VMware Aria Operations Reviews

We use it for monitoring our VMs and our data storage.

It has certainly saved me from problematic phone calls from people like VPs in my company saying, "Hey, this service is down," because we know in advance when we are running low on disk space. It preemptively alerts us and we can go in and fix the issue. That is what I really wanted from it.

We would get calls a lot. We'd have servers that would suddenly start chewing up a ton of resources and storage and then, when they would run out, everything would stop. I would get that phone call at 2 am: "Why is this down?" and I would have to dig through and look. It's gotten rid of that part of it.

It is also helpful how vRealize looks at your data over time, at the performance of the machine over time. It can make assessments of the machine's health, based on that, for example, if there are sudden changes. That's helpful to look at because we've been able to see, on occasion, where machines suddenly start doing things that they weren't doing.

Sadly, we actually found a machine that had been compromised because it started doing a lot more work after hours and at weird hours. Apparently, somebody was using us for Bitcoin farming. It was helpful in that regard. That is another return on investment because I wasn't expecting to be able to do things like that.

It does exactly what I program it to do at this point, which is to tell me if I've got machines running out of disk space or over-utilizing CPU or memory. The monitoring component of it is the most valuable feature.

Intuitive? Probably. User-friendly? It could probably use a little work there. It is something of a beast. There's a lot that it can do but getting in there and getting everything working the way you want it to can be challenging. You have to dedicate more time than I've given to it.

It seems very stable. I haven't had any issues with the server going down. It's been pretty much hands-off. I set it up three years ago when we got it and it's still emailing me today, without any interference on my part. I probably need to go back and upgrade it.

It is pretty scalable. We really haven't gotten into building it out. We have a fairly small operation as far as VMware goes.

We really weren't using anything before. We tinkered around with some third-party products. Then I came to one of the VMworld conferences a few years back, and they were talking about - it was called something else before, like vCOPs, vCenter Operations. I sat through a spiel on that and realized it called out 90 percent of the things that I needed to know about and that I was getting calls on.

The initial installation was very easy, straightforward. Getting it to do the three things that I wanted it to do, in terms of emailing for those specific metrics, that was very easy to do. Beyond that, when I started looking at some other things it can do, it gets very complex very fast. There is a lot more to it.

The ROI certainly is apparent with the downtime being eliminated. As a college, if any of our critical systems go down, students can't register for classes, students can't get in and do things, and that means lost productivity for a lot of people - not just me at 2 am fixing something, or one of my guys fixing it.

We used ManageEngine, but that was more looking at the Windows side of things. I can't remember any of the others we looked at.

I would definitely suggest to colleagues that they use this solution. I would encourage them to take a training class on it so they can get more out of it, get their money's worth.

I rated it an eight out of 10. I like it. I think it could be a 10. There are things I'm not doing in there, so any difference between my score and a 10 is probably my own fault for not utilizing it fully.

The primary use case of vROps is to balance our infrastructure, both from a predictive and reactive standpoint, for outage and maintenance.

The solution has allowed us to become more predictive, versus reactive, in terms of our infrastructure management.

It has helped to reduce the time needed to troubleshoot issues, improved quality of service to users, and provided cost savings through higher capacity. The primary benefit we're getting is from an operational standpoint. It has helped us to operationalize our processes and procedures. It has also helped us to stay ahead of our capacity planning so that we become more predictive, versus reactive. And then, the analysis features available with it allow us to do very high-level, enhanced root-cause analysis on events and issues that arise.

One of the most valuable features is the trending analysis of our environment to make capacity-planning decisions, in addition to providing real-time analysis of events.

I find it to also be intuitive and user-friendly. The layout, from a GUI standpoint, is somewhat logical. There are definitely some improvements made in the latest version, but I have not worked with the latest version yet. Overall, we find it relatively straightforward to work with.

One thing we'd like to see, although I think they already have done so, is moving away from Flash.

In terms of additional features, we'd like to see more integration with management packs, because one of the challenges we have is, depending on our third-party, we'll have to go outside of VMware to purchase management packs. If VMware increased the native management packs library, that would obviously help save us money and not have to rely on third-party solutions.

When it comes to stability, we haven't had any issues.

For the most part, the solution is within our initial requirements, although our requirements are changing and evolving. One definite item we would like is the capability to expand the license count per solution. That would help us to ensure we have a single pane of glass for the entire company, versus having various solutions for different environments within the company.

