VMware Aria Operations Reviews

Our primary use case of this solution is that it helps us to monitor and troubleshoot our VMware environment.

This product has improved my organization because it has helped us with monitoring and troubleshooting our VMware environment.

The most valuable features would be that it helps you drill down the problems to the bottleneck of where it is which saves us time. We have to give time back to business and we cannot spend hours trying to figure out what happened.

I definitely find this solution to be intuitive and user-friendly. It's integrated with vCenter, so I think it is a good product.

This solution solves our problems. But every time I think it's perfect I come here and they add something new. 

It is stable.

We are from Portugal, so we are small environments, mostly SMB companies, but yes I think it will adapt to any kind of infrastructure.

Technical support is good, once you pass the first level. They know the product like no one else, so they always solve everything. 

We had some monitoring tools, PRTG and some of the stuff from SolarWinds, but it is integrated with everything from VMware. Everything is virtual so, I think it is the way to go.

The initial setup was very easy. We do not have a huge environment, we have eight ESX hosts, so it was pretty straightforward. It was easy to do.

Normally we have a partner or a VMware reseller that helps us implement the solutions.

We have seen ROI because the time we take to solve problems has decreased a lot, so that is the way we give back to the company in the investment.

We have tested some other solutions and they are not as integrated and as easy to manage. I would advise someone looking into this solution that one vendor is always a better option than three or four.

I would rate this solution a nine because normally I wouldn't give a ten. We do not have any problems with the product. It solves our problems. We now know if something is on the console and if there really is a problem. Before this, we had a lot of false positives. It digs into the problems and then at the end it just drops it. 

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.

I use it for capacity planning and day-to-day metrics for how VMs are running. Most people think their application isn't running fast enough, so you need some numbers or pretty pictures to show them. vROps is a good place to obtain them.

1. You want to be able to plan. You want to budget going forward for what you have and put your hardware in before you can create VMs on it.
2. It is not a technological thing. It's a people management thing. If you have some pictures, numbers, or something that you can show how things are performing, the management will want to see what they're getting for their buck overall. However, individual app owners and business units want to see how their machines are performing, and if they can do better.

The newer version is a lot easier to use than the older version. It's one of the easiest ways to obtain some insight into vCenter.

The latest incarnation of it is intuitive and user-friendly; the previous versions, not so much.

There are some nagging little things. For example, if you want to automate the resizing of machines, you should be able to schedule it, so it happens at two in the morning instead of right now, because if you do it in the middle of a workday that's a big no-no. Who wants to get up at two in the morning to press that button? Automation should be a bit more intuitive.

They got rid of the badges largely. That was good. 

The customization of reports isn't as great as I would like to see it. There are some canned ones. 

The other thing is there should be a way so a business unit can actually login to it. They should be able customize the view as a business unit or application owner better than they can today. vROps gives people too much information. It's creating headaches for management by answering too many questions. We need to give the people the the right amount of information. They should be able to look at their own applications and hardware. They would feel a lot more comfortable with VMware if they could do this, because it gives them a little bit of influence and control, even though we're the ones with the keys to the castle.

It seems to be pretty good.

We don't have that big of an environment that it's on right now. So, I wouldn't be able to talk too much about scalability.

They are pretty good. We used to buy VM, vCenter Support, and ESX Support from HPE, because they were a reseller of it. It wasn't so good. 

So, when we did license renewals, we bought the support from VMware, and it was much better.

There are a lot of third-party monitoring and other tools that you can buy, but we decided to go with VMware's product in that it would be kept up-to-date together with vCenter and ESX, then everything should jive together a lot nicer.

The initial setup was straightforward.

There has been a bit of cost savings in that we could decide to move workloads around a bit better. 

Though not so much for SevOne outages, but for the day-to-day, warnings, critical things, and alerts that come in, you will run out of disc in X amount of time. Therefore, this product is handy to have.

Bundle it in with your license rather than buying it as a separate product. It saves a lot of money that way.

vRealize Operations Manager is mostly used for troubleshooting and doing health checks for virtual machines, to make sure that they're running efficiently and that there are no performance problems for the customers' uses.

