VMware Aria Operations Reviews

Our primary use case is to monitor the performance of the virtual machines as opposed to monitoring the performance of the OS. We'll monitor OS and stop at the OS, whereas vROps will pick up what's going on underneath. If the datastore is having a problem, it will bubble up to the VM and show us that.

It has allowed me to give the developers insight into what's actually happening underneath the covers. They used to only be able to see their app and now, they can see underneath. We've also given them access to see into the OS and we've given them a full stack view of how their application is performing.

It has helped to reduce the time it takes to troubleshoot issues and has improves quality of service to our users. 

The most valuable feature for us is the one that allows us to take over the DRS within vCenter and does it more intelligently. 

We have found it to be intuitive and user-friendly. 

I would like to go back in history on the performance data and blank out some of that performance data so that it isn't used in calculations. For instance, if an application goes wild and uses up all the resources, I don't want that to be understood as that VM needs more resources.

Stability is fine. The only issue I've had with it was an issue that I myself caused. 

We're not big enough to warrant scalability. 

Their technical support is good. They found the problem quickly. Support gets back to us quickly. When you raise a support call they don't get back to you with a candy email, they actually get back to you and help. 

The initial setup was very easy. 

We looked into a competitor but it was way too expensive. The fact that vROps came as part and parcel of the vRA enterprise gave us a huge win on the cost. 

I would rate this solution an eight. 

Capacity planning: Being able to see trends, so we can help plan for next year's capacity needs.

In infrastructure, from host down to storage (being levels), it can track problems easier and is able to diagnose problems quicker.

We're more proactive than reactive, so that's important to our customers.

The interface can be slow sometimes. I don't know if it's because all the data's being transcribed. When there's an issue, drill down, wait, and that could be a problem.

There's lots of whitepapers out there and installation guides. They also offer installation services for you. I highly recommend having them by your side to do it or else you'll be missing out on a couple things.

We haven't had any issues at all with it.

It's perfect.

Have not used it.

It's a lot easier to click and drill down, which are two things. It is as important as the capacity planning and business chargeback as well.

It was pretty straightforward. Obviously, we had VMware help us through it, but most of it was pretty straightforward.

The vendor has to have great support: 24/7 support.

ManageEngine, and we used Veeam and Veeam ONE. Those were basically the only ones.

I would definitely recommend having VMware come in and do a demo about all of the features it has, because a lot of places don't use all the features that are baked in. Thus, they're missing a lot of data that could be useful.

Definitely look how it helps their company and what the product does, because it's not a one size fits all. So definitely understand what the business requirements are and how vROps helps.

• Reports
• Dashboards
• Email notifications
• Health, risks, efficiency badges
• Troubleshooting capabilities
• Auto rotation feature of dashboards for NOC displays

• With the use of dashboards, we can provide Business Units and customers a certain level of self-control over their virtual environments.
• Access can be restricted to only objects relevant for certain users/administrators.
• With the combination of email notifications of health issues and upcoming risks, administrators and engineers can respond in a preventive way instead of reacting after issues.
• The network administrators and engineers can monitor all NSX components with this product.
• The storage administrators and engineers can monitor physical storage components with this product.

Improvement can be achieved in reports automation when creating custom environments and dashboards.

It would be very useful and time saving if this could be included in the process of creating dashboards to generate a report based on the created dashboard. Also it would be handy if it would be possible to export all snapshot images in one click action.

We have been using the system for about 18 months now. We have just upgraded to 6.2 this month.

We have not yet encountered any stability issues.

Unfortunately, we encountered a limitation in version 6.2. In this version it is not possible to import data from another Operations Manager instance already running. The workaround is to first import on version 6.0 and then upgrade that instance to 6.2.

Technical support is good. Inside the vRealize Operations Manager in each section there is a direct link to the document center of VMWare containing technical documentation, and tutorials for that particular section.

We did use other solutions and still do. Especially certain hardware equipment needs to be monitored in an other way or is not yet supported in vRealize Operations Manager.
The reasons we chose this product are:

• Licensing model is the best choice for the way we provide services to our customers.
• Our virtualization platform is VMWare and we are implementing more components (currently LogInsight) to complete our Software Defined Datacenter.
• vRealize Operations Manager can easily integrate with all these components.