We are BCS (business critical support) customers and, for the most part, they have been able to help us when we do have issues, and escalate as needed. The only concern that we do have, at times, is the availability of that support. There have been times where, when we've needed support, we've had to, unfortunately, wait for that support, for an available engineer. But it's improving, and we'll continue using it.

It became apparent we needed to switch when our tickets-to-resolve timeline was significantly higher. We weren't meeting SLAs as we needed to. With the introduction of this solution, we were able to meet the demand, rather than just meet SLAs. Through the trending analysis that we can do, it allowed us to quickly and easily right-size the capacity from a cluster.

In addition, when issues did arise, it helped us to quickly identify what those problems actually were. The main advantage was time. We got a lot of time back that we could then use to innovate and optimize our environment.

I initially deployed the solution for our company. It's relatively straightforward. There's a lot of good online documentation and there's YouTube.

Our ROI is time. It has reduced the amount of time it takes to troubleshoot an issue.

We looked at a couple of VMware's competitors. One of them was VMTurbo (now called Turbonomic). The main reason we went with vROps was the ease of integration, ease of use, and the support behind it. The community behind vRealize is relatively large and that just made the decision that much simpler for us.

Also, from a cost standpoint, we were able to negotiate with VMware. And, with VMware, the deployment process was a lot simpler for us, and the training-learning curve for vRealize versus the other solution tended to be the easier, so that was also a factor.

We've been using it for approximately two years now. We originally upgraded from vCOps to vROps. We have also expanded our platform to include vRealize Log Insight which further helped us to understand and perform RCAs as needed, when events occur.

Get involved in the community. Get involved in performing hands-on labs. And, quite frankly, deploy it. Create use cases, create your test cases, and validate them.

The reasons I rate vROps at eight out of 10 are because there are always areas for improvement. In addition, the limited amount of management packs natively available through vROps is a huge factor. As you can imagine, as with most companies, we do use a gambit of other solutions and other hardware, and the ability to use vROps as a single pane of glass would allow us to have one solution for all, and make for easier integration.

The key for us is visibility into the infrastructure, both at the application layer and with performance of historical trends. Thus, the ability to drop in and see when an application has changed, what's gone wrong, and getting them to focus on a quick remediation.

Quick remediation of problems.

They could improve their consistency in execution.

I would like to see these additional features in the next release:

• Deeper dive analytics
• Better licensing models.

No issues. It's been good.

No issues so far.

We have contacted technical support in the past. They are very good. We do have a TAM resource on-site, which definitely gives us an in when we are having problems.

We weren't using anything previously for virtualization. We invested in this solution because we needed to stay ahead of our competition and landscape. It was the obvious choice for consolidating our datacenters and simplifying the infrastructure.

It seemed fairly straightforward, but I have very complex engineers.

IBM, PureSoftware, and Dell EMC.

Advice for anyone looking at VM solutions:

• Stay abreast of the changing technology, because it is moving fast. Simple is better for time to market.
• Do some PoCs and train your engineers.
• Research total cost of ownership, deployment time, and the complexity of their applications.

Our most important criteria when selecting a vendor:

• Reliability
• Peer reviews
• Technical support
• Their willingness to work with us.

The tool really gives our VM admins the ability to dig deep into the VMs and really get a feel for what's going on. That's really a gap that we had prior to this product. Application teams would claim performance issues, etc. Our team really didn't have the tools to get in and do that deep-dive analysis without logging onto host and doing some very deep, technical commands. Very few people were able to do that type of analysis and this tool has really allowed us to open that up to more of our team, to be able to get a quick idea of what's going on with a VM.

It gives us quicker time to resolution. If we're in an outage situation, our teams can quickly get in there and identify whether it is a storage issue, a network issue, or a compute issue. It gives them the ability to discover that pretty quickly and then, when there is an issue, we can go back and do root-cause analysis. It gives them that ability to dig deep in and not just see it was a network issue, but get more specifics and hopefully get to an actual resolution because of that long-term fix.

It's a very powerful tool. It gives us the ability to get a lot of visibility that we just did not have before. The capacity management side of it is very big for us as well. Just being able to understand you know are we getting the most out of our infrastructure or not.

The biggest gap that we have today is that it doesn't integrate with our ticketing system. We get alerts out of the system in an email but those aren't actionable alerts. We actually did another professional service engagement with VMware to try and tailor those alerts some. We have been able to do that, but it's still an email alert, where we'd really like for that to be a ticket, so that somebody can be responsible for taking action on that.

