VMware Aria Operations Reviews

The primary use case is that we are transforming our customer's physical and virtual infrastructure, who are afraid of anything that can happen in a virtual environment. Our job is to make a sort of private cloud, not to sell virtual machines, but to host the workload.

The main point of installing, deploying, and troubleshooting with vRealize Operations is to provide visual dashboards to ensure that the entire workload is functioning properly. Because we sell our infrastructure to clients, they need to be able to operate it. Therefore, they must have the visibility, even if they don't know how the system works from the inside.

We have to be stable to provide high availability because it's a high value market. Therefore, we have to ensure everything works all the time.

It is intuitive and user-friendly.

We are looking to optimize all the parts. For example, vCenter can be fully deployed automatically, which is not the case with vROps. We can click some next buttons to integrate vCenter and would like these type of features for vROps, if possible.

It is stable.

The technical support is good and helpful. 

The initial setup is easy.

We bought the server from a third-party. 

The first thing that we did was ask VMware what type of hardware we should buy. They helped us by providing insight in which type of server to buy, then they helped us by providing the support to integrate the solution.

We chose VMware and its solution because it was the most easily supportable. We know some of their consultants and our people know the products.

Use VMware to support the solution. Don't go at it alone.

The primary use case of this product is to essentially integrate third-party applications, as well as appliances, with the vRealize Operations for monitoring and capacity planning purposes.

A lot of benefits of this solution come to my mind. It allows me to see how my entire infrastructure is performing in a simplified manner. It also gives me a waterfall analysis and a lot of custom badges to tell me if there are any health, risk, or efficiency issues that I am running into. This helps me plan better for my IT infrastructure.

The best feature that works in this solution is the ease of pluggability that is provides and analytics engine which runs behind the scenes.

The biggest way it is intuitive to the user is it allows you to create your custom dashboards. There are a number of widgets which are available to represent your data in the way you want, as well as in the priority you want to see them.

I would like to see more applications and out-of-the-box solutions for well-known applications, like Oracle or Microsoft Exchange. Certain out-of-the-box solutions for these applications, as well as containers. If I had a container solution deployed on top of a VMware infrastructure, or outside as well, it would be really helpful.

I have been working with this product since version 5.6. The stability of this product has been good. Through 6.7, there have been multiple improvements in terms of its GUI and performance. By default, support clustered more of its operations to support the skill and all of that works just fine.

The scalability of solution is actually fantastic. It runs in a clustered node. On top of that, the collector modules which are the work horses of collecting all the data, they give me to scale at the collector module level as well. This caters well to a large scale environment.

They are really good, primarily, because they are well-versed with the product and all its new features. From the 5.x series into the 6.0 series, the product has undergone transformation. While we were working with the product for integration, the technical support provided by VMware was fantastic.

I have seen a lot of custom home grown solutions in the industry before people started integrating with VMware Operations. 

I have been attending VMware events and part of the VMware club. Being part of VMware, I know about this product. That is where and how I started integrating with the product.

It's pretty straightforward. In the latest versions, after 6.4, the deployment has improved. It has simplified a lot. It gives me a programmable interface to automate my entire deployment. I can simply run a job and deploy the entire vRealize Operations solution quickly.

In terms of ROI, I have been working as a systems integrator. So, I am helping my customers when doing the integration. For multiple reasons, in terms of saving time and effort involved in identifying real issues and complex problems, that is the cost which has been saved. In terms of infrastructure monitoring, the returns are good.

The way it has helped improve troubleshooting helps me associate a lot of different infrastructure components, right up to the application layer. E.g., any issues coming in because an application is slowing down due to performance. Because of the hierarchy of all the objects labeled for that particular application, I can browse through the entire infrastructure and see where exact problem is. This helps me narrow down the surface area of the problem that I am trying to solve. That's a huge saving in terms of time required for resolving any particular issue. 

It also provides me with a very intuitive way of understanding my capacity usage, whether I'm running out of capacity and how long before I would need to bump up my capacity based on my usage history. So, it's helped me do capacity planning in an intelligent manner.

If you are running an infrastructure with a variety of components from various different vendors, and want to get monitoring all in one place, this is the solution to go with.

The important criteria when selecting a vendor for any solution:

1. How stable the product is.
2. The ease of usage.
3. Support's availability.

I would rate the solution somewhere between an eight and nine, because it has worked like a charm for me over the years.

It is a little bloated right now. I would like to see it broken out into microservices, so the overall footprint of the application is reduced. That would get it to a ten in my eyes.

Primary use case for vRealize Operations is from an optimization standpoint. We're actually getting analytics from our VMs for over-provisioned VMs, under-provisioned VMs, and making the adjustments accordingly, per the recommendation from Operations.

One of the benefits for our organization, in particular, was the optimization piece where, historically, our virtual environment has always been over-provisioned. We've always tried to go from a physical to virtual, one-for-one. Now, with vRealize Operations, we're actually proving to the company that we're utilizing the virtual infrastructure to its fullest capability, but actually scaling back instead of adding more resources.

