VMware Aria Operations Reviews

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 to run virtual machines where we host our applications, web servers, machine servers, and even database servers, then we have segregation where we even have used it both for tests, and on production virtual machines.

We can easily take backups by integrating with other third-party tools, we are able to take backups and restore them very easily. We can spin up virtual machines almost at the speed of thought.

One of the main features is it's very easy to use. 

It's very intuitive. You go on the web browser and when you log onto the application interface, you can easily see almost anything you need to.

The homepage dashboard shows you your CPU, the memory, and your network utilization, just at a glance. Even when you go to individual virtual machines, you're able to see the same report at a glance, I think that's very helpful.  

You can also have templates that have all the necessary audit compliance, probably at the direct patch level, and then deploy whenever you need it. I think it's a very powerful tool that a business needs for its everyday running.

We have been using VMware for more than seven years.

It is very stable - we always want to watch for stability and, in most cases, we have found that whenever there are vulnerabilities that have been identified they either come up with a workaround or a solution within a short time.

Today we still use virtual machines, but it helps us to scale for when we are ready to move towards consumerized applications. 

It's flexible so you can add more hosts; of course, this is subject to licensing.

Customer support is very helpful, very responsive, and most times, very knowledgeable. If the support doesn't know something, sometimes they will tell you that they'll get back to you, which is awesome because they usually do.

Positive

We switched to VMware because it's easier to manage and easier to run and scale with virtual machines.

The initial setup was fast. I downloaded the standard version from a virtual environment. I had a workstation on my laptop and that was where I tried it out. Ease of setup is awesome. In the production environment, as long as you adhere to the minimum hardware requirement, you won't have an issue.

It was implemented in-house, by a team of four, in conjunction with local support.

The only thing is, we're on Essentials Plus. There are some things we want to do that that particular version of the license will not allow, so we would need to upgrade to a higher one.

We had looked at other OEMs and partner OEMs, but none had as good reviews as this solution.

For the initial set up, you have to meet the minimum hardware requirement to avoid issues.

I would advise others to start using this because they will not regret it. I would rate this solution and eight out of ten.

We can monitor all of our relevant hosts that are stored from the same single pane of glass. We use it for daily routine operations.

The scalability options are quite good with VMware vRealize Operations (vROps), and all of the features are useful and relevant to us.

If this tool can integrate with other products, for example, those that monitor the network devices or any other storage devices, it will be very beneficial.

I have more than eight years of experience with this solution.

I am absolutely satisfied with the stability of the solution.

With regard to scalability, when you deploy it you are given different categories. You can deploy it in a tiny environment or a small, large, or enterprise level environment. You have the option to deploy it in different levels so that it fits the database accordingly.

We have a system team of around four to five employees who use this solution.

The technical support from VMware is very good. We have been using this product for more than five years now, and their support is very good. We are pretty satisfied with it.

The initial setup is easy, and it can be deployed by a single person. It's not a very difficult tool. It's a pre-configured appliance provided by VMware, and you just deploy it in your existing VMware cluster and assign the license. You can have it deployed in your environment in two to three hours or four hours at the most.

To maintain the solution, you will need two people at most.

It is a very good investment because in the long run, it's all about the uptime. As far as we are concerned, it has given us that 100% of the time. We are very satisfied with the product.

The license is a one time cost, and you pay for support on a yearly basis. It is a bit expensive, but if you consider the product support and its reliability, it's justifiable.

It is a very comprehensive tool, and it gives you detailed information. I would rate it at eight on a scale from one to ten.

We operate a test lab and we do virtual and physical testing for various clients.

We frequently build out a test sweep that looks like the client's environment and then runs the tests on that. We particularly do it with upgrades and things of that nature. 

vROps is used to do performance measurements. It's in conjunction with two other products. One of them is called vRealize Log Insight and the other one is called vRealize Network Insight. That gives us a reasonably good profile of the performance in one of the systems under test.

