VMware Aria Operations Reviews

We use this solution to monitor the virtual infrastructure health with deep-dive analytics ensuring hypervisors, VMs, network, and storage health. We can also use it for future forecasts for virtual machines, and allocate additional resources for where contention occurs.

Efficient use of resources/planning has helped my organization.

We like that we are able to combine all infrastructure monitoring using this solution, meaning we receive analytics from across our whole network.

We would like to see an improved licensing model to be set up for this solution. The current model charges per CPU, as opposed to being product-based, which would allow us to monitor our complete virtual infrastructure under a single license.

I have been using this product for two years.

We would rate this solution a seven out of ten.

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. 

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.

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.

From a manager's standpoint it's the dashboards. To be able to quickly and easily see what's going on in our environment, from my perspective. But it's able to find the hot spots and things that are happening in the environment and helps to be more proactive about troubleshooting and getting to the root cause.

As a manager, I'm a big user of dashboards and reporting, so I love vROps. I'm always trying to have them create different dashboards. Even I get in there at times and create my own dashboards and my guys will look in and say, what is that? And I'll say, "I just created this one on my own because I needed to have this other thing. You know, not to bother you guys with that one," and I'll dabble with it. I love the reporting, and it's visual. To be able to set that up on your bulletin board or electronic bulletin board, and have people come by and go, hey what's that all about? And I can tell them, this is where your sessions are, this is what's happening in your environment.

We're just really starting the journey into virtualization work. It's been about two and a half years, so the benefit really has been that my team, and the desktop engineering team as well, can see as they're developing a product what's going on, almost real-time, so they can figure out where we need to do optimization.

Honestly I don't know. It's just really good. Maybe the interface is a little bit archaic. It needs to be updated and again we're on view 6.2, we're not even on 7 yet. So maybe it's changed, but a more modern look and approach.

I'm not sure about exportability of data, and I haven't really toyed with that, I'm not even sure if it exists. Being able to find something and then export the needed data into something that's reusable for the team too. Visually, it looks great but what will you be able to do with it? You have to bring people over to your bulletin board and say look at this thing, or to your device and say look at this thing; versus being able to report out or maybe send out reports. So giving dashboards to people or even giving them periodic reports.

The stability part has probably contributed to what's going on in our environment. We've had a couple of ups and downs with our product, but overall it's good. The ups and downs in our environment are probably based on our configuration more so than the product itself.

We're trying to get it out to our help desk, dashboards for that kind of stuff. We haven't really done that yet but I envision us being able to do that. And then, from the management layer, being able to give people an idea of where their users are, how they're interacting with it, and giving them a dashboard so they can put some validity behind when their users are saying that there's an issue. Is it really an issue or is it a user issue? The biggest thing I see about vROps is it gives you a truth perspective in terms of, as I said, is it a user issue, a training issue, or is it truly a technology issue.

Our technical support is great. We have a TAM so we have a pretty good line in with finding the right technical resources, so it's a really good service.

I was not really hands on in the setup but I was there. I think it was pretty straightforward. Although, my guys are really smart, so what they make look easy may not be as easy as I would think.

VMware did come out for us, they did help us. We have a pretty good relationship with them. But I thought it was pretty straightforward.

No. We invested in the overall package and we got vROps as part of it.

Look for the partnership when choosing a vendor. We're in a pretty tough environment, healthcare, so we have some unique challenges. If things don't happen right, patient care is affected. So they have to be able to partner with us and understand the urgency behind some of the things we're trying to do. As long as they're flexible and can understand where we're coming from, that's fine. We've had some vendors that just don't get it. VMware has been excellent.

Utilize VMware. Let them come and help you. Utilize them to get some kind of canned reports or some kind of templates so you don't have to create them all from scratch.

That's probably the biggest thing: find other peers that have done that and then draw upon what they've already created so you don't have to recreate it.

The capacity information is the most valuable feature of vROps. It shows that you're using too many resources on VMs, and you can reclaim some resources. It provides that kind of insight so that we right-size and not over-provision VMs. For example, if someone says that they think they need eight CPUs, we can show them that they don’t; that they only need two. It’s beneficial in that way. That’s starting to happen more and more.

