VMware Aria Operations Reviews

The product is valuable - when we start virtualizing everything, specifically in the compute stack – for looking at the health of the ecosystem. It is very difficult to pinpoint your challenges in terms of performance. It also helps understand where your issues lie. vROps actually demystifies that for you, drilling deep into the infrastructure beyond what vCenter Server gives you. It puts together real metrics that make sense to you. For example, if we look at the metrics inside a vCenter Server, we can look independently at, for example, CPU utilization, processor, networking, but it's not tied together to give you a holistic view of the health of your environment. vROps actually does that for you, and then makes recommendations.

The other thing I love about the product is that, with other products like vRA and Orchestrater, we can actually send that information to an automation platform for self-healing and for mediation. That makes it very, very powerful.

For example, we can actually proactively monitor and anticipate server sprawl, or capacity depletion. We can actually see that coming before it arrives. We can head off issues such as saturation of resources in any particular host, aberrant behavior of applications. We can actually see those issues coming, head them off and manage more proactively, as opposed to reactively.

For example, we have people that have unfettered access to the vSphere environment. They just spin up servers at will, without really any regard for how that's going to have an impact on resources. vROps will give you a health batch, and you can start seeing problems develop before they arrive. It gives you an opportunity to anticipate a problem before it happens, address it and then remediate it before it actually becomes an issue in production.

The main concern, the main dropper right now was capacity planning, capacity management and heading it off.

Storage tends to be something that's always in high demand at our company. We really use this product to get a better forecast of organic growth and new organization. When you're going to look towards your budgeting for future years, you have to have something that's going to provide some type of a benchmark for you in terms of what you need to acquire for that next fiscal year.

One of the things about vROps is that, it's very robust. If you want to set up a notification, it's very, to me, involved. If they can streamline some of that through orchestration into what you’re trying to do with setting up alerts and things of that nature, in groups and policies, and tie those things together in a more seamless manner. I think that would be helpful.

There are multiple elements that need to be set up for a purpose, by contrast. I'll compare it to the installation of a vRA; when you set up vRA, it steps you through everything sequentially, like a workflow. If they can put a workflow into vROps for the types of things that you want to set up for policies, triggering and monitoring, I think that'd be very helpful; as opposed to clicking out of one pane, clicking into another pane, referencing what you just set up in a previous pane, those types of things.

Think about if, when you're setting up your triggers and your alerts, it could be something sequential, like through a wizard, or something of that nature. To help you walk through, take you right to the next screen that you need to go to. You don't click out of one area and then back in.

We’re not yet using any of the new features in version 6; that’s what I'd like to get to.

I think it's very, very stable. When it first came out, I did have some concerns with it. When it first came out, I can understand, as a maiden voyage, that there were some opportunities for improvement. I think VMware has worked very hard, as they typically will do, to remediate those issues. The only issues I had in the beginning was, the amount of information and tuning it required for the information to make sense to the typical admin. It really wasn't there, maturity-wise. I think they've done that now. The health batches now really do make sense to someone who has tuned the environment, or make sure that the application is tuned to their environment.

I think it's incredibly scalable.

We have a small environment. In our production environment we have 60 hosts and only, maybe, 500 VMs. I've not had an opportunity to use it in massive scale but for us, it's been something that we've been able to use.

I haven't used technical support; I haven't had the need to.

We previously the SolarWinds virtualization manager. The way in which it's licensed, the way in which it provides dashboarding is very, very complicated to use. The information is not easily consumable; it's just not easy digestible. We found that we had licensed versions of it sitting out for years without actually using it, because it just wasn't helpful for us.

I love the fact the vROps is tightly integrated with the other VMware families; purpose-built for running on vSphere. It's purpose built from the ground up by VMware architects and engineers who understand their other products and how they're bringing it to the family. For example, I'm looking to use vROps today to coalesce with vR Orchestrator, so that we could do some of the software mediation types of things through messaging to the vRO platform.

vROps is very, very straightforward to stand up. I would say, much more straightforward than some of the previous iterations. That's one of the other things I appreciate about the products VMware is bringing to market. They're making their products easier to deploy.

We looked at VMTurbo, now re-branded as Turbonomic. It didn't bring anything new to the fold for us. The way in which it's licensed is really, I think, a little bit outrageous. I just think VMware continues to do a stellar job in how they put together solutions that are purpose built and threaded together to work as an entire ecosystem.

Give it a chance, put it in a honey pot. I come from a consulting background, so a lot of companies tend to throw something directly into production. They don't actually have the opportunity to spend the time to learn the product first. That gives the product a negative connotation because it doesn't give them the results that they're looking for.