Our business is built around testing, measurement, and performance measurement and vROps is the primary tool. We use it in a VMware environment and we do tests in other environments. But in the VMware environment, vROps and the associated products, Log Insight and Network Insight are the primary tools that we use. It's a basic tool. It's very important for our organization. 

vROps provides proactive monitoring up to a point. There are limitations on its visibility. We often use it in conjunction with an operating system-specific monitoring tool. vROps provides not bad visibility into operating systems such as Windows and Linux, but if you want to track down problems in those, you're probably looking for something that runs inside the operating system. vROps is very important for the availability of the test lab.

Surprisingly enough, VMs take much fewer resources than most people think. vROps has enabled us to run 30% to 50% higher in terms of density. A lot of the work that we do is testing workloads, so the process is basically setting up a workload, guessing what the infrastructure's support that workload is, driving a test workload into it, and then manipulating the infrastructure until it begins to break or slow down. vROps provides the monitoring that tells us when those breaks occur, primarily at the hypervisor level.

vROps has enabled us to replace multiple tools. The performance measurement suite from VMware is three basic tools, vROps, Log Insight, and Network Insight. We use that cluster of tools in preference to things like Splunk and various other tools that are out there. It's a core tool for what we do. It is our measurement instrumentation tool, so it's critical to what we do.

In engagements with clients, we will often use vRealize for operational monitoring and that sort of thing. But our facility is primarily a test lab, so we use it for profiling and performance measurement.

For people who know it, vROps is quite user-friendly. It takes a little while to come to grips with it because it has a reasonably complex interface. The newer ones have gotten better in terms of being able to declutter the interface, but even so, there's a lot on the page, particularly in a reasonably sized infrastructure.

We've only just started experimenting with Tanzu to learn how to use monitoring and management. I have worked with Tanzu with a client who's in the process of post-deployment work. But I haven't used vROps specifically with Tanzu.

vROps enabled us to be more proactive in anticipating and solving problems. This has decreased our mean time to resolution by 40% to 60%. 

It's not a huge concern of ours but vROps' workload placement increased VM density.

We integrated vROps with vRealize Log Insight. It provides alerts, correlates metrics, and checks logs across all of the components of our infrastructure. When you're doing this, you get a slew of performance information that comes up in real-time on the vROps console and interface. Much of it comes through logs and Log Insight processes that are in the background and then push back the results from the log processing up to the vROps dashboard. It identifies issues that are showing up in the logs. The integration is very useful to the testing process.

vROps and Log Insight provide us the instrumentation that allows us to identify problems and issues and look at possible solutions.

Deployment is still a little bit of a nuisance but you only do that once. 

If I put on the hat of a client, I would say cost needs improvement. For clients with reasonable-sized infrastructure farms, you're looking at licensing at either per socket or per VM, and if you have an installation of any size, you're doing it per socket, and the per-socket licensing is a little heavy. Per VM license, if they have large numbers of VM, it is just not practical.

I have been using vROps for six years.

We found it to be very stable. 

Keeping in mind that we're a pretty small operation, scalability is not an issue for us. In larger data centers, my experience has been that it scales very well.

In terms of users, there's one person who works probably 50% of his time and 40% of his time as an administrator. We have people who run tests who are test managers of specialists and measurement specialists in testing and so on. Because we're not a production data center, it's not an army of people sitting in the other room, running this. It tends to be a small number of people that move around to various different roles. 

Half of an employee's time is needed for maintenance. 

Because we're a testing unit, the workload that we have in terms of testing will expand with the business. Generally, we run it on around three or four platforms at any given time.

We'll expand usage as our business expands, as we have more requirements, but we don't have a plan that says two months from now, we're going to add some more.

We didn't contact technical support for vROps. When we contacted support for other solutions, they generally provided reasonably good support. They tend to stick with the problem until it gets sorted out, and usually, they're good at identifying what information they need and how to get it to them. Working with them is reasonably good.

