VMware Aria Operations Reviews

Our primary use case of this solution is that it enables us to show value to our customer. We show them how they can get the most out of their state. It also shows us our investment and what we can do better to enhance our environment to get the most out of it.

This solution has improved my organization because we work with several other companies and we've seen them automate more of their workloads, get better visibility of their workloads, and get further insights into how their databases are operating. 

It has reduced the time it takes to troubleshoot issues. We have customers trying to pinpoint and isolate issues using vROps. The information it provides helps them to pinpoint the issue a lot faster and resolve anything a lot quicker as well. They have a lot less downtime. 

The most valuable feature would be that it can show us how to get the most out of our infrastructure, how we can scale, and what will happen in the future, over the next twelve months. 

This solution is intuitive and user-friendly. It's pretty easy, just plug and play.

The integration points can use improvement. We currently use a lot of third-party management packs to get insights for SQL, HP, or Dell EMC. If we could have more integration built in as a standard feature that would make it slightly better. 

It's very stable. I haven't seen any downtime. Usually, it's deployed using a redundant pair. It works really well. 

In terms of scalability, I haven't yet hit the max instances and I don't think I ever will. 

The initial setup was pretty easy. It's like setting up any other VM. It's a few clicks and you're ready to go. 

This solution offers a sixty-day free trial so I would advise someone considering this solution to give it a go. At the end of the day, you won't lose anything, you get to play with the product. Make sure to get your technical guy in early to help support you.  

I would rate this solution a solid nine because there's always room for improvement. It's a very good product, very easy to use and it has great integration points with other VMware products. 

We use vROps to gather all of the information about the infrastructure. We have a huge infrastructure which means that we need a central location where we can find anything and any kind of data. We also massively use it for reporting. 

This solution has improved my organization because it's much easier to keep track of installed software versions. 

The most valuable feature would be the reporting function and the central location for everything. We need reporting for all of the components.

This solution is intuitive and user-friendly. It has evolved pretty well. It wasn't that simple in the beginning but now it's getting better.

The speed of the user interface and the upgrade process of the components are features that I would like to see included in the next release. 

This solution is stable. It has improved a lot. 

We use one of the largest installations of vROps and it is scalable. 

VMware provides good support. We are a GSS customer which means that we have global support with a dedicated engineer from VMware's side so we have no issues with support. 

We use a large installation of this solution with multiple nodes and so the setup was pretty complex. 

We haven't seen ROI yet. It might come later.  

I would rate this solution a seven because it's not the best it can be yet. It has room for improvement but it has definitely evolved to become above average. 

Our primary use case of this solution is for collecting performance metrics and also for troubleshooting some performance issues. 

The most valuable feature is how our metrics interact with each other. You can find what objects are needed and get all of the information about an object: How it works with the storage, CPUs, memory, and you can get an easy way to find the solution during troubleshooting.

It is intuitive and user-friendly starting from the latest versions, especially with version 6.5. Previously, we had some issues with the stability with such obligations but now it's useful and stable. 

Our internal infrastructure was changed and now it's an absolutely different interface. It has absolutely different uses and dashboards. Sometimes it's difficult to find some features like they were in previous versions but it's coming with the times so for now, I don't think it's a big problem.

I think about how our infrastructure will grow and how we will manage with the application. It can grow at any time, there's a huge amount of new options and new hosts, but the console and the server stay the same. 

We mostly use this solution for troubleshooting because just getting information from vCenter is not enough. In vCenter you have information about the current state so a lot of the metrics are not collected but if you need to collect more metrics, you have to expand the level of collection. We would like to get a separate solution.

We tried to use Veeam ONE one for monitoring but it's a bit difficult. It's a different project and has different ways to manage it. Previous versions of vRealize did not have the same features as Veeam ONE. Now, it does have the same features and much more. 

I would of course recommend this solution to someone considering it. The new versions are simple, useful, and expandable.

I would rate this solution an eight. I wouldn't give it a ten, but I know that vRealize Operations provides API. You can get anything you need from API, not only from the dashboards.

We use it to obtain an overview of what is happening in our cloud infrastructure, e.g., our utilization, trends, and how long before I need to upgrade my hardware,

It removes the guess work. It gives me real data and analysis in a very user-friendly way that I can show to my management without going deep into numbers. It hides all the complex numbers and visualizes them into very nice, full-looking colors and graphs. So, it makes it easy to use.

Trend analysis: It gives us insights into problems which will happen in future.

It would be nice if it could tell me more about my hardware, if there were any updates on the network that should be deployed, if some firmware needs to be deployed on the server, etc.

The stability is excellent. It has never crashed, so I have no complaints there. It just works forever.

We have a small setup. So far, I haven't tested it on a large networks. However, for our setup, which is a couple of servers, it works fine.

I haven't called the support for this solution.

I was not using a solution previously. We got a recommendation from VMware to try this product, and we loved it.

It is very easy to set up.

As integrators, we deployed it ourselves.

We have seen good ROI results. It has made our lives easier. We have a 100TB storage, and it gives us an overview, including databases, how the storage is being utilized, etc. It makes it very easy to find information out.

I haven't used a competitor's product.

Only VMware was on our list because we were already using all the other VMware solutions, like vSphere, NSX, and vCenter. Therefore, we wanted something to run on top of those products, preferably from VMware, so it could integrate in a better way.

I'm happy with it. It does all what it promises and helps us.

We are a VMware partner and integrator, so we deploy it to a lot of our customers. We love promoting this product to all of our customers.

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.