I would advise to make a design before starting actual setup.
A few examples of design considerations:

• More than one vCenter to monitor.
• Need for high availability.
• Need to migrate historical data from previous version.

The initial setup is very straightforward and relatively easy. Depending on design you can have certain choices during installation to fit your needs.

There are different versions and licensing models available.
I would advise to read this pdf: https://www.vmware.com/content.

We also considered Veeam One. Our choice for the VMWare SDDC is the best product for us.

Before purchasing this product, I would advise to install the 60-day trial (http://www.vmware.com/try-vmware.html) in a test environment and see if this is a fit for the organization as well as the administrators and engineers. In my opinion the way vRealize operations manager operates (and will be used) is different to most traditional monitoring solutions.

The most valuable features of VMware vRealize Operations (vROps) are capacity and performance management.

VMware vRealize Operations (vROps) can improve the Layer 3 hypervisor VM infrastructure because we do not manage other applications. We need a package, which is too expensive. We would like to manage native VMware applications, VMware native components, hypervisor, and storage, such as vSAN.

I have been using VMware vRealize Operations (vROps) for approximately two years.

The stability of VMware vRealize Operations (vROps) could improve. It can help us to build a dashboard report on a job, but it seems very slow to produce or deliver the dashboards. We are tunning it to make it go fast.

The support provided by VMware vRealize Operations (vROps) is average.

The initial setup of VMware vRealize Operations (vROps) was very minimal.

We are experts and we install VMware vRealize Operations (vROps) on a host, and we import an appliance, such as OVA, and we deploy it.

We have a team of four people that does the maintenance and support of the solution.

I would advise others that VMware vRealize Operations (vROps) is a good tool to manage VMware application components, for sending storage on RPMs. For example, if we have a basic hypervisor or storage based on VMware files, such as VMFS. It is a great tool for that.

I rate VMware vRealize Operations (vROps) a nine out of ten.

There is a newer version available which will have better features.

I mainly use VMware vROps for capacity planning, performance tuning, and lower-sized VMs.

VMware vROps' most valuable feature is that it integrates well with our VMware infrastructure, which is helpful for us because we can closely monitor our VMs and their performance.

An area for improvement would be application-level monitoring.

I've been working with VMware vROps for four years.

VMware vROps' stability is good.

The scalability is fine - normally, it comes with analytic and user-interface VMs, but we've combined them as single VMs, so now we can manage our roots with a single VM.

VMware's technical support is good.

We previously used Spectrum but switched to VMware because we already had a VMware environment.

The initial setup was straightforward.

We used a vendor team.

I would recommend VMware vROps for those with a VMware infrastructure and would rate it as nine out of ten.

It was helpful in identifying the CPU, memory, and space utilization, which was very much important for us. We needed alerts when the utilization increased a lot, and we were able to inform the customers that we have a particular problem that could be the root cause of the problems that they might face later. They were then able to take some preventative measures in advance, which reduced a lot of problems.

It was very useful for regular monitoring, disk utilization information, and root cause analysis. It was also helpful in identifying why a specific issue is happening or why an error is occurring. 

It enabled us to be more proactive in anticipating and solving problems. We could know beforehand about the machines that might be at risk for high utilization. 

Alerts and monitoring were most valuable. It was also pretty user-friendly and interactive. I was able to generate good reports in PDF and HTML formats, which was really helpful.

The visibility that it provided for our infrastructure was pretty good. The snapshots were also useful.

vROps did a lot of monitoring, but in one case, we had to use Log Insight instead of vROps because vROps was not able to install the agent to enable us to have multi-monitoring. I don't exactly remember the case, but it involved monitoring all applications.

It wasn't exactly proactive. It was supposed to, but there were a lot of delays. It could also be because of our infrastructure and the way our network was set up. If vROps could be more proactive, that would be nice. It is nice to have the information beforehand, but when there is downtime, it takes a lot of time for us to be able to see an issue in real-time, which becomes a bit challenging. If there is a way to improve the data collection for the whole vCenter that would be nice because data collection takes a lot of time.

I used VMware for around five years, from 2015 till January 2021. Except for vCloud Director, I've used most VMware products such as vSphere client, Log Insight, and vRealize Automation.

It was pretty stable. I didn't find many errors while deploying the application and after the deployment.