We've done the setup a number of times, so from our standpoint, it was pretty straightforward. But for someone just starting out, you really have to spend a lot of time with the documentation and understand the various configuration parameters and how they affect the operation of it. The setup is reasonably complex for a client.

Overall, the quality of VMware's documentation tends to be fairly dreadful. And so, you do a lot of searching around and bouncing back and forth. One of the biggest improvements they could make would be to actually use illustrations in the document so that there is a straightforward way to understand what the documentation is trying to tell you. It's very verbose. Trying to relate what's in the documentation to what's in front of you doesn't always go well. Documentation doesn't seem to move as quickly as the interfaces.

We're certainly not a large data center by any sense of the word. We have about 20 hosts. If we were to do it starting from scratch and moving up, the setup would take about two weeks.

It takes two to three hours per host but there's a lot of carry-on between the time you spend working on the hosts. There's preparation and various other things. Overall, it takes around one to two hours per host.

When we started, we installed vROps, linked it to vCenter, picked a group of hosts, and set up monitoring on that group of hosts and on the VMs in that group of hosts. We worked out all of the kinks from the configuration and setup. Then from there, we just rolled it out to the rest of the hosts and set it up so that at the beginning of a test, we can deploy what we need for a given host. It's not just vROps, but it's also the support things that need to be in place for us to quickly turn around a testing environment.

Most clients see a good return on investment in reduced staff time, they get early warnings about problems that are coming along, reduced time to diagnose and come up with solutions to problems. In my mind, looking at our clients, the people who use it in production operations, there is a return on investment. It depends on the size of the organization and that sort of thing, but typically, I would say you get a 1.5:1 return on investment and perhaps a bit more. It's very client-specific. This is associated specifically with the testing work we do with VMware installations. We do work with other installations that use Microsoft and various other things, vROps is interesting, but not really that useful. There are better tools for those other environments.

There are no additional costs to standard licensing. There's time, material, staff cost, but they are not out of line or unusual.

To really use vROps effectively, you have to have three of VMware's tools. vROps, Log Insight and Network Insight. I'm not sure that would apply to every customer, but certainly would for the kind of work that we do. In a sense, the additional costs are those additional products.

When it comes to efficient workload placement, vROps works with vCenter for workload placement, and vCenter carries most of the burden for that, so I'm not sure that's something that vROps itself does.

If you're running an evaluation or testing on VMware environments, vROps is really the only tool that makes sense.

My advice would be to find a specialist. 

vROps will point you to where to look for the problem. When you actually dig into doing diagnosis and so on, you really need a good log processing facility to be able to dig through the logs and identify where the problems have arisen. vROps will notify you of a problem and will point you to where the location is. But to get down and identify the problems, you really need the log processing part.

Against other products, I'd rate vROps a nine out of ten. 

I am working for a company that provides a cloud computing solution in Bangladesh. We are like an AWS or Azure in Bangladesh. We have a huge infrastructure with different data centers and different availability zones. We need to monitor our customers' VMs and their workloads. Many of them are financial companies and big corporations. We use vROps as a visibility tool to do all this. We also use it for planning and for performance monitoring.

In our country, whenever people are using virtual machines or cloud computing, they want reports, every day or week or month, about how VM instances are working. They want to know about the CPU, memory, and data usage. That's especially true for FinTech companies. We generate those reports from vROps. It provides them with relevant information and helps them to better understand things.

The most challenging part of a data center is the monitoring. You have to see how things work, such as particular instances and workloads, what the ideal VMs are, et cetera. It's important to understand cost optimization and performance tuning. If you have that kind of visibility, when you have a large infrastructure with 10,000 or 20,000 VMs, a product like vROps is great for doing all these things in one place.

The solution has helped us to decrease overall downtime. We have segregated things. We have a master replica in a different segment, and it has helped us to do so. In two years, we have had one hour of downtime, in total. vROps helped achieve that.

It has also enabled us to be more proactive in anticipating and solving problems and that has helped to decrease our mean time to resolution by about one hour.