Apply the appropriate principles of project management during your pilot, your proof of concept, proof of technology. Then, pilot it, and then have a clear understanding of what it is, the scope and scale that you're trying to get out of the product. Then tailor your installation for that. I think that'll be something that'll have a higher chance of success.

We can manage the virtual environment of our organization with the help of the solution.

They keep improving and updating their apps over time. In each new version, we get lots of good features; thus, I don't have any concerns.

They should include an integration feature through which we can connect to different vendors by installing a small plugin.

We have been using the solution for more than five years. Also, I have been using it for 16-17 years, personally.

It is a stable solution.

It is a scalable product. We have a couple of 100 users using the solution in our organization. 

We are using VMware as it is a known product that helps to manage companies' virtual environments. Consumers are accustomed to using VMware, and it's a very old product as well. That's the main reason we are using it.

I recommend others use the solution and rate it as a nine.

I use VMware vRealize Operations for troubleshooting, monitoring the storage and network.

VMware vRealize Operations has helped our organization by providing troubleshooting our systems.

The performance for monitoring the VM is very good. Additionally, the solution is flexible.

The solution could improve by having more APIs, customized alerts, and documentation.

In the next release, there should be better integration with microservices.

I have used VMware vRealize Operations within the last 12 months.

The stability is very good.

VMware vRealize Operations is scalable.

We have one team in my organization that uses this solution.

The VMware support is very good. I had a great experience with them, they are the best.

I have used Grafana and Prometheus. Each solution has its use case, you need to know what use case you have to know what solution would be best.

I have previously worked with VMware, the installation was not difficult, I did not have any problems.

We have our partial script to repair and deploy the solution in the environments quickly.

I did the implementation myself.

We have a three-person team that handles the maintenance of the solution.

VMware vRealize Operations has very useful technology. We can deploy it on Amazon, but we didn't use the solution on the cloud yet.

I rate VMware vRealize Operations an eight out of ten.

We use it daily for troubleshooting. We use it for charting, for reports. It's an awesome product. The performance is good.

The most valuable feature is troubleshooting. When somebody comes and says, "I have slow response," and we say, "Really?" And they say, "Yeah, we want double the CPU and RAM." We can take a look at it and say, "Uh, no. Here's what you're using, and this is what you've allocated. Oh, and by the way, you've over-allocated, are you ready to give some back?" So it's been a great tool for us to reclaim resources.

It's user-friendly. When you click on it, everything is spelled out - as long as you understand the basics of how virtualization, CPU, and memory work. Everything you need when you click on it is right there. You just pick the right thing, and it gives you a report immediately. I think it's very intuitive.

I'd like to see more of the advanced reporting without having to go to the advanced product and paying the extra price. Canned reports are great, but you shouldn't have to pay for custom reports.

The stability is, for the most part, most of the time, excellent.

In terms of scalability, as far as I'm concerned, the jury's still out on that. There are some small details but we have a call coming up and we're working on it.

For the contract that we paid for, technical support was okay. For the service we're used to getting, before we downgraded our service, it was not as good. But that was not on them, that was on us.

Unfortunately, we were using vFoglight and that thing was the most complicated solution. You needed to be a rocket scientist to even use it. We were glad to get rid of it after three years, and we've been extremely pleased since we migrated.

The most important criteria, for us, when selecting a vendor are

• reliability
• length of time in the industry
• tech support.
  

The initial setup was not complex but a little hard.

I don't really have the numbers for ROI, but I can tell you it has increased them.

We looked at vFoglight again, but it was too difficult. We looked at a product called VMTurbo (Turbonomic), and it didn't really come up to par during the PoC that we went through. We weren't very happy with it.

In terms of advice to colleagues, I would give them examples of reports to prove that what we're saying is true, but the proof is in the pudding.

I rate it a nine out of 10. If it had more advanced features without having to pay for them it would be a 10.

The most valuable features of the solution are the effectiveness of hardware availability and flexibility.

The deployment of the solution can be improved by making it less complex.

The licensing cost is high and needs to be reduced.

I have been using the solution for 20 years.

VMware Aria Operations is a great product that is very stable.

The solution is scalable and we currently have 800 people using VMware Aria Operations.

I previously used other solutions and switched to VMware Aria Operations because of its functionality.

The initial setup of this solution is complex and takes a couple of weeks to deploy in our environment. We require six administrators for the deployment and maintenance.

The implementation was completed through a vendor.

The solution requires an annual license which is very expensive.

Before choosing VMware Aria Operations I evaluated other solutions. 

