VMware Aria Operations Reviews

vRealize with vCenter is primarily used to monitor our EMR platform for our hospital, and overall, it gives us good insight into what's happening and alerts us to possible conditions. For the most part, it's pretty much right on target.

It gives everybody a better sense of the fact that everything is okay. That is really the gist of it. We are using it because it is running our hospital and it is critical care. If certain systems are down, the hospital is down, or surgeries don't happen... It gives everybody a sense of being able to glance at something.

The most valuable feature is being able to take a quick glance and to understand the health of it, how that impacts things, and how quickly we should take a look at trying to resolve an issue.

In some respects, the UI is pretty stale. It has been that way from the beginning. Some easier ways to create custom dashboards for management, versus the tech guys, versus administrators, that would be helpful.

The stability of the product is good now. Initially, we had some issues, and with all new things there is the learning, on both parts, and that took place.

We haven't really scaled it much since we implemented it. It's still pretty much maintaining the same 50 hosts and supporting the hospital very well.

Occasionally, we have used technical support. During setup, there were a few little issues. During a couple of upgrades there were a few issues, but for the most part, tech support is very responsive. They haven't been mission-critical issues, like an ESX host being down, but most of the time we have gotten solutions within the same day, and at least contact with somebody very quickly.

The EMR provider that we went with, it was pretty much a strong recommendation for their default build that we go with vROps. It was really a no-brainer when we looked into the cost that it added to what was already a multi-million dollar project. It was a small investment at that time.

I now find it to be user-friendly but initially it wasn't. It was just an entirely different look and feel, so we had to break our habits from previous environments. A lot of the monitoring that we've done was with SolarWinds, which is entirely different. But even inside of VMware, with the C# Client and things like that, as we moved into using VRealize with 6.0, it was how the badges worked, how the color stratifications worked and the like. It took a long time to get comfortable glancing at it, and then educating management on their dashboards.

To be honest, ROI wasn't a tremendous factor because, the way we buy things, it was next to nothing for the initial purchase, and then a little bit of maintenance each year. The ROI was very quick on the product. This solution was also a requirement by the EMR provider too. It's nothing that we've regretted, it has definitely added an exposure that we wouldn't have had without it.

I would give it a thumbs up. I'm not certain there are too many solutions that integrate on the level it does with the data that it does. As I mentioned, our previous implementation, or previous corporate solution, was SolarWinds, and it just interfaces differently, and the data is not the same. This is the easiest way.

I rate it at about eight out of 10. That's primarily because there are always improvements. Technically, I don't see anything wrong that would drag it down quite a bit. I would like it to have a little more responsiveness. I know we are not running the latest vCenter environment that it's integrated with, but there are times that some of the data lags and sometimes the screens will somewhat freeze for a little bit, to repopulate. But that is really the biggest inconvenience that we've seen with it.

The tool really gives our VM admins the ability to dig deep into the VMs and really get a feel for what's going on. That's really a gap that we had prior to this product. Application teams would claim performance issues, etc. Our team really didn't have the tools to get in and do that deep-dive analysis without logging onto host and doing some very deep, technical commands. Very few people were able to do that type of analysis and this tool has really allowed us to open that up to more of our team, to be able to get a quick idea of what's going on with a VM.

It gives us quicker time to resolution. If we're in an outage situation, our teams can quickly get in there and identify whether it is a storage issue, a network issue, or a compute issue. It gives them the ability to discover that pretty quickly and then, when there is an issue, we can go back and do root-cause analysis. It gives them that ability to dig deep in and not just see it was a network issue, but get more specifics and hopefully get to an actual resolution because of that long-term fix.

It's a very powerful tool. It gives us the ability to get a lot of visibility that we just did not have before. The capacity management side of it is very big for us as well. Just being able to understand you know are we getting the most out of our infrastructure or not.

The biggest gap that we have today is that it doesn't integrate with our ticketing system. We get alerts out of the system in an email but those aren't actionable alerts. We actually did another professional service engagement with VMware to try and tailor those alerts some. We have been able to do that, but it's still an email alert, where we'd really like for that to be a ticket, so that somebody can be responsible for taking action on that.

There's also some gaps with the ability to aggregate the data and show it at a higher level. You have to dig deep into the specific VM to get the information you want. Not just anybody can do that. We've been able to open it up to more people on the team, but it's still not a completely intuitive tool that they can just pick up and use.