There's also some gaps with the ability to aggregate the data and show it at a higher level. You have to dig deep into the specific VM to get the information you want. Not just anybody can do that. We've been able to open it up to more people on the team, but it's still not a completely intuitive tool that they can just pick up and use.

It seems to be a stable tool. We did have some issues early on with getting the kind of configuration correct. We've actually had to rebuild it, I believe two times, because of some bad configuration to start out with and, I guess, some databases getting too large. Outside of that, the tool has been pretty stable for us. For the most part, it's pretty reliable.

It seems scalable as well. It does a really good job of looking at the entire environment and aggregating all that data together. Going back to the scale and the database issues that we have had, I think that had to do with the amount of data that we were collecting on the number of VMs we were collecting. Now that we've got that fine-tuned a little better, it does seem to be pretty scalable in meeting our needs in that aspect.

We have used technical support. I don't know that I have a very solid answer regarding it, though. That would be more of our technical guys that were in there, day-to-day, dealing with it. I do know that we've had issues we've been able to resolve, but how easy that was, I'm not all that sure.

We really weren't using anything different. We were just using the vCenter functionality, really knew there was a gap there, and looked at the tools on the market at the time. We went with this tool because it really did give us that ability to dig deep into the VMs and get that technical deep dive. With some of the other tools, it was more of trusting the algorithms to tune the VMs correctly. We really wanted a little more control than that; that's why we went with this tool.

We use professional services to do the setup; that definitely helped us there. We did have configuration issues. There were some things that maybe weren't apparent at the time we went through the install. Over time, support realized there were some issues and made some different recommendations. I'll say using professional services definitely gave us a good foundation that we at least were doing things according to best practice at that time.

VMTurbo was the main one that we looked at.

The most important criteria when I’m selecting a vendor like VMware is the relationship. We have a good relationship with VMware. Also, whether it is a proven product, and then obviously cost is always at the top of the list.

I recommend vROps. I recommend professional services engagement, as well, especially for the tuning of the alerts, because it comes out of the box with just a lot of information. It takes a bit to get through that and kind of narrow it down. Your team either needs to really understand and be able to spend the time to do that, or get somebody to help you that's been through that experience before.

The most valuable feature is that it stores all the data from the vCenters that we point it at, so it's an essential place to get that sort of performance data; the CPU utilization and disk utilization data is the most important part. It also provides us with inventory information, which is somewhat useful.

We use it to do many things. One is to investigate and troubleshoot problems in the environment, and another is to set thresholds and then notify the operations center when things are outside. I guess the key benefit is that alerting capability and having the data available when we have to troubleshoot problems.

We can set thresholds for disk utilization, memory utilization and CPU utilization, which is usually like a side effect of disk performance.

Like everything at VMware, they should just throw the FLEX stuff - the UI abstraction - out. It's terrible. They've got to have more natural language querying tools, easier ways of building reports. The reporting interface is pretty terrible. It's not real intuitive. It's in FLEX; it's really difficult to use. It's sort of clunky and slow. It's not a natural way to work with the data. There are lots of layers and the presentation is quite ugly. In some ways, it would be easier for me to just work directly with the relationship database or something.

Another thing that would be nice - I don't know if it works yet: We're sort of missing metadata and tagging throughout the whole vSphere ecosystem. If we tag things in a cloud abstraction - we use Bio; actually, we're one of the only customers that does - and we put meta data tags in there, those don't show up as real tags in vSphere. I don't even know if we could get tags in vSphere; if we could actually get them consumed by vROps, we'd like to organize everything in tags and not in folders. It's sort of antiquated, the whole object model inside of vSphere feels like it's from 20 years ago.

Those would all be nice things to have.

I think it's stable. It doesn't fall down. It's fine.

Scalability seems to be a lot better now too. I don't know what they did with the six-step or whatever it is, but they created some sort of different database underneath that seems to be pretty much invisible and just works. We had issues with earlier versions; I think it just got faster. It is my understanding that they changed up the database.

I don't really pay a whole lot of attention to vROps, but it does seem to require very little maintenance from us. Which is good, because otherwise we probably would've bought something else.

I do not really use technical support. There's another group that's our tools and monitoring team. They may use it because they built some dashboards and set some of the thresholds. I haven't really had to.

