VMware Aria Operations Reviews

One use case was to get better insights into the infrastructure, to be able to do things like closed-loop automation, based on the data that we're finding within vRealize Operations. But we're also using it to get a better understanding of capacity within our environment. That was the primary use case. We've expanded those use cases through integration with Log Insight as well.

We went from using industry standard KPIs to going to a complete on-demand model based on the algorithms from vRealize Operations. It has enabled us to drive more utilization out of our existing compute infrastructure to the point where, for a period of six months, we didn't purchase a single server or any additional compute. We were able to continue to sweat our existing assets.

The most valuable feature is the seamless integration with the vSphere Client and being able to go quickly back and forth between an incident within the vSphere interface and the actual drilling into it within vROps, to identify problems.

I find it to be intuitive and user-friendly as well.

The integration with Log Insight is a big thing for us. We're hoping to take point-in-time events that are happening within the environment, feed them into incidents within vROps, and then be able to execute a remediation step, through vRealize Orchestrator and the like.  We're looking for that seamless integration.

Stability has been good. There were some issues where we didn't have it scaled out properly, initially. But once we got a handle on that, because of the size of our environment - how to have it handle that much information coming at it - it became stable and has been since.

Scalability has been pretty easy. You just add additional worker nodes into the environment. It has not been a problem for us.

We have had to use technical support extensively. We had a pretty significant engagement to stand up the product and we've been using support as needed to understand certain metrics better and the things that we should be looking at. There's such a breadth of information in there that we needed some help trying to boil it down.

We did see a big change in that with the latest release, not dumbing it down, but consolidating some of the data that you're getting into a little bit more of a consumable format. It is easier to make sense of it without having to drill too far into the weeds.

Be prepared to get it spun up quickly but, to really get the value out of the product, I'm not saying you have to dedicate resources to it, just give it a little care. Don't just make it a shelfware product where you install and use it for one very small thing. It's a powerful product but you do need some expertise and some time and effort spent to actually drive value out of it.

When selecting a vendor, what's important to me is commitment to the customer in terms of supportability and to be with me when I do have issues. I want them to work with me to troubleshoot and understand that it's not always about the price, it's not always about the name, it's about how they react when things aren't going well.

Because of the early struggles we had, I would go with an eight out of ten for vROps at this point. Again, a lot of those things were just figuring out how much infrastructure it needed, to perform in our size of environment.

Our primary use case is monitoring and reporting on our VM infrastructure for student-facing applications, classroom-facing applications, and data center infrastructure like AD and DNS.

It has performed really well. I have been using it since whatever it was called before vROps, so I have been using it for a while. It works really well.

It gives us a lot of details about the environment that we normally wouldn't be able to see without using other tools. We get visibility into our infrastructure, a single interface to see storage performance, VM performance, and to find issues in the environment that we wouldn't normally see.

Some of the forecasting features give us a picture of, let's say, in six months I know that my storage will be full, or I'll be out of resources. It gives us a little bit of forecasting. But it's not a tool for us that really shapes how we do stuff or improves functionality, it's just a bonus. In terms of solving some problems, it helps there, but it doesn't make a big difference in the grand scheme of things for us.

The most valuable feature is the reporting, to be able to generate reports. You come in on a Monday and see, "Okay, here are the things it found in the environment, here are the issues it's seeing," and you can go and address them at your leisure. But you get that type of reporting, it's always there.

It's pretty user-friendly. It is very intuitive, the layout is well-built, and the user experience is well-built. You look at the interface and you say, "Oh, I understand what these sections or what these categories of features do." For example, for reporting, there's a tab that says "Reporting." You click on it and there are all your reports. So the user interface is really well-designed to make it intuitive.

One of the features I would like them to bring in is more application monitoring and more visibly into applications. Instead of the actual hardware and the environment, they need to go one step further and bring in application availability and application performance. I don't really care if the hardware's overloaded, as long as the application is performing correctly. That's all the users care about and that's all I really care about.

I've never had any issues with its stability. Even through updates, it's pretty stable.

In the environment I'm using it in currently, scale is not really an issue. In previous environments I was in, it scaled very well across all of the infrastructure. So scalability has never really been an issue for us because it's just a reporting tool.

I don't think I have ever had to use technical support. Customer service through VMware has always been fairly good. We haven't had to use it for this product but, overall, VMware is a pretty good customer service experience.