I give the solution an eight out of ten.

I would recommend the solution to others.

We use this product for troubleshooting and capacity planning.

Our troubleshooting steps include checking for performance issues, and that is the main concern. Apart from that, the capacity analysis features allow us to forecast capacity planning. We also use it for performance monitoring.

This product is what we use for all of our L1 and L2 tasks, such as increasing the amount of RAM or upgrading the CPU when configuring our VMs. Each and every task is clearly summarized.

If there is an event, such as a spike in disk activity, we are able to use vROps to clearly explain to the DB team what happened. We can look at a particular disk in the storage and determine what happened. Being able to properly explain it will help the DB team to check it on their end.

As a VMware engineer, the visibility of the infrastructure that it provides is something that I am really impressed with. When we are having performance issues, or problems with capacity, or the network, it clearly, easily, and in the quickest way, will show the cause of the problem and how to resolve it. Everything is crystal clear. vCenter is also useful for troubleshooting but I prefer vROps and think that it's the best option.

This product provides us with proactive monitoring. The dashboard gives us a clear picture of everything that is going on. From an operations perspective, we can view how many hosts there are, and whether anything is critical, all in a single view.

It allows us to monitor the entire environment. For example, we can see how many data centers we have and how many clusters are being hosted. The single dashboard shows us other details, as well, including the cumulative uptime for each cluster. Proactive monitoring really helps from a capacity-planning perspective. When we conduct a capacity analysis, we can forecast the future based on how things performed over the previous six months. It allows us to effectively predict capacity.

The capacity analysis will show us details like how many VMs were powered off over a period of time. Knowing this helps us to optimize and reclaim or release those resources.

vROps has helped us to decrease our overall downtime. This is in part because of the visibility with regards to what patches are needed. If any of the hosts need a critical update, we can view it from the dashboard and perform the patch proactively. The issue will be fixed on our schedule ahead of any problems.

With respect to workload placement, proactive monitoring and good integration make this system efficient. Based on the CPU and memory that is available, it will best decide how and where to place workloads. Efficiently also comes from the fact that we can log into vROps and view everything.

Another advantage is that because it covers L1 and L2 tasks completely, we do not have to give L1s or L2s access to vCenter. Instead, we can give them access to vROps. They can perform activities from there. For example, they can configure and generate reports, and forecast capacity based on them. From a VMware perspective, the troubleshooting is quite quick and easy to do.

The most valuable feature is that everything is integrated for monitoring, performance, and troubleshooting.

The interface is quite user-friendly. Regardless of what you are doing, everything is available on the dashboard. There is nothing that is too complicated.

We have integrated with other VMware products including vCenter, VRA, and Log Insight. Normally, we rely on vCenter for alerts, and based on those, we know what to monitor.

I have not used the Kubernetes integration but the feature is good.

Technical support is normally good but there is sometimes a delay in their response.

We have been using VMware vRealize Operations for approximately six years.

We are using version 8.1, which is both stable and efficient.

We provide support to our clients but for critical things that we are not able to resolve, or if they have an RCA, then we contact the VMware technical team. The support is good and I would rate them an eight out of ten.

That said, the support could use some improvement because sometimes, there is a delay before we get a response. If it is a P1 or P2 issue then it will be considered a high priority. Also, if the issue heavily impacts our business then they work quickly and well to resolve it.

They have different support teams to work on different issues. For example, vCenter was down and we didn't know why. After we checked the logs, we discovered that it was an issue related to storage. The network team was involved, as well as a VM team and a storage team. Bringing all of these teams together, they need a single point of contact to fix the issue. We would be grateful for this because when it comes to critical issues, this is L4 support, and we need to fix them.

We have it deployed on-premises but I have also deployed it in a hybrid cloud environment. I was not personally involved in the initial setup.

My advice for anybody who is implementing vROps is to first learn how to troubleshoot. If any issue should arise, the first point of contact is L1 and L2. From there, instead of going to vCenter and checking the logs, use vROps. It will allow you to easily find problems and monitor them.

As we are technical people, we need to develop a solution as soon as possible, instead of delaying. My preference is to log in to vROps and monitor everything. Once we locate exactly where the problem is, we can give a solution for it. Only if we do not find the cause here then we go to the logs.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.

We have a large, enterprise-level VMware virtual infrastructure. We use vROps for private cloud monitoring. We are using vROps for capacity management and audit monitoring. If there is any issue within the infrastructure, within the thresholds, vROps will capture them and trigger alerts. The triggered alerts are sent to our ticketing tool, using the REST API, and the ticket is created according to the priority. The respective first-level teams will handle those incidents.

