VMware Aria Operations Reviews

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.

It is faster than HPE Operations Orchestration. I also think that it is comparatively easier to program.

For us, it's predominately a back-end system so I don't expect to see that much in terms of cost savings, with respect to end-users. But I think that there will be a huge saving in terms of time. With HPEOO we're talking 45 minutes, at least, for provisioning of a VDI. For the VMware stack, with vRA and vRO, we've cut that down to about 12 minutes.

I definitely love the feature richness and the ability to cross over any platform that I need. Right now I'm working with a lot of other products. We're in the process of flushing out our old HPE system and moving everything over. A lot of the automation that we do, and emailing, sending out customer notices, we've been able to take that over from the HPE Operations Orchestration, and the old stack, and automate it into vRO very quickly.

It was user-friendly after training. There is a lot to it.

Also, integration seems to seamless, as far as I know.

I get in to code whatever I need and then get out. So perhaps they could support different coding languages. I know that JavaScript is their primary "cash cow" but I'd like to see c#, personally. I'd like to see different capabilities for adding code.

So far it hasn't failed us. Once in a great while it will crash, but it's just a restart of the system and it's good to go.

It seems to be as scalable as we need it to be.

Technical support is very good.

We chose to move from HPE to VMware because the HPE was end-of-life. We were looking for a new product that was easier to use.

Also, it is a matter of the length of time it takes to get done what you want to do within the product. In order to get down to where I'm able to actually code script into HPEOO takes well over 10 minutes, just to get to that point. The library within our Dev environment was just massive and crawled. Whenever it would try to do callbacks, with HPEOO, it would have to go back to the server. Callbacks took forever. It was clear that the solution just did not want to work the way that we needed it to work.

After training, it is worth the effort.

We mainly use it for analytics, to get insight into what they're doing, to go above and beyond what vCenter does and into actual time-based analytics.

We went through a zombie and rightsizing exercise, we skimmed the surface to get the low-hanging fruit. That was the latest good example of how it has improved our organization.

It has also definitely reduced the time to troubleshoot issues. The fact that it gives us that single pane of glass to look for stuff, that's the first stop whenever we start troubleshooting.

We like the analytics that it does. We can rightsize VMs and look for zombie VMs that are consuming resources but aren't really being used. It's been a great product. Predictive DRS has been a great value-added feature for us as well.

And with the newest updates, with HTML 5, they made it a lot simpler to deploy and to use, so it's definitely intuitive and user-friendly. In particular, I like the Unity UI. That is fantastic. There are a lot of colors, everybody loves colors.

I would like to see multi-cloud support. It would be nice to see analytics not only on-prem but on VMWare Cloud on AWS. I think that's in the roadmap. They should just keep growing it.

More HTML 5 would also be good. I wish vSphere Client would mirror it. I wish they announced it on day one of 6.7. HTML 5 is good. I miss the thick client, but I'm conforming.

The stability is great. We haven't had any major problems stability-wise. It just works.

It scales up to what we have. We have around 65 - 70 hosts that it monitors, and around 2,000 VMs. So it works for us and we can continue to grow and it will keep supporting us.

Regarding technical support, it all depends on who you get. When you call into tier-one, you have to deal with them to get to tier-two and three, so it depends on who you get the first time.

We didn't really have anything before, we were just relying on vCenter. So we needed something. When we did our PoC bakeoff, we liked vROps the best.

The most important criteria we look for in a vendor are

• scalability
• cost
• performance. 

It's really a total-package thing. Cost, performance, scalability, and does it do what we want it to do? Does it fit into our ecosystem, our portfolio? There are a lot of variables there.

We do see an ROI. The rightsize exercise, if we get more aggressive on that, we could actually pay for vRO by rightsizing the VMs. There's definitely an ROI there.

Pricing could always be cheaper, but it's acceptable.

We have looked at several different things. We looked at VMTurbo - Turbonomic is what they're called now. We did SolarWinds. We looked at Virtualization Manager because we already have an ELA, so we were just able to add it on to our ELA. But I like keeping everything in the VMware ecosystem. I'm very happy with our choice.

Pluralsight is a good start, to get an overview of it. Research it, PoC it, stick it out, have it monitor production for a couple of weeks and see what kind of results you get.