From a troubleshooting standpoint, beforehand it took us a lot of time to actually go into esxtop, pull the actual raw data that was happening from a storage level, a network level, a CPU/VCPU and memory level. But having all of these resources at our fingertips, from a graphical user interface, we can pinpoint the pitfall very easily. And it is very user-friendly, with the red, green, yellow "what's wrong." And getting the right teams involved faster has helped us the most with vRealize Operations.

Most valuable feature is the dashboards that we can customize per-user that logs into them. If we need to make a dashboard that's very high-level for our executive to see how our virtual environment's handling things, we can do that. Or, if we need to deep-dive technically, we can do that for our engineers. They really need to see the important stats that make our virtual environment work the most efficiently.

The solution is very user-friendly. From an installation standpoint, it only takes about half a day to a day to implement. Integration with vCenter is very seamless, starts collecting data, almost immediately once you make those connections, getting real-time data within the first 24 to 48 hours. User friendliness is very easy.

A lot of feedback that we're getting from some of our engineers who are actually using Operations today is that the graphics are very low-key. When it comes to red, yellow, green, yes, "Skittles Theory," but when it actually comes down to what's optimized and what's not optimized, it's very rudimentary. If they could actually make nicer pie charts or graphics involved in it, it would make it a lot easier to read the data on a higher level, rather than actually having to dive down and know specifically what you're looking at.

It's extremely stable. Since we implemented it, we haven't had a restart or reboot that wasn't for a maintenance period, and we've been up ever since, collecting data.

Scalability is very easy. Once you implement a new vCenter, it's pretty much just make the connection to the new vCenter and it automatically starts collecting data from all the VMs in that new vCenter. Clusters, DRS recommendations, HA recommendations, everything's at your fingertips and it's very easy to upscale, per your environment, for the growth of your company.

We didn't have a solution at the get-go. Once we implemented this, we actually saw the grand scheme, or a higher level, from top-down, of our whole virtualized environment, that we weren't getting before without really deep-diving into the underlying hypervisor level. That's really what we've been using it for.

We learned that we had the licensing for it, I downloaded the file, and just ran with it. It was very straightforward, just downloaded the file from the internet, uploaded into vCenter, ran it, IP address, log on to the web console and go.

We had a little bit of Hyper-V, but normally, mostly VMware.

If you're running VMware, implement vRealize Operations as soon as possible.

I would rate the solution and eight out of ten. The only reason why (it's not a ten) is because of that graphical interface (issue) that I just described.

Our primary use case for vROps is enabling operational efficiency in the data center from a support perspective. We use it to diagnose problems and look for proactive signs of failure. This makes a big difference on the troubleshooting side.

It's definitely improved the organization by increasing the efficiency in which we can diagnose issues. If a customer were to call in reporting a problem, we've probably already noticed it in vROps and are actually working on resolving it.

It has made a big difference in the time to troubleshoot. It's significantly reduced it. 

As a cloud provider, some of the reports which are available in vRealize Operations enable us to be a partner to the customer and show them there are some workloads which are over-provisioned. While that might mean scaling back some resources, ultimately, it means a better experience for the customer.

The most valuable features for us are some of the trending and analysis on workloads. It doesn't just look to see if something is maximized at 100%. It figures out what the normal is for the application, so it's not just if something is maxed out and causing a problem, but if something is higher than normal or running outside of its normal range. This helps us to identify something that other products might not necessarily note as an issue.

vROps is more user-friendly than some other products that we've seen on the market. It was very easy for our technicians to pick up. The search functionality works well. It makes it easy for our technicians to get down to a workload that they're possibly having an issue with.

If I had to think of one thing that could be improved, I would probably lean towards making it easier to pull dashboards from vRealize Operations into other products (maybe outside of it), like a company-branded dashboard that would display in a NOC. 

The stability in vRealize has been great. We've had no outages nor impacts. The upgrade process has been great so far.

We have 11 data centers. We utilize vRealize Operations at all our data centers. We've really scaled it out. We're at around 16,000 active VMs reporting into vRealize. We've had no scalability issues.

We've used tech support from VMware for pretty much all their products. The vRealize Operations support experience has been pretty good. 

Probably the big one that a lot of people would compare to vROps is Veeam ONE. We looked at Veeam ONE among other products and found that the level of metrics that we got out of vRealize Operations, because it comes from VMware, were pretty much second to none. 

It's a nine out of ten. There's always room for improvement with any product, but it's a solid solution. 

vRealize is easy to stand up. It's very easy to point at your workload. It's not going to be impacting. Put it up there. Take a look at it. Point it at your infrastructure and just see what comes out. I think you'll be surprised.

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor: As a cloud provider, we have a dedicated team that goes through and evaluates new products. It's what we do day in, day out, and we have a fairly lengthy evaluation process that goes in. We look at everything from the support of the product provided by the vendor, the patching process, the upgrade process, and their roadmap. We really go through every facet of the product to make sure that it's going to be a good fit for our organization before we consider putting it into production.

I work in property and casualty insurance.

Our primary use case is to monitor our servers and infrastructure, provide alerting for any type of system issues that we have had, and give us real-time alerts to go into the system, troubleshoot, and deep dive into what the issue may be.

vROps has improved our organization by giving it that high level monitoring of the complete environment with the different plugins that it has. It is a single pane of glass to our environment to monitor everything.