I did not previously use a different solution; this is all we've used in our environment. There's another side of the house that's sort of a more traditional IT side of the house that I work with. There's vFoglight from Dell. That's really terrible. vROps is a step up from that.

Initial setup was pretty straightforward, although you have to think about the overall size of your environment and do a little planning. It requires a little bit of thought.

We looked at VMTurbo. That one seems okay, but it wasn't compelling enough to buy something different. vROps is a part of the suite license that we have, so it's sort of already there.

Capacity planning: Seeing where the hot spots are in our enterprise and where we're running out of computing resource capacity and what we need to address at a glance.

It's helped us be more proactive rather than reactive.

I also use it for performance management. We've used it a lot of times to justify to other teams that own VMs whether or not their VMs are oversized or right-sized. We've been able to reclaim capacity by using data from vROps, so that's been very helpful. Being able to reclaim capacity means you can run more efficiently.

It might have indirectly helped us avoid outages through making sure that we have capacity.

They could look at some of their competitors and take some lessons there on, for example, having vROps be a little bit more interactive with your vCenter and actually apply changes for you, and be more proactive in utilizing the resources that you have.

It's really good at monitoring, but it's not fantastic at helping you resolve issues. It sometimes seems overly complicated to figure out what's wrong. If you're troubleshooting a problem, it can get pretty complicated to figure out where to go, where to look, and give you that information easily.

It's very stable. I haven't had it go down unexpectedly or anything.

I haven't had any problem with scalability. We're not a huge shop. I have about 1,000 VMs and about 80 hosts, and it, I'm sure, can handle a lot more than that.

I have used technical support. I actually have a case open as I’m giving this review. It's unresolved, after about a week and a half, so it’s not great. I think they released some modules for vROps that don't quite work right. There's some particular cases for the SQL plug-in. It's not working as advertised and they're trying to figure it out.

We were using SolarWinds, which was a pretty good product. vROps got kind of bundled with another VMware solution, so the price was right. You need something to monitor your enterprise. You can't be looking into every cluster and every vCenter that you have; then you have stuff everywhere. Centralized monitoring was really why we switched.

It was a pretty simple setup. It just takes a while to gather useful information out of it. They even say it's about 30 days before you can actually really do anything with the information coming out of it.

VMTurbo was on our short list at the time.

When selecting a vendor like VMware, the most important criteria is whether it works.

• Capacity planner
• Analysis reports
• Health check
• Dashboard (Default and customized one’s)

Best tool for capacity planning and analyzing the existing infrastructure in VMware.

By scheduling the reports on a weekly basis on under-utilized machines and over-utilized machines and analyzing them to provide the best resource. We can then balance them to improve the benefits of the resources and plan for the integration of more VM’s into the existing infrastructure.

• Resource management
• Capacity planning

For the last three years.

No, it's a very simple installation with OFV available from VMware.

No, it’s got a very smooth with functionality.

No.

10/10 as we analyze the infrastructure and present it to our customers to improve the use of resources.

10/10, whenever we have faced any issue with this product VMware have given us good support.

No, I have learned about this product in one of the forums. I thought to use this product to utilize in my environment as it is the best resource analysis and utilization tool.

It’s very straightforward as the installation is done via OFV provided by VMware or easily available for download from VMware site.

In-house implementation.

Good product.

We just need to purchase licenses from VMware and this depends on how many VM’s we need to monitor via this product; else the setup is freely available at VMware site.

No, as I thought this is a good tool as heard in a VMware forum.

Best tool for Capacity Planning and getting the best use of resources.

We use it for data center virtualization and management.

I like the fact that the performance is good and that it makes it easy to consolidate all your servers.

If the cost of the license could be cheaper, it would be good.

We have been dealing with this solution for about three years now.

VMware vRealize Operations (vROps) is stable.

It is a scalable solution. We have two clients who are using the product.

The technical support is very good. They get it sorted within the SLA.

The initial setup is straightforward. It took about two weeks to deploy it.

We had a team of one or two engineers for the implementation process.

Our customers who have used it have definitely seen an ROI. Instead of using so many physical servers to achieve the same thing, they've reduced it to five physical servers, and they are able to do much more with those five servers.

The licensing model is annual. Compared to the price of other products, VMware vRealize Operations (vROps) is a bit on the high side. If it could be cheaper, it would be good.

I would absolutely recommend the product and would give it an eight out of ten.