The setup is pretty easy. It takes 20 minutes and it's up and running. It's pretty straightforward.

It goes back to: "What does it actually do for us?" It's a nice-to-have and it gives us a little bit easier way of predicting when we're going to have issues. Or, if we have issues that no one else notices, a major reporting platform like vROps sees stuff before we know it's an issue. It gives us that heads-up along the lines of, "Hey, you might be having issues or you might be seeing issues in the future. You may not be right now, but here's something to look forward to." That's what it gives us, a bit of heads-up in terms of the way our infrastructure is performing.

Costs could always be lower.

For this environment we're fairly small, so we didn't really look at anything else. In other environments, we compared other products and other companies against vROps. But, for this environment, it's so small, it just made sense. It's easy enough to do, so we just went with vROps.

I rate vROps at eight out of ten. I don't think any platform will ever be a ten because there's always that little bit of room to grow. But they do what they do fairly well. Maybe there are other products that can do it a little bit better, but for the balance of cost, the ease of use, and how well it integrates into our environment, it is a good fit for a lot of places. If you have specific needs it doesn't fill, there may be better options. But for us, in our environment, it just works well.

The most important criterion in selecting a vendor is intuitive interfaces, the ease of management going forward. I don't want my reporting and management platform to be hard to manage. It's not something you should have to look after. It's something that should be looking after your infrastructure, not your having to look after it to look after your infrastructure. The most important thing is a good user experience, something that's very intuitive. If you bring some new person into the environment, you don't want them to take weeks to understand how the tool works and what it does for them.

Currently, the most valuable features of the product are monitoring, capacity management and planning; things of that nature.

We run a SCCM and SCOM. We took all of that and piped it in the back-end. That took a good amount of time; a couple of months to get it cleaned up and working. Once we had that completed, we first used it for capacity management and planning. With that, we were looking at what's over-provisioned, under-provisioned, things of that nature.

Moving forward, we took it to phase two, which is now. We're trying to do more proactive capacity management planning; look at forecasting on disk space, things of that nature. Now, moving forward, we're actually trying to move to a platform where we're going to try to make this our main monitoring base, too. We're going to build out portals. We're mapping everything as a service now, trying to go from individual VMs; we're trying to build everything out as a platform service and then build out portals so that we can publish all of these portals.

The benefits for us, because we're mostly virtualized, it's getting everything under one hood. That's probably the biggest thing for us.

It has most definitely helped us avoid outages or shortened outage time. I think that with forecasting and disk space features, we've easily avoided outages for machines. For example, we had older machines that had BDE partitions on them. With those, even if they're thin-provisioned, you had to take them down and remove that BDE partition before you could re-size them. With that, if you find something that ran out of space quickly, because we have a lot of growth there, we were able to forecast it, and say, "This thing is going to run out in three weeks; let's schedule some down time and get it cleaned up. Get some space added."

We use capacity management a lot and it's been pretty accurate for us.

With performance management, I think that some of the recommendations are a little off, but overall, it's been pretty good. They'll tell you that it's over- or under-provisioned. We've found that when we try to clean up and reclaim some resources, that might not necessarily be the case. Overall, we'll take about 50 to 60 percent of what they're saying we can remove and do that.

Adding it seems a little better with regards to saying that it's under-provisioned. We've found that when it's under-provisioned and we add the resources, what it's telling us is pretty accurate.

We're just getting into the new version 6 features now; more automation, increased integration with DRS for workload balancing and scheduling. We're still behind on some of it. We have not gotten into it yet.

We'd like to see more customizable things, more management packs; the ability to not have to customize the portals and do everything so ad-hoc. If they built more frames and shells into it so that you could deploy things easier and get it built out easier.

For example, and I'm not the primary one doing this, when you're building out the management monitoring portals and piping SCOM in and things of that nature, everything seems to be fully customized. There's no easy way to do that type of stuff. It should automatically be customized, or there should be templates or shells that you could use.

I'd like to see templates and other features built in, for when you're building out a portal and you want to give a portal and map out of all of your objects and services, and not machines themselves. I feel like that should either be built in or cleaned up so that you could build it in.

The UI can be a little laggy, at times; improving that would be nice. It just seems slow when it's loading out.

