VMware Aria Operations Reviews

We use it to monitor our virtualized infrastructure.

So far we're still in the early stages of using it. We've had it in place for about six months but have only been actively pursuing it for about a month. However, it's giving us better ideas about how to be more proactive in our monitoring, rather than being reactive to issues when they arise.

Before we had this in place, typically an issue would arise and we would have no concrete proof as to why it happened or what happened. Now we can go back and look, historically, and see how it performed previous to the event, and then after the event, and where that correlation to other objects actually existed.

We've used it a number of times now when we've had major events occur.

It provides insights that we otherwise wouldn't have.

It is intuitive.

I'd like to see more out-of-the-box dashboards and less customizing of the environment. The interface could be more streamlined. There are still a lot of old dashboards versus the new UI dashboards.

We've had no issue with downtime of the solution.

Scalability has been great.

We have an SE that comes in and is working through a lot of the stuff it does. We don't have a full commitment on money until next year, so right now we own 50 percent of the environment, the other 50 percent is in trial.

Technical support, for what we've needed to use it for, has been great.

We had a number of small-scale monitoring solutions in our environment, but nothing that really tied together what we do, as a whole for our group, which is storage virtualization and the compute side. This product brings all those pieces into one interface and now we can actually correlate data between them.

I've done the initial setup a few times at other companies, so it wasn't too bad. It does have a learning curve to some of the more advanced features.

When I actually did the evaluation there was no shortlist. We had a couple products that were in place and I pushed forward with getting an enterprise solution that captured all the data. We already had this solution halfway in the environment from some other purchases on the Standard edition, so we just built off of that.

We had VMTurbo, and SolarWinds is still in the environment. Cost-wise vROps is probably a little more expensive than the other two products put together, for the advanced piece that we need, where we can do customized dashboards. But the feature set is way more advanced. I think with VMTurbo we were only getting 25 to 30 data points and now we're getting hundreds of data points in the environment.

The best process is to put them all in place, compare the products, and come to the best product that works for your organization. The nice thing about the vROps is that it has all kinds of integration points to all the products that we were using in our environment. So getting all that data into one place and then correlating it together, that was a strong selling point for us.

The only issue we have right now is just time; time to fully use the product. It has a huge number of features and we're using probably 10 percent of them right now.

I rate it a nine out of 10 because it gives us, overall, a really good feel for the environment. I think there is some UI stuff that could be better. They have done that with a lot of the new stuff, but a lot of the old stuff is still there.

We use it for troubleshooting and capacity planning. The current version I'm running, 6.6, performs as I want. In the newer versions, they've removed some functionality and I actually discussed that with the product manager yesterday.

The product is a single pane of glass for faults and warnings, for VMs that are undersized or hosts that are undersized or struggling with resources, and for validating that the sizing for a VM is accurate.

It has improved our ability to troubleshoot and isolate problems. It has reduced cost by allowing us to not oversize a VM. I am able to go back to a vendor and say "Hey, you know you're asking for this, you're not using that, and you should probably look at this part of your application."

For me, as an architect, it's the capacity planning piece, which is the Project section.

I've already spoken to the project managers during the TAM Customer Day here at VMworld 2018. They need to bring back the My Project piece. They removed it from the current release. That's the reason I haven't updated to the current release. They say the project or the infrastructure capacity planning is coming back.

The one stability problem that we have is that it eats a lot of disk space and, if I'm not monitoring it really closely, it will just stop running and we'll lose all of that data for that timeframe. That's really the only stability issue that we've had. That's more on us and what we're trying to retain, than it is on the product itself, because we can trim things and change things.

vROps has functionality where you can add remote collectors and remote data collectors, databases. We've actually started doing that. We've got a remote collector in place already and we'll be looking at adding an additional data collector.

Technical support for VMware has usually been spot on for me. Sometimes it's a little slow matching up because the specialists, who are typically whom I need, have to be scheduled. They only have so much time in which to take the calls they have to take, and then focus on me. But otherwise, the support is usually really good. I'm also a TAM customer, so if I have problems with support, I use TAM instead to escalate my tickets.

There are a few solutions out there that we never made the investment in it. I like to call what we used before "Kentucky Windage": You lick your finger and figure out which way the wind is going. That was our capacity planning and troubleshooting method before that. There was a lot of knowledge and time spent doing it all in the past. This has made it to where, when we suspect something, we can go look right at it and see what's going on.

It's a straightforward install. Getting all of the collections and making sure your data is coming in is a little time consuming, but the install itself, getting it up and running, is pretty simple. 

I used my TAM to help me. He is knowledgeable, absolutely. He's a great guy. He works with us all the time on stuff like that.

The biggest ROI is being able, when a systems group comes to us and says, "Hey we need to add more memory or CPU," to look at 'em and say, "Well, if you do that, you're going to add licensing costs, and we don't see that you need it," utilizing the vRealize tools that we have.