I also appreciate the health monitors. When we get the alerts and so on, we can very quickly see what the problem is. Sometimes it's kind of difficult to get that information directly from vSphere itself, so it enables us to get it quicker. We're fortunate in our environment; we bought vSphere Enterprise Plus and vROps comes with it. We didn't have to buy it separately.

We're not very mature with our vROps installation, but we are trying to learn more and more about it, and use it more and more. One thing I wasn't aware of: I didn’t know you could monitor external things, such as Brocade switches or something like that. I didn't know that was a possibility with vROps.

Feature-wise, I don't know that I'm looking for any more features. What I would need more help with is establishing the correct baselines and that's something that's very subjective, based on each individual company. From my perspective, that's something I could use some help with; making sure I get the baseline set correctly. If you just take the out-of-the-box settings and an alert goes off because you have a certain disk latency, is that really a problem? Is that the correct level for your organization? The out-of-the-box settings might not be the best for your environment. I would think each organization would need to develop its own baseline, and that can be the trickiest part. Sometimes, you need a little guidance with that. You kind of have an idea of what is bad, but sometimes it needs to be a little more tight. Maybe they could offer a questionnaire or some sheet that I can go through that will help me establish what might be the current baselines for me. Something like that.

I'd also like to see a mobile interface. I don't know if later versions offer it, because we're on 5.5. I guess some of their guys are working on it, so it very well could be in later versions, but a mobile interface is something I can see as being beneficial.

It is absolutely stable; no issues whatsoever.

It scales really, really well. When we did it, we just installed it and it started doing the analysis. It's pretty much, set it and forget it. We need to adjust our baselines and similar items, but it's scaled really well for us. We have about 320 VMs. We're not doing any VDI or anything like that, so it's just our service infrastructure and I would say we're about 80% virtualized.

When we started using vROps, we had around 200 VMs. We’re now at around 320 VMs and haven’t had to change anything in vROps to accommodate that 60% increase in our virtual footprint. vROps simply began monitoring the additional VMs and reported on them as expected.

There are default baselines out of the box that VMware recommends for typical environments, but it’s probably a good idea to have those baselines adjusted for your particular environment, so that you get what you need and weed out what you don’t need.

We don't have to call very often for VMware support.

The biggest problem we had was with licensing, figuring out purchasing and those kind of logistical issues; not technical issues.

I did not previously use a different solution. The reason I initially wanted to look at it was to gain more insight into alerts, performance, and that type of information. As I’ve mentioned, it's kind of difficult to get that directly out of vSphere sometimes. I wanted to see what vROps would give me and it's very useful.

Initial setup very straightforward: install the virtual application, and let it start monitoring. Getting the web interface and all that set up wasn't that difficult. There's plenty of documentation out there on it. It took a couple of days, on and off. While I was working on it, I would get pulled off on something else, so it took a couple of days.

As I’ve mentioned, it was included with our Enterprise Plus, so it was a no-brainer.

vROps is definitely something you would want to look at because of the tight integration with vSphere. I don't know whether I would want to look at another product to do this type of information gathering and alerting. I've had some of my engineers look at some other solutions. They come back, share what they found, show it to me and I think, I don't know why we need to look at that. We have vROps and it works a lot better than that.

Do yourself a favor and look at vROps.

The most valuable feature is that it stores all the data from the vCenters that we point it at, so it's an essential place to get that sort of performance data; the CPU utilization and disk utilization data is the most important part. It also provides us with inventory information, which is somewhat useful.

We use it to do many things. One is to investigate and troubleshoot problems in the environment, and another is to set thresholds and then notify the operations center when things are outside. I guess the key benefit is that alerting capability and having the data available when we have to troubleshoot problems.

We can set thresholds for disk utilization, memory utilization and CPU utilization, which is usually like a side effect of disk performance.

Like everything at VMware, they should just throw the FLEX stuff - the UI abstraction - out. It's terrible. They've got to have more natural language querying tools, easier ways of building reports. The reporting interface is pretty terrible. It's not real intuitive. It's in FLEX; it's really difficult to use. It's sort of clunky and slow. It's not a natural way to work with the data. There are lots of layers and the presentation is quite ugly. In some ways, it would be easier for me to just work directly with the relationship database or something.