The organizational layout of it is pretty bad. There's a lot of information and a lot of tabs. When you're going to try and rifle through everything, it's very convoluted.

I have been using it for a year and half or two years.

We've had no stability issues to date. None. I know that it sounds crazy, but we did take it slow though.

Scalability has been good so far. We don't have a huge undertaking on it yet. Right now, we're using it for a couple hundred VMs and then maybe 300 or 400 VDI solutions. We're just starting the VDI side of things.

We have used technical support once or twice, and it hasn't been great; slow, a little inaccurate. We've worked through it; we're able to get the end result. It just wasn't as quick as calling in a BCS ticket. They were knowledgeable, and pretty good. It was just slow getting to the end of what we wanted to get to with resolutions.

We looked at it, we liked it. We talked to our TAM and they pretty much talked us into it. That's pretty much how we went with it.

I was somewhat involved in the initial setup. I have a main guy that does it. I was overseeing the project. I know that initial setup was fairly complex, but I don't think that it was ridiculous.

We looked at a few other vendors. It wasn't a very large offering. Also, for the price, it was very good. It was a very good price, we thought. We're educational too, so there's a different spin on that, as far as looking at third-party vendors versus this, plus we're trying to semi-unify on platforms and management. Trying not to keep putting more and more layers into everything.

Give yourself enough time to do it. It's going to take a little while. It took us a good six months to get it off the ground and functional. Probably another three to six months to get into the advanced features of it.

• Troubleshooting: All the way from the cluster level down to the VM, you can see it as a whole perspective or troubleshoot the individual VM.
• Creating custom dashboards
• Customer reporting

We use it to monitor CPU and memory usage. We also monitor our storage for latency, and things like that.

For the most part, we have not used the new features in version 6, such as integration with DRS and capacity planning.

It has helped identify bottlenecks and contention. One of them was a storage issue; trying to find out what VMs were pulling the highest latency or a highest IOPS, and narrowing it down from there. It also identifies any type of CPU contention ready time or memory issues.

The biggest improvement I'd like to see is when you create custom dashboards, there isn’t an easy way to specify custom time settings. When you create a dashboard, it is always statically set for a specific time frame versus specifying a different time frame.
The other improvement would be to be able to create a custom report out of a dashboard you just created.

We do a little bit of reporting. We'd like to get a little more, though.

I'm going to mess with 6.3; maybe it's better. It's improved, but I don't know how much yet.

It's very stable. I'm having no issues with stability.

I haven't really had an issue with it scaling out. We have over 5,000 VMs. No issues.

I've not used technical support for vROps.

We were using a little bit of SolarWinds, which was probably the biggest one that we're using at the time.

You can get a lot more granular with vROps, and it's made for what we need specifically, for VMware.

Initial setup was straightforward. It was very simple; right out of the box, it worked. We've been using vROps since they first came out with 5.0 and 5.5. It's come along way with 6.0.

I don’t have any issues with configurations. Once you understand how the templates and the reporting stuff works – once you understand how that comes together – then it's pretty simple to do the reports.

Give it the good 30-day time frame to mess with it and see what it has to offer. Take advantage of the free trial.

vROps offers a lot more detail that is really helpful for the enterprise. For example, when you're doing performance troubleshooting, or evaluating the efficiency of mission-critical labs, capacity planning, or just looking at environment consolidations, for example, to cut costs. I have actually used it to a fair degree to bring about a few thousand dollars of savings, partially because of how the environment was configured; which is how it should be configured. Those metrics were available through vROps. For example, consolidating the number of leads in a cluster versus adding new clusters for other business needs. There was a level of cost avoidance and there was a level of cost savings at the same time. This was in a previous company that I used to work with that I left just two months back.

We use it to help the team understand how they should be leveraging that infrastructure and how it should be performing. For example, you can talk to your team and ask them to ensure performance at certain milliseconds for IOPS, specific gigahertz for performance, and then you have maybe 60% peak usage or 70% peak usage. There should be capacity for more production workload to go off and run when there's a peak demand in a sudden way; for example, unexpected requirements. At least your environment assigns resources appropriately from that standpoint. If you don't know how your environment if functioning, and you're just relying on real-time metrics, then you're not really planning ahead, and it also can cause a business impact because you don't really know what your environment is doing.

