VMware Aria Operations Reviews

We have been able to use vROps to optimize our environment and do right-sizing for most of our VMs. vROps has also been able to help us in regards to forecasting and adware procurement. Therefore, we can see our utilization in the next six months and how we have been trending.

The company is multinational. We are still running on-premise with a plan of moving to the public cloud. At the end of the day, it will probably be a hybrid environment.

When it comes to apps and infrastructure, it provides us with valuable insights. 

It has been helpful around capacity planning, which we traditionally did on a yearly basis. However, since last year, I started using vROps to reclaim and save more resources. It has been helpful along those lines.

In the next six months, vROps will hopefully give me an accurate forecast. Also, it will be able to look at my environment and prove some vendor requirements wrong. 

The dashboards are interesting. We have been able to use the dashboard to monitor the environment. There is also a newer feature where we can share dashboards with people. We don't necessarily have to give them access to vROps. That has been great.

The optimization and performance are helpful.

If I could integrate with vCenter with vROps, then I could execute more things by managing vSphere from within vROps. That would be great.

I have been using vROps for about a year. We got the license last year, but it could not be deployed until later in the year. 

It is a stable solution.

vROps has helped decrease downtime by 80 percent because it gives me a lot of visibility into my environment. With its performance optimization, we have been able to see things happening ahead of time. It also works concurrently with some other monitoring tools. For example, I am also using VMware Skyline, which has helped to drastically reduce downtime. 

I haven't had any downtime this year.

If I see the infrastructure grow enough, then I will scale up.

I am the only one using vROps within the organization.

The VMware technical support is helpful.

Before now, we did not really have a tool for capacity planning. This is the first tool that we have used. It has been great.

The initial setup was straightforward. The documentation is online, so I was able to deploy it before the training. The deployment took me three weeks. 

We don't have a test environment, so everything that I deploy has to go straight to production. However, when deploying vROps, I knew that it would not break service nor cost me downtime, so I decided to give it a shot.

I did the deployment. Going through the documentation, I was able to get different options, picking the one that suits my environment.

If you are not that familiar with the deployment and how to do it correctly, then you may need an expert's advice or intervention at some point in time. You should be able to find your way around 75 percent of vROps. Overall, the solution has been great for someone who is technical.

Make sure you get the right advice and documentation for the deployment. So, if a person or customer is unable to deploy on vROps, then they should get the right expert to assist them with the deployment. Because if you have the wrong deployment, then that might put you in a mess and you might not get the value from vROps. If you are going to implement the solution, do it the right way.

At the moment, I am the only person managing vROps.

It is worth its cost. With VMware, you always get your value for your money. 

vROps has saved us a lot because it has reduced our procurement costs. Usually, we would have a rise in procurement costs at the beginning of the first quarter. We haven't seen that going into 2021.

The solution has a huge cost. If we could just have one license covering everything that vROps can do, that would be great. I would prefer it this way.

We need a separate license for vRealize Log Insight, which has not been integrated. However, it's something I'm looking forward to using.

We did not look at any of their competitors.

We are still running vROps in parallel with some products that we are currently using. However, I am seeing the opportunity for it to take over from our other tools in the future.

From what I have read, it is a great tool that you can use across multiple clouds.

We are planning on implementing VMware's Tanzu solution along with vROps for Kubernetes monitoring/management in Q1 2020. I am currently familiarizing myself with it because I know it's something that I will be deploying pretty soon.

I would rate this solution as a nine out of 10. 

Our primary use case is to have everything on one dashboard in which we can look after our operations and get alerts.

It is easy to see when something has gone wrong. We just have to go in and fix it. The reduced time it takes to spot and fix an issue has improved my organization. It also saves the amount of resources that we use to fix an incident

We have found the integration with VMware to be one of the most valuable features. It's also easy to use. The interface is really clear and when there is an issue the color turns red.

I'm quite happy with the path that it's going on, so at the moment, I can't really recommend anything that this solution can improve on.  I'm pleased with where it's going and the new features that are coming.

I'm really happy with the stability. I haven't seen any issues with it at all. 

We're really happy with the scalability. We've deployed it and it's looking after several VMware instances and it hasn't had any issues. It gives us all of the information that we need. 

We haven't had to use their technical support. 

One of our managers presented vRealize and we really liked it. It has better features than other alternatives. 

The initial setup was straightforward. We used an integrator and they did everything for us,  there were no issues. It was just a case of going in, looking around, learning it, and just getting a little bit of initial help for a few days. It's been fine since.

We also use SolarWinds, AppDynamics, Nimsoft, plus vRealize as well. We're trying to make the company all go for one thing, but it's been a bit of a struggle. We'll be pushing it.

I would rate this solution an eight. It's a good solution and I like it. I haven't explored it enough to be able to say that it's a perfect ten. 