The incidents we deal with are mainly in things like capacity management. Over a period of time, the virtual infra keeps growing. We measure when we are going to hit the entire capacity and we will always set thresholds 30 days ahead of hitting capacity. vROps will alert on that, and we can procure more hardware proactively and we can keep increasing the capacity well in advance.

VMware has released a feature called Continuous Availability (CA). We have HA within the data center and the CA is across the data centers. We use both services. For most of the infra we are using HA, meaning within a given data center, we have a master and master replica and multiple data. Based on the growth of our virtual infra, or if there is any new deployment, we'll keep increasing our data nodes. It can do analysis and give you beautiful reports. Those reports are very useful for management. What is the status of our memory and CPU? What was the utilization of infra like in the last 30 days? How many workloads were deployed? What are the future requirements? With a simple click we can generate the reports.

It certainly helps us to decrease overall downtime. While we have cluster-level resiliency on the vSphere end, vROps provides an alerting solution. On top of that, we can use workload balancing. vROps will sense that there are multiple clusters running, some that are more utilized and some that are under-utilized, and it will report that to us. If you use it to balance, it will automate that back to the virtual infra, and it will do all the migrations automatically. Workload balancing is a great feature from vROps. Without vROps, we had 80 to 85 percent uptime. With vROps, we improved that at least 10 percent and we are close to 98 or 99 percent uptime.

It has also increased VM density on particular clusters. Based on the memory assigned to the workload, the density on the cluster varies. If we have 50 VMs on a particular cluster, but the resource allocation is greater there, that cluster is heavily used. If we have a second cluster with 100 VMs, but each VM is assigned less memory and CPU, we cannot say that the density of the first cluster is only 50 and the second cluster is 100 VMs. It will calculate based on the demand and allocation model of capacity and resources to the workloads.

With vROps we have saved on hardware costs by at least 5 percent.

In addition, in general, if I want to see the logs for a particular object, I need to log in to vRealize Log Insight and search by framing a query. But because it is integrated with vROps, when I go to the cluster tree, if I click that object and click on the logs, it will automatically provide the output. It is very simple and I don't need to log in and frame the query.

The "what-if" analysis capability is important to us. We can create a report for possible failures. What if we lose one host or two hosts? And if we add two hosts, how does that affect our resources? Or if there is a new project and we need a certain amount of workloads deployed, how many hosts do we need? With the existing capacity, if we add that many workloads what will our remaining capacity be? We can do capacity analysis with this tool.

Policy tuning and the SDDC Management Pack for health monitoring are also important.

It gives us visibility into the virtual infrastructure, and even the physical infrastructure, and into the workloads running. We have visibility even at the level of the appliance services. We can monitor everything. We can also create dependency reports, so if a service is down, it will not impact things. It gives us those dependencies brilliantly.

When it comes to policies, they need to fine tune things to make it easier. It is a bit difficult setting up policies.

We have been using VMware vRealize Operations for six years. We started with version 6.x. We keep upgrading and now we are running on the latest version, 8.1.

With the HA feature it was a stable product, but with the new service, the Continuous Availability, we have seen some issues and we are not recommending that. We are re-deploying that infra to high-availability. CA is a great feature, but we see some issues with our infra, so we are using HA. As soon as we got that new CA feature we implemented it and we learned that it creates a lot of issues for our infrastructure, but it is working fine for other customers. VMware tried to help us and their solution was to move to the HA.

But stability-wise, it's good. It won't create any issues. If there is an issue, just a simple services restart will fix them. We've mostly seen that disk space consumption increases when we keep provisioning and expanding. But that works fine and the product's stability is very good.

We can scale up the infra without any downtime. There have been no issues. 

If there is any issue, they will pitch in and help, based on the severity. They're very helpful and very knowledgeable. We get good support from them. No issues. Their support has been brilliant.

We started applying vROps in parallel with the inception of our VMware infra.

The solution is very user friendly. In one step it is ready to deploy. We don't need to configure anything on the OS level. You just deploy it and power-on. We only need to configure in, vCenter, which infra we are monitoring. When we start to onboard, it's very simple to manage. Anybody can deploy and configure it. It is easy to deploy. There are a lot of publicly available articles that we can refer to. There was a great article on end-to-end setup.

Based on the virtual infrastructure size, we decide which appliance size is needed. Do we need to go for tiny, medium, large, or extra-large. The decision is based on our environment's capacity, how many objects we have within the virtual infra. We first deploy the master, then the master replica, and then the data nodes. We can run with one master node, but if we deploy master and replica and data nodes, it gives us more resilience. So even if we have a failure on the master, the master replica makes it a high-availability solution.