For efficient workload placement, it's great. It's a multi-purpose solution. If you have multi-purpose workloads in your infrastructure you must use this kind of product.

In terms of cost savings, it's about optimization. When you have lots of hardware in your data center you need to optimize it. If you have lots of workloads running, you need to optimize them. With this kind of solution, you optimize your data center. It has helped to optimize our operations by 15 to 20 percent.

In addition, the solution has replaced multiple monitoring tools. It combines a lot of tools. We are still using SolarWinds and Grafana, but our infrastructure is totally built on VMware, so we are planning to use vRealize Operations Manager with everything because it's a VMware product.

One of the most valuable features is the ability to compare between AWS/Azure and the local cloud. When customers deploy something on the local cloud, with the same configuration that would apply to AWS or Azure, we can calculate the estimated cost difference between the local cloud and the public cloud. We do this kind of analysis for optimization and it is one of the best features of vROps. It is an advanced feature that came out in version 7.5.

The most commonly-used functions are easy to access.

When it comes to the visibility the solution provides, from apps to infrastructure across multiple clouds, it is a great product. If you have a VMware infrastructure, or a multi-cloud infrastructure—including AWS or Azure or Hyper-V—you need visibility and dashboards to monitor everything. vRealize Operations Manager, for managed service providers, makes it easier to understand all the scenarios. It's a good product, providing visibility into everything in a single dashboard. It is an amazing product.

They need to improve the capacity and infrastructure planning side of things. Also, I would like to see them integrate more stuff, with more detailed monitoring and different cloud providers.

I've been using VMware vRealize Operations for two years. Initially, I was using version 7, then we upgraded to 7.5, and now it's 8.0.

Out of five, the stability of the solution is 4.5.

The scalability is 4.6 out of five.

Initially, the tech support was not that good, but now it is very good. They've improved.

We were only using vCenter and ESXi initially and then we started using vRealize Operations Manager.

The initial setup of vROps was pretty straightforward, but I have been working on VMware stuff for the last six or seven years. Deployment takes about 30 minutes.

In our data center, we have a NOC monitoring team and we have a system team. Those are the two departments that are using the solution. And it doesn't require much staff for deployment and maintenance.

The value we get from the solution is worth the cost because it enables us to optimize things.

If you have a big infrastructure, you should calculate the cost for those systems. But if you have a small workload, a small environment, don't go for vROps.

We are using Veeam and SolarWinds, but they are not that efficient.

My advice is to take a good look at vROps. When you have a big infrastructure with a large volume of instances, monitoring everything in a single dashboard is very difficult, but with this solution, it's pretty easy. It's like a Swiss Army knife. You can troubleshoot and monitor in a single place. It's pretty convenient.

Overall, this is a very good product. We are using lots of VMware technologies, including Log Insights, VMware ESXi, vCenter, and NSX. There were a lot of improvements with version 8. They integrated AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud. It is improving day by day. If some of your instances are situated in AWS and some are on Azure, and you have to monitor all the systems in a single place, that's where they're improving on things. Now, they are providing the cloud-provider stuff.

We are planning to deploy Kubernetes in our data centers, because Kubernetes is a very new technology, but in our country it is not that popular yet. We will look at integrating that kind of offering later.

Previously we integrated this solution with vRealize Log Insight as a trial. But later on, we stopped using vRealize Log Insight because we were using Splunk for analytics. vRealize Log Insight is a different product. When you have a lot of stuff in your data center and you need to archive and manipulate things, you need to use different tools. vRealize Log Insight is not useful for our use case.

My primary use case is infrastructure monitoring. This is a very in-depth monitoring tool and the use cases have been to monitor multiple hardware platforms like Dell and UCS. This includes network hardware as well as the storage solutions like Unity boxes. We've also monitored the entire SDDC stack by leveraging the different management packs.

vROps provides us with visibility from apps to infrastructure and across multiple clouds. It has immense monitoring capabilities when we talk about the vCenter, which includes clusters that host virtual machines and data stores. Not only that, but with vROps version 8, you have in-built management packs for AWS and Azure. This means that you can monitor these public clouds from the same solution and you do not have to purchase any other management packs.