The performance of the solution is sufficient. It has gotten much better as the program has developed. I know that the new version 7, which was just announced, is supposed to be even better than the last version, and that version was awesome.

It speeds up time for troubleshooting and it gives simple-to-use dashboarding for executives and managers to be able to see what the issues are in an easy way, so they can escalate or question. From an operations side it lets you get to the core of the apple and figure out the problem quickly.

Valuable features include the PowerCLI module and the ability to do scripting, to pull information out, to simplify reporting and troubleshooting. Being able to gather metrics, or to gather information to alert on it, or to be able to present it in a report, is crucial because, even if the interface is fast, we want to be able to do everything faster through automation. The fact that that's being developed more and more is very important.

I would like to see a full RESTful API for everything, and PowerCLI modules that interact with more of the different features. It doesn't have a complete API set and it's not a complete PowerCLI module yet. I'd love to see that developed more, to be able to interact with other applications and automation.

It's stable. I've never really had any issues with it.

If you design your environment with scalability in mind, it works well. Going back and refactoring, adding scaling into the cluster, isn't hard, but it takes a lot of reconfiguration and planning, changing load-balancing and the like.

Technical support is good. We have the highest level of support contract so we are able to get dedicated resources that help in resolving any issues. The Knowledge Base is very up to date for vRealize Operations Manager as well.

The initial setup is complex. There's a lot of planning that goes into it. You could go through the wizard really fast and install it, but to really get a validated and resilient design, it takes a lot of practice in going through and making sure everything is hooked in right.

This has great value. I feel it should be a default for every installation. Having the monitoring and analytics developed by VMware, so that it understands the kernel better than anything else, is really valuable. I'm not really sure how an enterprise could work without it.

Go for it. Be willing to go through some growing pains to get it going, but once it's going it's beautiful. It's worth the effort.

For a new user, it's not intuitive and user-friendly. But once you get the hang of it, it becomes very logical. When you're first sitting and looking at it you can get information out of it, but to really use it and get to the meat of the program, it takes a little bit of learning, a little bit of familiarity.

We use it to see the actual workloads of the VMs.

The benefits we see from it are the ability to quickly get reports for our bosses, determining the use of the environment, and that it lets us see the remaining capacity. For example, in some clusters where the resources are tight, it's giving us a good idea of what resources we really have left.

The most valuable feature is determining if more resources are needed, at the hypervisor level, based on the workload of the virtual machines that we have in our environment.

The descriptions are not quite as user-friendly as I would like but, for the most, it's part pretty user-friendly.

They could also improve on the badging nomenclature they have for batches in the system, for determining the health of a certain aspect of the system.

It's very stable.

It seems to be very scalable. I haven't scaled it, but we have people, contractors, who work for us who handle that.

We went with this solution because it was part of the user license that we have. It is part of the package deal for the Enterprise solution, so it was in existence before I joined the team.

In general, when selecting a vendor, the most important criterion is stability. If you don't have stability you've got big problems.

I couldn't necessarily say what our ROI is monetarily, but again, it goes back to finding information for reports that our bosses are asking for. For me, the ROI is in finding out what capacity is remaining in the clusters, the ESXi hosts.

I rate vROps at nine out of ten. To get to a ten it goes back to better explaining the badge labeling for batches.

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.

Dashboards. They give a single pane of glass where you can view multiple clients, multiple issues, networking, data stores, etc. Another good tool it has is capacity planning for your host, your costs.

We have large environments, around 55,000 VMs and 5000 to 8000 hosts. So there's a lot of hosts, a lot of clusters, a lot of movement.

During upgrades I'd love to see a single pane of glass showing what the system's actually doing. In our case, we have a UK datacenter. It might take five, six, or seven hours to upgrade the whole environment. All I'm doing is looking at a screen that says "four out of nine steps". I don't know where it's at. I don't know if space is filling up, if I have to run a df-h on the nodes to actually see if something's filling up during that time. I have to read the upgrade log files.