During initial setup, it actually gives a lot of false alarms, so that's one aspect that can be improved, but that's why you have to tweak it to get the right type of metrics.
If it were more agile and more self-descriptive, and in fact, scripted in a way that it just goes and self-installs, and then you specify certain metrics for configuration, that would be awesome.

Also, it needs to catch up with the times. The user interface is really buggy and slow. I'm not sure if it is now on HTML5 or not, but I'm hoping it would be in the latest release. I do not have any experience with version 6 and later. My last experience was at 5.5.

From that standpoint, other improvements would be some intelligence monitoring, and intuitive reporting. Machine learning, if it's integrated with the capabilities of vROps, would be awesome. For example, why should I set an alert at 65% for one environment and 75% at the other, when it might change or fluctuate from time to time. If there's machine learning and it automatically knows the optimum level, that would be awesome. Half of the configuration pain gets cut down right there.

It is rock solid once it's configured properly and it's running.

I have had no issues with scalability, as far as I was concerned. I have actually used vROps for thousands of VMs and have had no issues.

I’ve never had to call VMware for any type of technical support, except maybe for one time when we had an issue with the SQL database - but over a year, one call is nothing.

There is a little bit of complexity initially to set the right metrics and put in certain alerts and tweaks.

There are competitors who are doing something similar, with regards to machine learning. For example, Splunk, not a direct competitor to vROps, but does a lot of stuff that vROps does. CloudPhysics is a great tool. I have also tested out CloudPhysics and worked with one of it in one of the clusters. I can tell you that it’s also a really good product. VMTurbo is another competitor to vROps, but it does a few other things that I might not want to do in an automated fashion in an enterprise. However, there are other things that VMTurbo would be really good at doing where people want that level of automation.

When we spoke to vendors, the detailed metrics was the biggest thing. The level of granularity you get, it's awesome. One bad thing about vROps is the level of granularity from a time perspective; it averages data out at five minutes. If it was possible to go down to 30 seconds, for example, or 10 seconds, that would be really great.

Granularity is good but I want even more, because, to be honest, peaks don't stay around for five minutes. When data gets averaged out at five-minute intervals, you don't catch all of the required information that you need. Still, you get a lot of information out of vROps because you can tweak it for time.

If you have all the core pieces of VMware, vROps is a no-brainer. If you want a little more level of agility, there are other products at play, but it all depends on your requirements. You can't go wrong with vROps. Are there things that are always going to be better? There would be. Would vROps catch up? It would. Would it evolve into something new? It might. Right now, it's there. It does everything you want it to do.

We use it for monitoring of the VMware environment. 

It has performed well. Though, I haven't found time to dig deep into it.

Because of the recommendations in the product for configuration changes, bad legacy setups become visible using the tool, which is great.

You receive both the overview and the details.

It's user friendly, but a bit complex, so you need to spend time with it.

As far as I have seen, it is very stable.

We have a small size setup.

I have no experience with the technical support.

We received the product as part of a license upgrade and decided to use it at that time.

The initial setup was very straightforward. We spent a few days setting it up, then it was up and running. We haven't done many changes since then.

We did a basic setup with a large European reseller of VMware. They were great, as it was a quick turn on solution for us.

We have another monitoring tool which we use for physical servers and virtual as well, but vRealize Operations Manager gives us more detail. It's best of breed when it come to monitoring.

Don't underestimate the time for getting it in place and in tune for your business. Even though it's pretty much turnkey, ensure you have enough time to focus on getting it tuned for your environment.

It is a good product, but our company has a lot of tuning to do with the product.

1. There is the VMware environment for our operations.
2. We have another instance running for the VDI environment.

It allows me to automate a lot of tasks. Because in a college, we have many different operations going. We need to automate as much as possible. Generally, vROps does a good job.

The automation brings insight into how we will grow. I can look at it, then make my recommendations on what equipment we need to do for the next fiscal year.

• The automation is the most valuable feature.
• The UI is pretty easy to understand.
• It gives me insight into the environment.
  

• The learning curve is pretty steep, but support help decipher it for us.
• It could use more integration with the hardware.
• A reporting engine would be good, where the database could dump into something like Splunk integration, so we could write our own reports. That would be better.

It's completely stable. There's no problem with it.

Scalability is good.