Our environment didn't scale much, so I cannot comment on its scalability.

We had four vCenters. One was in Santa Clara, US. One was in Beijing, China. One was in Manheim, Europe, and one was in Singapore. We also had test centers, and we integrated vROps for testing there. We had one in King of Prussia and one in Switzerland. So, majorly, we had four vCenters for the production environment, and these vCenters worked with around 4,000 virtual machines.

I have not used VMware's support for vROps.

This was the first tool that we tried to deploy for monitoring.

I was involved in the initial setup of vROps. It was pretty straightforward. Most of the VMware products are pretty straightforward to install.

In terms of the implementation strategy, we have always followed the documentation provided by VMware.

We tried to evaluate many solutions, such as Prometheus, Dynatrace, Nagios, and PRTG. It was best for us to go with vROps because it is a VMware product, and it integrates best with VMware vCenter.

I would recommend vROps for an Enterprise environment. Based on my experience, it is a great tool to work with. Rather than having a big vCenter and then installing vROps, it is good to have it when you're starting with a vCenter. That's because data collection takes time, and it would become an overhead for vROps. In such a case, you might need a load balancer and multiple vROps. So, I would recommend having a vROps when you start building a vCenter. It will really help in scaling up the environment, and you'll also know if you'll need to replicate vROps or not.

We didn't use it for workload placement because we didn't have the load balancer for that. It didn't help much in decreasing the overall downtime, and it also didn't affect our operations when it comes to overall downtime due to performance issues.

I would rate vROps an eight out of 10.

Our primary use case of this solution is that it helps us to monitor and troubleshoot our VMware environment.

This product has improved my organization because it has helped us with monitoring and troubleshooting our VMware environment.

The most valuable features would be that it helps you drill down the problems to the bottleneck of where it is which saves us time. We have to give time back to business and we cannot spend hours trying to figure out what happened.

I definitely find this solution to be intuitive and user-friendly. It's integrated with vCenter, so I think it is a good product.

This solution solves our problems. But every time I think it's perfect I come here and they add something new. 

It is stable.

We are from Portugal, so we are small environments, mostly SMB companies, but yes I think it will adapt to any kind of infrastructure.

Technical support is good, once you pass the first level. They know the product like no one else, so they always solve everything. 

We had some monitoring tools, PRTG and some of the stuff from SolarWinds, but it is integrated with everything from VMware. Everything is virtual so, I think it is the way to go.

The initial setup was very easy. We do not have a huge environment, we have eight ESX hosts, so it was pretty straightforward. It was easy to do.

Normally we have a partner or a VMware reseller that helps us implement the solutions.

We have seen ROI because the time we take to solve problems has decreased a lot, so that is the way we give back to the company in the investment.

We have tested some other solutions and they are not as integrated and as easy to manage. I would advise someone looking into this solution that one vendor is always a better option than three or four.

I would rate this solution a nine because normally I wouldn't give a ten. We do not have any problems with the product. It solves our problems. We now know if something is on the console and if there really is a problem. Before this, we had a lot of false positives. It digs into the problems and then at the end it just drops it. 

We use it to see the actual workloads of the VMs.

The benefits we see from it are the ability to quickly get reports for our bosses, determining the use of the environment, and that it lets us see the remaining capacity. For example, in some clusters where the resources are tight, it's giving us a good idea of what resources we really have left.

The most valuable feature is determining if more resources are needed, at the hypervisor level, based on the workload of the virtual machines that we have in our environment.

The descriptions are not quite as user-friendly as I would like but, for the most, it's part pretty user-friendly.

They could also improve on the badging nomenclature they have for batches in the system, for determining the health of a certain aspect of the system.

It's very stable.

It seems to be very scalable. I haven't scaled it, but we have people, contractors, who work for us who handle that.

We went with this solution because it was part of the user license that we have. It is part of the package deal for the Enterprise solution, so it was in existence before I joined the team.

In general, when selecting a vendor, the most important criterion is stability. If you don't have stability you've got big problems.

I couldn't necessarily say what our ROI is monetarily, but again, it goes back to finding information for reports that our bosses are asking for. For me, the ROI is in finding out what capacity is remaining in the clusters, the ESXi hosts.

I rate vROps at nine out of ten. To get to a ten it goes back to better explaining the badge labeling for batches.