For me, I want to see some kind of metrics there, which I can look and say, "Okay, at this point it's pushing the pack file out to the UK." I don't want to sit there and look at each screen for three hours, and then have to wonder if I should call VMware or not. If I let it sit three more hours, then we're down for six hours, and I could have called three hours ago to fix it. The problem is, I didn't know if there was an issue or not.

Stability is good. It's easy to upgrade, easy to maintain. They made it easier with 6.5. Instead of having to add in an extra data node, or an extra remote collector, to add into the virtual center to pull in metrics, all you do is expand the memory. You start off small, then you start expanding the memory. Therefore, as long as your host can handle the memory you don't have to purchase anything extra.

GSS is pretty good. They're not so key to the actual architecture behind it. They can answer general questions. If you need to escalate, you need to escalate to BCS. In general, GSS does a really good job.

I think they've been using vRealize about five or six years now. I'm not sure what they used before we got monitoring tools.

In this case, it was a company-wide decision. Really we're using vROps for host monitoring, for clustering, and for data store vSAN. We had a use case where we have to work with hospitals, so it can't be down.

I wasn't involved in this.

I have set it up in another site, initially, starting it off with Horizon View.

It was real straightforward. There are lots of guides out there. VMware helps you with it, guides you on how to set everything up. All you're doing is installing a management pack file for the vCenter. Then, to connect to your vCenter you have to have a username, password, and the fully qualified domain name name, and that's it.

Not at this time, because we're partnered with them.

When selecting a vendor be sure to look at reliability, uptime, and make sure that they're available for you. Because we work for hospitals, hospitals can't be down, they can't be down at all, even for a minute or two.

Definitely find a couple of use cases to make sure that vROps is what you need. vROps, can do pretty much everything up to capacity planning. It comes with different licensing levels, Standard, Enterprise, Advanced. Find out what you need, which version and edition.

One of the most valuable ones is being able to see an overview of your environment, and saying this VM is overallocated, in terms of CPUs or memory. If something is stressed, or if something is not stressed, that's one of the good things it can do. The reports: Print any kind of reports or generate them, and send them to somebody if they say my VM is going very slow. 

"We need to add more CPUs," We get a lot of those requests. Then you look at it, and you realize, wait a minute, this VM has 8 CPUs, 32GBs of ram, you probably have it overallocated. That's probably why it's going so slow. You can just do that in vROps with just a few clicks of a button. That's what is pretty cool about it.

It can save the organization money if you're using it right. It'll save you a lot of money. 

Don't overallocate! This means that you don't have to buy many hosts. You can save money that way.

Make sure your environment is scaled correctly. That it can handle whatever specifications are needed in your environment before you go and deploy it.

I would say on the scale of one to 10, probably a seven. 

It all depends on who sets it up, and if they set it up right. I haven't gotten that far in my career to know the correct way to set it up yet. I just know when I got to the place where I work on it now. It was set up, it would break, and you would have to go fix it. Then it would break, and they would have some other guys that knew a bit more about it, and they fixed it. It's been up and running for a few months now without any issue.

That's the thing with it. Many different users can use it, but you also have a learning curve. You have to have the employees, who know what they're doing, be able to teach the employees, who don't know what they're doing, how to use vROps.

We purchased vROps because wanted to see more of our environment.

I was not involved.

The most important thing you research before implementing a product in every company is the cost. You want to get the most bang for your buck. You want to make sure that you get something that's cost effective, too. Also, that it is good and easy to use. At the end of the day, when you bring it to your manager, they need to compare. 

 Other than VMware, I can't think of any others right now.

Do your research. Research it, research all your products which are similar, and see that it fits the mold of your company. If it's cost effective, or if it's going to give you the most bang for your buck.

When selecting a vendor:

1. They should know what they're talking about. 
2. If I don't know what I'm talking about, then I shouldn't fumble them up. 

But the number one thing is that they know what they're talking about and it's easy to use, also its setup is easy. If they can show me how to use it during their presentation and I can explain it to my manager or my boss, then that's one of the most important things.