I would advise someone looking into this or a similar solution to consider vROps. Have a look, try it out, and try some demos. I think it's a really good product. 

We are using it to monitor our whole infrastructure, integrating SAP, and using the Madura plugin. We love it.

Using a single pane of glass, we can view what is causing the issue.

Before we used the tool, when we had performance issues, a lot of people looked into their pieces and finger-pointing happened. Now, one person can look at the full overview of their infrastructure, and say, "Here's the problem. Have a look here."

We have all the information that we need in one place and don't have to search for our monitoring tools everywhere.

The solution is intuitive. You don't need a week of training. If there is an issue, you can intuitively find it. 

We would like to have monitoring for containers.

It is stable. The solution works.

We have thousands of RAMs and thousands of hosts on it. 

We started small, and now, we are a big company. It scaled.

I have not used the technical support because the solution is stable.

We did not have a previous solution.

We used the company, Fleet, for the deployment. They were professional and the solution works perfectly now.

We did an enterprise license agreement with our VMware partner and put this in our bundle. We tried it and loved it, so we use it now.

Try it. Or, you can start small and use it.

It makes our life so much easier.

We mostly use it for debugging or troubleshooting when some application doesn't work. We can look at the vRealize Operations Manager and troubleshoot from there. 

We also use it for capacity planning. 

When we have problems with applications, we are fast with troubleshooting because we use vROps.

The solution has helped us a lot to troubleshoot issues and improve quality of service.

• It has many types of metrics.
• The dashboards are very easy to use.

vROps is user-friendly. You have custom-made dashboards, which are provide by VMware. You just configure them, and it works.

We had some problems with updating it. The two times that we upgraded vRealize Operations Manager, we lost all our data.

When we not updating vROps, it works perfectly.

Scalability is great. We have two instances of vROps, and we haven't had to scale it yet.

We haven't opened any cases yet.

We did not have a previous solution.

The initial setup was straightforward.

We would like to build custom dashboards in the standard license. Right now, this is available in the enterprise license, not the standard license.

We used Grafana to monitor our environment. With vROps, you have all the VMware specific metrics and dashboards. It's much harder to invest time in another solution where you have to build it on your own.

We just considered vROps. Grafana was something that we designed on our own afterwards.

I would recommend vROps.

We use it for proactive and reactive monitoring. 

I just came off a contract where capacity management was a major issue. They hadn't planned for it or made any provisions for it. So, they were looking at the operations teams to sort of do capacity management for them. This project came along, I picked it up, used vROps, and was able to say, "This is what's going on. This is what we are going to have to do. This is what we need to do to be where we want be."

Its ability to resolve an issue from within the application rather than going somewhere else to resolve it.

The dashboard is a single pane of glass for troubleshooting.

I've never had an issue with stability.

It is very easy to scale. However, in the beginning, I picked up an implementation that had been designed wrong from the ground up.

Ideally, somebody using the technical support when I found out the configuration was incorrect.

I still received a lot of help from the support agent who dealt with my case. What he couldn't do was tell me what to do to bring it back into line. However, he told me what it needed to look like, which was very well documented anyway. Though, having someone point you in the right direction can be a good thing.

The initial setup can be complex, but it is not too complex for me. I consider it straightforward.

We are an integrator.

We have seen huge ROI. 

It has certainly reduced troubleshooting, especially when we have less experienced support technicians than engineers looking at it. It guides them as to where to find the solution. Now, I have a lot less junior staff coming up to me asking what has gone wrong because it displays on the dashboard what they can do to resolve it.

In terms of integration, between this product and everything else in the VM product line, it is very easy to just pick this up as opposed to looking elsewhere.

Use it! It makes perfect sense.

It is very intuitive and user-friendly. The solution is a lot more intuitive and user-friendly these days than it was before.

We use it for analytics, graphs, etc. We use it for some reports, but not too many.

It has helped us with analyzing storage issues, such as looking at the break down per VM, IOPS, storage wait times, CPU Ready, etc.

It's helped us troubleshoot some issues.

The built-in dashboards for troubleshooting are nice.

We have had no concerns with stability.

It is part of the vRealize Suite, so we tried it out.

The initial setup is straightforward. It is an OVA deployment, connect to the virtual center, and add some plugins. Then, you're done.

We don't take advantage of the cost savings features that it has.

We have another competing product that we use to do the same thing. We use it as well. So, we have two things doing the same thing. Some things we like about it, and some things we don't.

We're also using SCOM with Veeam together. I don't think we will move away from Veeam and it will not replace SCOM. 

Install it and give it a shot. Know that it's not so easy to configure or learn. You need to invest some time to get to know the product, but it can be very helpful.