Deployment takes just 15 minutes, and we can have vROps up and running in 30 minutes.

There are five members on our team and everyone has knowledge of vROps. Everyone is certified. There is no segregation of roles. Everyone takes care of the entire product life cycle, whether it's upgrading, troubleshooting, or streamlining. We use it day in and day out. Our key job is tracking of vROps' health and alerts-monitoring, to make sure it's running fine. It's part of our daily work.

They forecast our pricing based on the objects we deploy, but I'm not involved much with that. The licensing part is a bit complicated.

We have not evaluated other solutions since this one is from VMware itself. We prefer to use the proprietary solution.

It provides proactive monitoring, but it is not a real-time monitoring. It is polling every five minutes. If there is an issue in the first minute, but polling happens at the fifth minute, there is a gap of four minutes. It will capture that failure and alert in the fifth minute. It is more reactive monitoring, in that sense. But at least we know there is an issue.

Overall, vROps is maturing, year by year. New versions have a lot of scope. We are not fully utilizing it, but if you understand the product features correctly, it will save you a lot of cost and reduce manual efforts. I would recommend it. If someone is looking for virtual monitoring, vROps is the best solution.

For most data center operations teams, it is pretty hard to get a comprehensive view of what’s going on in their IT ecosystem. Virtualization and cloud service abstractions have made cross-platform relationships between different layers of the IT stack more complex. Heterogeneous, hybrid environments are the norm. IT pros have found visibility to be the #1 challenge facing operations teams. VMware Blue Medora management packs aggregate operations data from the leading server, storage,compute and database applications into vRealize Operations for rich analytics and helped to achieve full stack view of the environment.

Using VMware vRealize Operations with Blue Medora TVS helped to centralize data center operations monitoring platform. By adding the True Visibility Suite, its helped to monitor  applications, database, virtualization/cloud, compute, network and storage using one monitoring platform.

All the Blue Medora vROps management packs have features like:

· OOTB dashboards

· Collected metrics

· OOTB Reports

· Alerts and recommendations

· External relationships

· Capacity planning

• Reduced cross-team friction by eliminating MTTI hunts through, siloed infrastructure tools.

• True Visibility customers can see up to 50% reduction in time for root cause
  analysis.
• Cleared up alert storms with built-in policies that disable alerts for your dev environment and other less-critical resources.
• Increased tier I app availability up to 50% by pinpointing problems faster and more accurately with dependency-aware dashboards.
• Were able to drill down to native-tool detail to find noisy.

One missing component was the integration of Log Insight and vRealize Business within vROps. But, with the new version of vROps (v6.5 & v6.6), this requirement was also met with, as the other products in vRealize Suite are now fully-integrated.

More than five years.

As such, no stability issues were experienced from vROps during deployment, configuration, and the collection of metrics and data into the platform. 

The client decided to add an additional node to increase the capacity and resources within vROps analytics cluster so it could support the additional metrics collection process. You can scale vertically or horizontally.

I have received excellent support from VMware & Blue Medora support team.

Yes, Engineered by Blue Medora and validated by VMware, the True Visibility Suite included an extensive knowledge portal and includes 24/7/365 individualized technical support

It was implemented in-house

By using vROps plus Blue Medora TVS you can Maximize Performance, Minimize Investment
Reduce the IT tools, eliminate silos and boost IT productivity by up to 67%.

• Deploy in minutes without additional services or expertise.
• Maintain performance, reduce administration with agentless design.

The True Visibility Suite is available in three editions: Standard, Advanced and Enterprise. 
These packages align with the various infrastructure teams, and offer a convenient
way to pick the best package that applies, without being tethered to just one vendor or
device type.

There were a couple of options that we considered, like Microsoft SCOM and SolarWinds, but the level of monitoring and dashboard visibility wasn’t there.

• Conduct workshops and capture monitoring requirements at a high level; document and understand the customer's requirements. 
• Study the customer’s infrastructure, as it will be useful during the implementation stage.
• Align the customer's requirements, so that all the required systems are monitored in the vROps platform.
• Work out the network firewall rules that are required to configure vROps.
• Use the vROps sizing guidelines and sizing guide spreadsheet prior to vROps deployment.
• Deploy the remote collectors for bigger environments as it puts less load on the analytics cluster.
• Post deployment of vROps, you should create a full-stack relationship dashboard, as it helps to identify issues at various tiers in a typical 3-2-1 type environment.
• Make use of role-based user account management.
• Avoid taking snapshots or backups of vROps nodes during DT window.