For me, there wasn't a competitor because, under the hood, vROps is going to know everything that VirtualCenter does. If you're relying on a third-party to discover all that and put it in place - when I can stay native, I'm going to stay native, when it's the best solution.

It's an absolute must to get the information that you want out of your VMs and to be able to help application people pinpoint problems. You just don't run a big VMware shop without vROps.

It is intuitive but in terms of "friendly", it takes a lot to learn how to use it. You can get really granular, so it takes education to really effectively use it.

I would rate it an eight out of 10, and the reason for that is, as I mentioned, they've taken some features away that I want back. They're telling me they're going to give them back but I'm going to have to teach myself how to use them again. But it has done everything that we've asked it to do. It can do more and my rating could go up if we actually got in and used it better than we do now.

vROps has been able to cut down our time to be able to find our problems, if we have something arise in our infrastructure. We have certainly found anomalies, and it has alerted us to those anomalies and where we can find the problems, thus getting our meantime realized solution down. We've also been able to rightsize our VMs because of vROps. It's able to tell you if you're over-provisioning VMs and reduces memory, if it's not being used, and these sorts of things, so we're rightsizing our VMs.

It also gives you predictive timelines for when you're gonna run out of capacity in your resources, so you may plan accordingly for all of your resource planning.

• Probably in the configuration of it.
• Configuring the different types of alerts.
• Maybe streamlining the process a little more.
• Make it a little more user-friendly, possibly.
• It's a little difficult to configure, maybe.

It is a stable solution. Upgrades have been smooth. We haven't had any problems there, but a little bit of time configuring it. Although, I noticed in their latest release (6.2), it's much cleaner. It seems a little easier to configure, manage, and navigate.

It's not a scale-out architecture, but definitely as much infrastructure as we throw at it, it's able to monitor it. If your infrastructure grows, or even into the Cloud, they have plugins that can monitor VMs, AWS, and Azure.

The support is VMware, and it's good support, as you'd expect.

It's fairly straightforward. There was initially, when I set it up, a version 5, and it had a little bit of different components that you had to configure and put together. I believe it's a little easier these days.

It's a very good product. It's really given us a lot of insight.

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor: The partnerships with other vendors and integration with other products that we have, therefore their reputation in that, and their support.

It has a lot of great reporting features in it that help us scale with our products, and to scale with different things that we're trying to work on, on a day to day workload. It's a great tool to analyze those type of things for us.

Honestly, I think it's pretty good right where it's at. It could always add more features. But for right now, it's got more than what we know how to run. It's just a great product.

Very stable. It's something I check every morning when I come in. It just runs. It has a lot of great features for a lot of our applications where we're trying to figure out what's going on with them in the background.

It scales great. It basically watches an application and tells us where we might have too much CPU, or not enough memory. It helps us fine tune things pretty nice.

It's awesome. I mean, we get help if we need anything, but a lot of times you don't even have to do anything, because the product just runs.

It's pretty straightforward. We didn't have any trouble setting it up.

It's a good product. It definitely helps troubleshooting, and helps you find things a lot faster than just trying to dig for a needle in a haystack. It's definitely a reliable product, and it's definitely helped us save a lot of time.

vROps allows us to quickly get an overview of what's going on in the environment, without even having to know too much. So from the low-end to the high-end individual, everyone can get something out of it. Obviously the better you are at it, the more you can truly drill down and find something invaluable. But even the service desk people that we have can look at it in the morning and say, "Okay, the environment is good or bad." Or they might see things in there before the customers do. So it's just a very quick and easy way to see what's going on.

How tightly integrates with the VM world. There's a lot of nice solution packs so we use Horizon, vSAN. They get integrated into the solution packs initially but then they get integrated with the product over time, and we get this better end to end view. Obviously we use VDI with vSAN to also get the end to end view, the protocol down to the storage and everything in between. So it's really clever.

I'd like to see some sort of better integration with vSphere. I couldn't get into the account setup, so it would be nice to set up an account somewhere which connects to vSphere. It would be nice if that was more streamlined. It would be something like, "Here's my vCenter, here's my admin credentials, create me an account, do the right delegation for me." Essentially it would automate the setup a bit further. I had to create roles, create accounts, and that sort of repetitive work that whoever has to deploy vROps will do.

I've never had a trouble with it. Once it's been set up it's been really "set-and-forget" from a management point of view.

My environment is probably, in the big picture, fairly small. We have one server that easily covers our environment. I do not consider vROps resource-heavy at all.

I think I had to use them only during set up because we were getting a lot of false positives. And that was a known issue then. When we first set up the environment and we were saying, "Are these... we don't believe we're seeing that but vROps says we're seeing that." Once that was all squared away it was fixed in a later version. Just bad timing, I guess.

We got it resolved quite quickly, so really no issues with tech support from that point of view. It was understood this was an issue on VMware side, and it was knocked out of the park. They knew what they were doing.