In some places, it is easy to use, and in other places, not so much. The prebuilt dashboards are easy to use, but if you want to create your own, it is not so easy. It is the same for reports.

At Western Carolina University, we have a lot of classrooms that are going on, a lot of logins, a lot of thin clients. Right now, we mostly want to see usage. Also, we want to troubleshoot any kind of issues we may be having.

With vRealize, we have the ability to mold the template into what we want, what we want to see. Having that in real-time is really great. We can go to our managers, we can go to our higher-ups and say, “Hey, look at where we're at and what we're doing.” It's a really great product for that.

Having it right there, on point. You log in, you see everything that's happening right then. We can also export that, get information, print it out, show it to people. That's a big deal. People want to see that transparency. It's great that way.

I would like to see even more scalability and the ability to customize more templates to our advantage.

Also, we do like to be on the latest version of everything. I know VMware has their hands in a lot of different places, but if they could have a rollout and say, "Don't be using the latest and greatest, you've got to use two versions back to get to this, to be there at the latest and greatest." That would be wonderful.

We did run into a small issue. The latest version of it would not work with Horizon 7.5, so we had to roll back vRealize. But, they say it's coming out soon. Can't wait for it. We're looking forward to it. But other than that, it's been great.

I have no problems with it. As far as stability goes, it's been great.

Scalability is there, but it's on the sysadmin. VMware hands you a product and says, "Form it to what you want it to do." So it's on the sysadmins to make it do whatever they want, tailored to their needs. As long as the sysadmins know what they need, they can scale it to do whatever.

Technical support has been good, they usually get back to us pretty quickly. There's usually a lot of back and forth. We generally have an answer within three or four days, so that's pretty good.

We didn't really have anything. That's why this has been such a great integration into our system.

Among the most important criteria when selecting vendor, building a good relationship is a key step. If they are talkative, they respond, they give us the information we want, that's the best first step. And then, actually delivering on the product. There are a lot of times we get a product they say does something and we test it and find out it really doesn't have that capability, or there are caveats to it that weren't mentioned. So delivering on the products, their features, and building that relationship, are important when selecting a vendor.

I was in the room for the initial setup but was only slightly invovled. Some others guys were there doing it. But it wasn't that bad, probably took us about four hours to get it up and going.

I don't really have anything to compare it to right now, but on a scale from one to ten, it's about an eight. I expect to see some things getting better down the road, so I'm sure that number will go up.

We primarily use it for monitoring our VDI environment and the performance is okay.

It improves some of the decisions we make. Based on those usage patterns, we can determine when our best maintenance times are and when we need to scale things up or down.

The most valuable feature we get out of it is the actual usage of the virtual desktop:  concurrent logins, when our peaks are, when our low times are. That's our main use of vROps.

Once you find what you're looking for, it is pretty user-friendly. There is just so much information in vROps, the drilling down to find exactly what you are looking for, that's the hard part. But once you find it, it's pretty easy. You can build a dashboard based on whatever information you have found and then, from that dashboard, it's fine.

The one thing that I am always missing is training specific to Horizon. There is no training class you can go to for the Horizon add-on for vROps. I'd like to see specific training for Horizon admins, as opposed to general vSphere admins.

It seems pretty stable. We've had a few issues as we do upgrades of different products, but other than that it's fairly solid.

When we've run into an upgrade of Horizon, or something breaks the agent in the connection servers, then we'll pull in resources. The support is good. They are able to get it resolved. Typically, a problem with vROps is not considered to cause end-users to have downtime or to be a production-down type of thing, so you sometimes have trouble getting somebody right away. But they've been pretty reasonable.

Previously, we weren't doing much monitoring at all. vRealize became our monitoring solution for VDI. The usage metrics were the driving force behind purchasing vROps and setting it up and spending the time to learn it.

The initial setup was pretty easy. It's an appliance so the deployment is quite easy. The documentation is excellent.

It's very valuable for us. We've since upgraded to the Horizon Enterprise suite, so now it's included with that. It was just another reason to go to Enterprise.

We compared a couple of different tools and it really came down to the fact that VMware was giving us a good price for bundling it with our Horizon purchase, at the time. And, at the time, we were doing PCoIP and it was basically the only product that really gave us that insight.

If you're planning to do a Horizon deployment I would definitely recommend vROps. It seems to be the best. In the past, when we were doing PCoIP exclusively, it was the only tool that gave you excellent PCoIP metrics. I assume that that is moving forward as well. For a Horizon deployment, you almost have to have vROps if you want that kind of data.

I rate the solution at eight out of 10. To get it to a 10, I would like to see some training on the Horizon-specific pieces and, somehow, they should make it easier to find those granular things that you're always looking for. You're always running into a situation where you want to use the tool to figure out a problem, but the amount of effort needed to delve into vROps and find the exact metric you're looking for is always so difficult.