With vROps emerging into the application field, we can now deploy the Telegraf agent and have the application monitoring done in vROps as well. From infrastructure to application monitoring, vROps has a wide range of visibility into the monitoring spectrum.

One of the most useful features that this product provides is proactive monitoring with the help of alert optimization. It detects anomalies and I know when something is about to go wrong in my inflow, or even that something could already be happening. The alerts are available by default and this helps with early detection. Other than the alerting, the capacity planning functionality is also a proactive measure that is very useful.

Proactive monitoring is something that takes time to stabilize because once you download vROps, it will take three months for the tool to stabilize and create a baseline. Once that is complete, it can perform proactive monitoring and will help to analyze the underlying issues.

It has absolutely helped us to reduce downtime. When we talk about the infrastructure and detecting problems, the notifications and alerts provided by vROps have allowed us to avoid application failures resulting from the infrastructure not working correctly. It is difficult to estimate how much time it saves because different customers have different environments and different timelines.

With respect to workload placement, it is a feature we use and it's incredibly useful. That said, there are a few things that can still be enhanced because certain customizations are missing. If we are referring only to VMware workload placement then the functionality works great. It works well on-premises but not for the public cloud.

Using vROps has led to improved data center efficiency, which has, in turn, reduced the cost of our infrastructure. Specifically, the VMs were on different ESXi hosts and now we've consolidated some and distributed others. The cost savings come from a reduction in hardware requirements as well as licenses.

We have integrated vROps with vRealize Log Insight and it's a great thing, firstly, because the integration is very easy. The best part is that you can easily create alerts within Log Insight, and then push them to vROps. Unfortunately, we do have a problem with getting the triggered object when we send alerts from Log Insight to vROps but other than that, the integration works seamlessly. The system is best utilized if whatever integrations you have with vROps are integrated into Log Insight as well. That is when it starts giving you value.

The integration with Log Insight has improved our troubleshooting capabilities. For example, there are certain events like a disk consolidation failure where there was an alert, but we weren't able to capture it with vROps because it isn't able to capture everything. However, we were able to find it using Log Insight, which then allowed us to capture the event that triggered the alert. This helped us to save the application that was running on the virtual machine.

Implementing vROps and the right sizing has really helped the customers to save a lot of resources with respect to CPU and memory. We were able to identify what resources and VMs were idle versus what was powered up and in use. The reports helped to highlight where it was oversized and we were able to downsize accordingly, ultimately saving money.

The most valuable features are capacity planning and predictive analysis. These are some of the most outstanding features that vROps has as a monitoring tool.

The ease of usability, interactive dashboards, and graphs are features that are different when we talk about the other monitoring tools. The dashboards and the interface are very easy to understand, very lively, and very dynamic.

This product is very user-friendly. It is also very easy to deploy and because it's a VMware product, we always have access to VMware support.

The workload placement can be improved. It can be more diversified because it does not provide many options with respect to segregating the workload.

The what-if analysis section is not very advanced and there is a lot of room for improvement. For example, it should include a wider spectrum when we talk about the data center cost assessments and the data center workload assessments. It should be able to consider a use case and predict what the capacity will be after a specified period of time.

I have been working with VMware vRealize Operations for more than five years.

This product is really stable when we talk about monitoring. The only condition is that it has to be sized well. If vROps is sized properly, it will give you a value with respect to monitoring. If it is not sized well, where it has too few nodes and the number of objects is really large, or the workload is not placed properly across all nodes, we might face issues. It happens because the workload is not correctly distributed. Importantly, we do have options for properly sizing everything.

Other than this single issue, it works fine.