We went with it because it was recommended to me by a colleague who had already deployed it. He showed me what he gets out of it, and I could see the benefit in it for us as well. So the switch came internally to us.

I did the deployment at my site. It's very straightforward. It's deploying an appliance and just connecting it to your vSphere environment. You need to let it sit for a bit, to make sure it gets baselines for everything, but it was really easy. Took me more than about a day or two to get it fully running and to get everything connected that I wanted to get connected.

I had the offer of a team but I did not accept it at the time. I wasn't sure how much I would use the product.

Microsoft, and that's really about it.

When selecting a vendor to go with, it goes down to total cost of ownership pretty quickly. The product has to work, it's got to be reliable, and obviously it's got to provide benefits that are worth whatever investment in, time, money, licenses, you have to make.

Every solution we add to the environment adds complexity to the environment, so it's now under the product we advocated to use or maintain. You can only have so many products in your environment before there's just too much information so you need to keep it simple, to a certain extent.

Set it up and test it. It's really not hard to do. One day, two days, depending on how complex your environment is, and then just let it sit. It will pull in a lot of information, and you can see very quickly if it's telling you things you need to know.

There are some nice VMware session videos on it. Also read up. There's plenty of guides online. Really, it's not a complex thing to implement.

It allows us to view the statistics of our environment in real time. We're able to pull reports and generate other metrics from all the virtual infrastructure.

It's helped us because we're able to take a heartbeat or take a snapshot of the environment at any given time. With all the reporting and analytics built into vROps, we can rightsize the environment. We can reclaim resources. We can do a whole wealth of things that allows us to keep our datacenters running.

I'd like to see more integration with ticketing systems, so tickets can be based off metrics or thresholds that were met.

Lots of coffee and lots of donuts.

Just a thorough plan, which definitely needs to be had in making a deployment like this.

Early on, it was iffy, but the latest releases have been pretty stable.

It scales.

It was great. They were very knowledgeable. They were spot on.

We contacted them several times. We've even had a PSO Engagement where someone who was a specialist for vROps came on site.

Nobody else. Just VM.

I would highly recommend others to take a look at the vROps tool. It will definitely help them manage their infrastructure.

When evaluating vROps, they need to make sure all the plugins are working, and that it's the solution for them. Sometimes people evaluate a lot of products, and it's just an evaluation which really doesn't fit what their business needs are. Having a good understanding of what you're looking for and what you need is the most important part of evaluating a product.

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor:

• Their education
• Their product knowledge
• Ability to get support.

The analytics engine:

• Goes through all the data which we are out to collect and gives us a nice dashboard.
• Gives details about the whole infrastructure.
• Shows how things are working now.

We used to do all the calculations manually. Now everything is done within the analytics engine itself. So, it gives us a very clear vision, or data, about what we need in our infrastructure support applications.

A feature that would definitely help is something that automatically resizes the virtual infrastructure. That is one thing that we would like to see in vROps. It would understand the workloads' requirements and then resize them based upon orchestration and automation rules.

I've never had an issue with it.

I've never had an issue with it.

I have never used it.

No. We need the solution because we have to monitor our environment. So for monitoring the virtual infrastructure, it is the key component.

It is a straightforward architecture, but you can make it complex based upon your architecture. Based upon where and how you want to deploy.

All the architecture is based upon your datacenter layout. It's a pretty straightforward process but you have to consider your layout.

In-house.

The most important criteria is that the solution must understand the overall software, defined as it is in your architecture; not only the hypervisor layer but the VMs run on it, the storage, the computing that will be running, and the network as well.

Research integration with any other portal that you want to monitor along with your hypervisor.

I would highly recommend going forward with this solution.

The most valuable feature is the ability to get a view into all of my clusters from each one of my data centers at the same time.

It allows us to meet the needs of our customers a little better as far as capacity management. We can keep ahead of the curve of adding new hardware at the cluster side to meet the demand for what the other teams – such as the Windows team and Linux teams – need for their VMs.

The biggest room for improvement that I can see on vROps is for slightly better definitions around the metrics inside of the reporting. For some of that, it's difficult to find any kind of documentation that explains exactly what you're getting out of each particular metric.

I haven't seen any issues with stability at all. It works great.

Once again, I don't see any issues with scalability.

I have not had to use technical support.

We weren't using anything previously. Of course, we had a few talks with our reps at VMware, and they suggested we use it. We looked into it a little bit and it looked like it'd be a good tool for us.

The most important criteria when selecting a vendor such as VMware is obviously market space and how popular they are. What everybody else's experience with them are.

I was not involved in the initial setup. I heard it was straightforward for us.

I don't believe we were considering any other solutions at the time.

Definitely give vROps a shot; at least if you can get a PoC to see if it works and if it's the right solution for you.

I think it works good. I'm not as experienced with it as some of the other people on my team, so they might have a few more things they dislike or like more about it. But so far from what I've seen, it works great.