The primary use case for it is monitoring our VMware state and helping with troubleshooting the VMs. In terms of the performance, it works well for what we're using it for. We hope to expand its use in the future.

The Troubleshooting Dashboard helps us see if there is contention on the VM that's causing performance issues or if it's a problem with the resources it has or if it doesn't have enough. It helps lower the troubleshooting time on virtual machines.

The Troubleshooting Dashboard is probably the best feature, the one that gets used the most.

It's getting better from what it used to be, but it still has a pretty steep learning curve. It's not super-intuitive when you first log into it. To find a lot of the information you need, you have to dig through multiple categories, subcategories, panes, and dashboards and widgets. They've been making it better by presenting some of the most commonly used ones more in the forefront. But some of the more advanced stuff is still pretty difficult to find.

The latest version, it has come a long way and I know the next version coming out looks like it's going further. I think they're making great strides there.

It's pretty stable. We haven't had many problems with it going down. If it does, it's mostly that the machine runs out of disk space but, other than that, it's up, it works.

I think it scales well. We have a pretty large environment, several thousand VMs, several hundred hosts. It handles things pretty well.

We did use tech support when we had problems upgrading it, but otherwise I usually just go in and add a disk space. But tech support has always been pretty good.

It reduces man-hour times when trying to troubleshoot machines. As far as return on investment goes, being that it came with the level of licensing we were already getting, we didn't spend extra for it.

I would definitely suggest you use it. It's a really good tool for what we use it for, for troubleshooting machines. The Troubleshooting Dashboard really highlights things pretty well.

I rate vROps a seven out of ten. It might be a ten if they made it a bit more user-friendly, a little bit more intuitive.

Primarily, today, we use it for troubleshooting problems and being proactive in the management of our capacity.

It gives us a faster time to resolution on some problems. It also helps us plan our growth when it comes to the budgeting time frame, to help plan our capacity needs for the coming year.

The solution has helped us improve quality of service to users, by giving alerts when different performance metrics get outside of their normal ranges. For example, I've had times when there have been memory leaks in applications and this solution has shown me as my memory usage gets outside of normal bounds. I'm able to find that and resolve it before my customers get back to me to tell me that there's a problem.

Trending of performance and capacity. Also, being able to dive into some more detailed analysis of performance metrics and compare them to a baseline of what's normal for particular time frames.

For me, more examples of the configuration of the solution in specific use cases would be better.

The stability is very good.

The scalability is good as well, it's worked well for us. We've increased the size of nodes and deployed additional nodes without any problem.

Our experience with technical support has been very good. Every time I've opened up support tickets, I've gotten resolution of my problems within what I would consider to be a reasonable time.

Overall, part of the ROI is more being able to provide statistical information to back up what we tell our application owners. It gives them a little more faith in what we tell them about what we see for the performance of their applications and whether the problem is at the core resource level, or if it's pointing back to a problem with their application.

I've been a user of this solution for quite a few years so it's something I've believed in for a while. I've looked at some alternatives but nothing that's given me everything that I needed, that I get out of the vROps.

I would rate this solution at about eight out of ten. To get to a ten it would have to have more ease of configuration and maybe some wizards in there to help configure more typical scenarios that people want to do in there. It's still fairly complicated to really get the full use out of it.

My primary use for it is monitoring and making sure that there are no issues anywhere. You have the various content packs that keep track of all of our different products and the various things we're using within the enterprise. It's a good central point for management. The performance has been good.

It has definitely helped us reduce the time to troubleshoot issues.

The most valuable features are the Heat Maps, and the various graphs and reporting features it has.

For the most part, it is intuitive and user-friendly. Sometimes you have to dig around a little bit to find stuff, but that's because of the way that they do the content, more than anything else.

The main concern would be just to make sure that there's some consistency when third-parties are building their various content packs for it. It seems like it's pretty random in terms of what you're going to get. A vendor is going to provide whatever they provide but it's really hit or miss in terms of how good the quality is. In terms of the things that are monitoring the vSsphere components etc., that's all solid, that's all pretty good.

It's stable. I haven't really had any issues with it. I think we have run into a couple of bugs but normally it seems to run okay.

We've been okay as far as the scalability goes. I'm not aware of any issues there.

Technical support is excellent.

In terms of the decision to go with vROps, It was more along the lines of, "Hey, this is out, this is available to you, it's going to improve things for you." It was a no-brainer because you don't want to do things the hard way.

How much more difficult would it have been to troubleshoot something if this solution wasn't there? It's really hard to say. It's a matter of digging into various different places, so I don't necessarily know how much there is an ROI on it. We trust this product, it seems to be a good tool that we make use of, and I wouldn't want to be without it.

I don't know that we really considered anything else in that pure category because, at that time, nothing really compared to it. Everybody had their own little management and monitoring solutions for their little bubbles. But there wasn't this all-inclusive, try to get other vendors to buy in and have one single monitoring solution.

My advice would be, just go ahead and buy it. It's going to be leaps and bounds ahead of doing it the hard way. It puts it all in one place, gives you a little bit of capacity planning, a better idea of what your actual capacity is, versus just looking at the spot values you get right out of VMware at a given point in time. In terms of looking at a VM, you can see how much RAM it is actually using over a period of time versus whatever the user claims: "Oh it's completely out of memory." We can say, "Is it? Is it really? Let's check it out."

I rate it at nine out of 10. It would be a 10 with just a little bit more arm-twisting on the people that are supplying their little add-ins, to make sure that they're of a sufficient quality to match whatever else is in VMware. They need third-party quality control, less so the actual VMware parts.