We had a product called StrataCloud for years, which was good, but very complicated. It turned off the team. They wouldn't even bother looking at it, so we discontinued it.

The initial setup is fairly straightforward. I had a few questions for support, but it was relatively easy.

It has helped me optimize certain VMs and made them more efficient.

The optimization is a huge return on investment alone.

Do it. Just start off small. Add one vCenter, then add the rest as you go.

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor: 

• Straightforward use; I don't want complex. 
• Reliability. 
• If it snaps into something, the better. Because our team is very small for our environment. The fewer consoles that we need to know (or access), the better.

One of the key things is the ability to integrate data from other sources. That's always a huge issue. I'll give an example: We've got an issue in an Oracle database. We go to the Oracle database team to get data from the Oracle management tools. We go to the virtualization to ensure the data there. The last layer's a whole other thing. vROps brings them all together. Any tool that does that is a useful tool.

Also, the data retention is better compared to what vCenter does by default. vCenter keeps data for only a short window of time, so if it's an hour after a problem manifests, you're out of luck. vROps makes a copy of all the data from vCenter; it keeps its own copy and it can maintain it longer because it's not an actively used database that's trying to manage the system. It's just a copy for reference purposes.

One of the things we're going to look at is experimenting with the integration with DRS. In fact, I attended a session at a conference on that. We're looking at integrating it with our Citrix XenApp environments; we currently have somewhat of a gap on that reporting there as well. That's 2 areas we definitely are looking at using it for.

We have had major outages that we would have caught in advance had vROps been in place.

With both capacity management and performance management, we expect to gain. The outages I mentioned were capacity or performance related. They were in areas of capacity that we could not see with our current tool set without a lot of digging around, which are very easily accessible with vROps.

You can always improve the type of data you can merge in, but there's nothing that we're missing at the moment from it. I'm sure as we dig deeper into it, we'll start finding room for improvement.

The reporting can always be improved. The problem is that no one does reporting well, because no one can know what your company needs out of the tool. I'm sure refinements with the reporting would be great. I'm sure they'll be refining it with every version, but it's not something that's inherent to them; it's an inherent problem with any tool that's trying to report data. I've found no tools that report data the way you need it to be reported.

We’ve been using it for a couple of months now; we've been experimenting. Previous versions were not as strong. The last version before this one was when they started to actually make the tool particularly useful, and then the latest version's even better.

Stability is much better than it used to be. They went to a distributed model, so it's stable and you can expand and grow with it.

Early versions did not use a completely balanced distributed model. As the number of items being collected grew, performance could not be scaled easily by adding additional servers to the vROps infrastructure. The newer versions handle this much better and allow for performance to be maintained at high numbers of items being collected.

You can now expand outwards horizontally, which you think they would've done initially, but you know... If you have an instance, you can build it taller with more CPU and memory, or you can build multiple instances. You can build instances out in remote sites to collect data there. It's a scalable solution now, which it was not completely before.

I don't know what their limits are, but it's certainly scalable enough to accommodate our needs.

It does not get slow; that's why the model's much better.

We haven't used technical support for scaling it yet, but I'm sure we will.

We decided to invest in this type of solution because of gaps in our current reporting. There are certain constraints we're running into in the environment that we cannot attack easily with any other tool.

We currently use a lot of other tools. We use TeamQuest. We use Cirba. We use CA; both their standard monitoring tool and their application performance monitoring tools. Even with all those, there's certain nuances within virtualization that they can't easily capture. We'd either have to automate scripts for ourselves to pull the data and then use something else to do it, or we can use vROps, which is why we're installing it.

The most important criteria when we select apps and vendors is our experience working with VMware and the ability to take data from multiple sources, which a lot of tools cannot easily do.

I’m involved mostly with the engineering of how we're going to use it. Most of their products are really easy to install.

We've looked at VMTurbo and we've talked with the other vendors that I’ve mentioned we use, to see if there are ways of doing what we want to do within their goals.

There's been mass improvements; if they've looked at it previously, like a few years ago, I would look at it again. We looked at it a few years ago, decided it wasn't for us, but it's useful. Particularly if you're dealing with a large-scale enterprise, there are gaps in all the other toying that are hard to get at without this tool because this tool has much more direct access to the right areas of vCenter. You can use the API to get at anything, but VMware knows what to pull better because it's their product.