The system has reduced the time to troubleshoot issues with the real-time alerting built-in. The alert comes through, we can click on the link, take us right to the alert, and it has the metrics that triggered the alert right in the message so we know right where to look to resolve the issue.

It has helped us improve our end users lives with our Horizon VDI monitoring. We can look at our Horizon environment, see our response times for our users, quickly drill into any latency issues, and proactively troubleshoot without the end user not even knowing.

Application monitoring: Checking to make sure the HTTP application is alive, if the Windows service is running. If it is not, then providing a real-time alert. It also provides the ability to resolve the alert on the fly.

We have a specific application that relies heavily on a Windows service. The product is not the greatest, so it is known to fail from time to time, where the Windows service will just stop running. When this happens, we receive an immediate notification that the service has stopped and our engineers can go in and analyze the issue taking care of the problem quickly.

The latest versions of the product has really changed the user interface, making it more user-friendly than it used to be.

It has great charts and graphs which provide a high level overview of our environment. Being able to click through those to deep dive, we can easily get to the information that we are looking for.

The biggest room for improvement would be the customizability of the alerting function. The emails that come through are somewhat difficult to tailor along with the information contained within them and how they are laid out.

The stability of the product has been great. It just runs. We don't have to worry about troubleshooting or monitoring product.

The scalability is great. We have never had any issues with it being unable to size properly in our environment.

You can quickly deploy extra collectors to the environment or your wide area network, if you have remote servers that you need to collect against. 

We have not had to use vROps tech support at all. It is a set it and forget it application.

This is the first solution that we deployed for total enterprise monitoring. We went with vROps because we were heavily invested in the VMware architecture, so it made sense to go that route. 

I was involved in the initial vROps setup. It is very straightforward virtual appliance deployment, configure it with the IP, and point it to your various ESXi hosts. It can get a bit complex when getting into the endpoint monitoring, but it is still not overly complex where it makes it difficult to deploy.

Another vendor on our shortlist was WhatsUp Gold. 

Try to stay with something that is going to monitor your entire environment. Don't go with one solution that will monitor your virtual infrastructure and another that will monitor the Window Servers or applications. Get that single pane of glass view so it has that entire overview of your environment in one spot.

I would rate the solution as an eight out of 10. It is a set it and forget it product. We are not constantly having to babysit or troubleshoot it. It does what it is designed to do, and it does a very good job of it.

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor: supportability. Everything is going to break sooner or later, and how they support or fix it says a lot about a company.

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.

It gives us good information when there's an issue of where to pinpoint the source of the issue within the virtual infrastructure.

A lot of the stuff we need assistance with is trying to get us help on our internal process of actually implementing stuff. So the right sizing of VMs and things like that. If there was some way in which it could identify the amount of resources in use, and scale them up and down on the fly, that would be fantastic.

No, it's very stable. It's part of the VMR Stack, so it's protected by all the core VMR features, like HA, vMotion, and DRS. You can put SRM on it.

You can put it on the whole VM infrastructure. Anywhere your VMs are, you have vROps that can act on that space.

They're knowledgeable. Sometimes, you have through the first level to get to the next level of engineering. Once you get past that, they're very knowledgeable with the products, usually able to help us in a short amount of time.

We also have someone on site to help us with the more advanced stuff on an ongoing basis as well, in addition to our TAM who can help escalate stuff and find the right answers.

It's fairly straightforward.

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor: Everything is important.

• Reputation is certainly good for us, being a bank.
• The relationship is huge.
• We have to partner with someone that we trust, who we think is going to do a good job for us, and responds to the issues that we have.

We're running a couple of different flavors of vRealize Operations. vRealize Operations gives us the ability and the insight to be able to see what our VMs are actually doing.

• Who's the hungriest?
• Have we got any runaways?
• Have we got any noisy neighbors?

We can address those things. We can separate our test from our production, and make sure our production workloads are getting the launch share of the resources.

I think some of the improvements should be to the adapters, and the adapters which are available to customers. I know there's a lot in the marketplace, but we're looking for more, because we are a pretty large-scale company throughout the State of Louisiana. We've got a lot of different products, and we're looking for a lot of visibility from those other products that we have inside of vRealize Operations.

vROps has gone through a maturation process, and we've grown along with it. We've come to appreciate the things which are offered.

It is a very stable product.

It's quite scalable. We're adding additional vCenters at different regions to a single instance of our vRealize Operations for our virtual server management.

vROps tech support is super. Any issue that we've had, even in a how-to perspective, they've been able to assist us. We've had some things happen late at night or early in the morning where we've needed to open a preemptive service request, for an upgrade, support for a module, or a plugin that we needed to do, and they've been right there for us.

The vRealize Operations setup, installation, and configurations are pretty straightforward. We, as a customer, actually did two of our environments ourselves. We used an implementation service for the first. Then, we used that as a blueprint and a pattern to deploy our other two environments.

It's great from a scalability perspective, and it gives us all of the metrics that we need. Our configuration, or dashboard configuration, and deployment are quite easy.