Scaling is easy to do. For example, adding an extra node is easy and can be done in 30 to 40 minutes. All you need to do is add a data node and the vROps internal architecture will automatically replicate and share the data across nodes.

There are between 50 and 60 people on my team. The roles vary from engineers to consultants to architects, all of whom work on the product. We have implemented this product for more than 50 clients, some of which had huge environments. For example, we have worked to implement environments with more than 40,000 virtual machines.

Technical support is pretty good. Most of the time, I've been able to get solutions to my problems. There have been times when we had trouble that they were not able to find a solution for but other than that, the support is okay.

I have knowledge of other products that are similar but I'm biased toward vROps because that is the only one that I have been working on.

This solution is very easy to deploy.

It is deployed on-premises but with the latest version, they introduced vROps on the cloud as well. This means that they now have a SaaS offering in addition to the on-premises solution.

When deploying in a production environment, it will take between one and two hours to complete. The implementation plan depends on the SMEs that are working on the project and how stable your insight is. The timeline is very personal and it can really vary.

When we talk about deployment, there is no fixed plan when we talk about vROps. The reason is that it's a very customizable tool and the entire sizing depends upon the sizing chart that is provided by VMware. Essentially, whatever the requirements of customers are, we plan according to that, and then we follow the deployment rules or the deployment process that is given by VMware to deploy the tool.

Our clients have seen a return on investment by way of cost savings through both proper sizing and efficient workload placement. What they get from this solution is absolutely worth the cost. It's a monitoring tool, so return on investment doesn't happen on day one.

When you deploy the tool, it takes three months before you start monitoring the data. Then, you start getting into the metrics, and then after that, maybe after a year or so, you will start realizing how useful it is. This will be the case with all of the monitoring tools.

This is an enterprise-level product and everything is included in the VMware Suite license. 

My advice for anybody who is implementing this product is to size the environment very well. This is the first analysis that we do; we look at how big the environment is that we want to monitor and how many objects will be there, and compare this to the VMware sizing guide. You really have to analyze that and size your environment well because if it is done properly then it will give you a lot of value in monitoring.

Overall, this is a good monitoring tool and I think it's the best one for me. That said, there is always room for improvement.

I would rate this solution a nine out of ten.

We are using vROps for checking performance and trends in the future, so we can plan our departments correctly, and make the correct calculation for new hardware, etc., for the future. The solution is performing very well for us.

It's much easier to show problems to users. If someone comes and says, “My server is slow,” I can show them exactly what's happening with the server over time and at that exact moment as well. It's very good.

The solution has helped to reduce time to troubleshoot issues and has definitely helped improve the quality of service to users.

Performance monitoring.

The first impression is that it is not that easy to find everything. But after two or three times, you will find everything you like.

In vROps, I would like to have both automation and monitoring together, not two separate things you have to buy. I want them included in one package, one installation.

Also, there is a good page showing what happens, the performance over time. I would like to have that in a good report, to be able to print it out or to send as a PDF to customers. The page today is very good, but I would like to be able to send this report every week to customers.

The stability is very good. The only problem we have is monitoring of the disk space used by the program.

Scaling is easy.

I have not needed to use tech support. It has run smoothly for the last three years.

We didn't really have anything previously. The only things we had before were SCOM and the normal monitoring tool in vCenter. We needed something else that showed us everything in one picture, that showed what's happening to one server or a cluster, or whatever we needed to look at. We needed one good tool.

We went with vROps because of our good relations with VMware and good pricing.

For me, the most important criteria when selecting a vendor are that the solution is

• easy to use
• easy to integrate with VirtualCenter.

The initial setup was straightforward, very easy.

We bought it because we wanted to have good monitoring. The return on investment is fewer people calling us about performance issues.

On our shorlist, beside vROps, were vFoglight and one other that I don't remember.

Look for ease of use. The first program you should have is one that you find easy to use. Today, vROps is easy to use. Back in the time, the first time we looked at it, it was fairly complicated to set up; the rules, etc. But today it's very easy.