA is vROps bundled is there any additional license agreement note that says differently that vROps license.

Based on what you want to monitor you need to choose the right license and the right MPs.

I hope I have helped.