Another thing that would be nice - I don't know if it works yet: We're sort of missing metadata and tagging throughout the whole vSphere ecosystem. If we tag things in a cloud abstraction - we use Bio; actually, we're one of the only customers that does - and we put meta data tags in there, those don't show up as real tags in vSphere. I don't even know if we could get tags in vSphere; if we could actually get them consumed by vROps, we'd like to organize everything in tags and not in folders. It's sort of antiquated, the whole object model inside of vSphere feels like it's from 20 years ago.

Those would all be nice things to have.

I think it's stable. It doesn't fall down. It's fine.

Scalability seems to be a lot better now too. I don't know what they did with the six-step or whatever it is, but they created some sort of different database underneath that seems to be pretty much invisible and just works. We had issues with earlier versions; I think it just got faster. It is my understanding that they changed up the database.

I don't really pay a whole lot of attention to vROps, but it does seem to require very little maintenance from us. Which is good, because otherwise we probably would've bought something else.

I do not really use technical support. There's another group that's our tools and monitoring team. They may use it because they built some dashboards and set some of the thresholds. I haven't really had to.

I did not previously use a different solution; this is all we've used in our environment. There's another side of the house that's sort of a more traditional IT side of the house that I work with. There's vFoglight from Dell. That's really terrible. vROps is a step up from that.

Initial setup was pretty straightforward, although you have to think about the overall size of your environment and do a little planning. It requires a little bit of thought.

We looked at VMTurbo. That one seems okay, but it wasn't compelling enough to buy something different. vROps is a part of the suite license that we have, so it's sort of already there.

Our primary use of it is for loading purposes, whether it be for memory or CPU loading, how much storage consumption. There's a large paradigm shift that everybody's had at this organization, going from physical to virtual. They all think, "The software says I need 16 GB RAMs, I need 16 GB RAMs when it's virtualized." When in reality they really don't. We've started things off and it's been really difficult for people to adjust to that, because we start off with 4 GB, which is our standard VM size. We'll use vCOps to see if it's actually being stressed from a memory or a CPU standpoint, if it needs more CPU or more memory. In most cases, we show that it's not; when we go back, we find out there was either a badly written query, maybe it's I/O bound or something, or network bound, those kinds of things. It's helped us to keep the sprawl from happening.

I think it streamlines the tech side of things, where people are doing the troubleshooting. We've got three tier levels. It didn't help the tier 1 folks too much because they don't have access to it. But the tier 2 folks, they do, they use it as a tool to see if indeed there's something wrong or if it's a specific application as opposed to the virtual machine. Things along that nature. It definitely helps from a troubleshooting standpoint.

There are some features that we would like it to monitor outside of the virtual world. For example, networking and appliances. I know that there are some adapters that you can add that will help with that, but it doesn't give you that full picture of the organization. It's hard to bridge across multiple domains and things of that nature.

I think what's missing is what we haven't deployed yet, things such as Infrastructure Navigator, which goes by a different name now. Part of the reason I attended VMworld 2016 is to bone up on the newer vROps, actually the entire vRealize Suite; see how best we can migrate them over.

I think a single pane of glass for everything would be most useful to me.
I think it would be nice if, when you actually found an issue somewhere, by clicking you can actually go in and fix the issue. I think that probably happens on later versions, I know our version we don't have that capability.

We've had stability issues with the underlying PostgreSQL database; it's very chatty, it fills the logs up, it fills the drives up. We have to go in and shut it down, resize the database drives. It would be nice to be able to do that on the fly, as opposed to having to shut the system down and use manual Linux tools to expand the partition sizes and stuff.

I can't really address scalability because we deployed it for what we wanted already. We're not going to grow. Scalability I don't think is an issue for us. We deployed it for what we wanted. It's not something we've addressed.

I have used technical support a couple of times. They were helpful. They pointed me to the issues, the database issue I mentioned elsewhere.

We didn't have anything that was monitoring the virtual infrastructure.

Initial set up was straightforward. We follow the PDFs that you get from VMware; pretty straightforward.

We looked at SolarWinds and we looked at a Veeam product.

vROps fit better. It just fit better for what we were doing. The other ones didn't. You had to install agents on all of the VMs. We didn't just want to do that.

Plan it out, because a lot of IT guys want to bring it up, install it, see what's going on, and then they realize, "I need to build it this way now, instead of that way." Do the research ahead of time, plan it out and size it properly from the outside.