It seems to be a stable tool. We did have some issues early on with getting the kind of configuration correct. We've actually had to rebuild it, I believe two times, because of some bad configuration to start out with and, I guess, some databases getting too large. Outside of that, the tool has been pretty stable for us. For the most part, it's pretty reliable.

It seems scalable as well. It does a really good job of looking at the entire environment and aggregating all that data together. Going back to the scale and the database issues that we have had, I think that had to do with the amount of data that we were collecting on the number of VMs we were collecting. Now that we've got that fine-tuned a little better, it does seem to be pretty scalable in meeting our needs in that aspect.

We have used technical support. I don't know that I have a very solid answer regarding it, though. That would be more of our technical guys that were in there, day-to-day, dealing with it. I do know that we've had issues we've been able to resolve, but how easy that was, I'm not all that sure.

We really weren't using anything different. We were just using the vCenter functionality, really knew there was a gap there, and looked at the tools on the market at the time. We went with this tool because it really did give us that ability to dig deep into the VMs and get that technical deep dive. With some of the other tools, it was more of trusting the algorithms to tune the VMs correctly. We really wanted a little more control than that; that's why we went with this tool.

We use professional services to do the setup; that definitely helped us there. We did have configuration issues. There were some things that maybe weren't apparent at the time we went through the install. Over time, support realized there were some issues and made some different recommendations. I'll say using professional services definitely gave us a good foundation that we at least were doing things according to best practice at that time.

VMTurbo was the main one that we looked at.

The most important criteria when I’m selecting a vendor like VMware is the relationship. We have a good relationship with VMware. Also, whether it is a proven product, and then obviously cost is always at the top of the list.

I recommend vROps. I recommend professional services engagement, as well, especially for the tuning of the alerts, because it comes out of the box with just a lot of information. It takes a bit to get through that and kind of narrow it down. Your team either needs to really understand and be able to spend the time to do that, or get somebody to help you that's been through that experience before.

Right now, we've been creating a lot of custom dashboards for the application teams, so they can see all their application and server performance. We've been trying to do a lot of the integration with their management packs, so you can basically try and see everything from end to end.

It improves the resolution time for troubleshooting, but we also can predictably see issues as they start to happen so we can jump on it before it really becomes a problem for the end users.

Even though I'm not sure how often they're finding issues – I don't really deal with that too much because I'm not in the operations side – I know that one guy that we've been using heavily for a VDI environment now, and they've been able to track down a lot of problems as they start.

They haven't started using many of the new features for version six, but it's one of the things they're looking at, trying to mess with.

We do not have any use cases where we avoided outages or reduced outage time. We're not using it for any actual alerting; it's just the dashboard and troubleshooting really.

We do use it for capacity management. Well, I was when I was doing the job; I was using it for capacity management. There were a lot of cases where we could save on storage but, because of political reasons, we weren't allowed to reclaim a lot of the space that was being wasted. It was a good tool to show that waste was happening. We weren't doing any VM provisioning on the array side, but because of vROps, we were able to prove that we have a lot of waste here; we needed to start VM provisioning somewhere. They got that implemented on the array side.

We'll see improvement in the phase when we're trying to get more people to use the tool. As a VMware admin, I find it useful for capacity planning. That's the big one for me. We're trying to get our transition more on the engineering side, so I don't really use it as much now. We're trying to get the operations team to kind of embrace it a little bit more.

This is a difficult area to address because I'm not using it much anymore. I don't know. A lot of the big areas for improvement, they've already addressed with six; the ability to integrate with vRealize Orchestrator, adding some automation to it.

Some of the thresholds and what not are a little tricky to set up, and that's where we're struggling right now; our operations team isn't really managing those properly. Right now, I don't even know if they have a process to set up the thresholds anymore. Basically, they are just relying on the out-of-the-box setup. Every time they come to me and say, "We've got these alerts that are red," I say, "Did you actually validate that it's a problem?" Nine times out of ten, it's not. It's just out of the norm, and they don't really understand that.

With version six, stability is really good. We're really enjoying six. Five was stable. Six is a lot easier to use. That's the big one.

Scalability is really good, especially with the new model in six. Five was okay. It wasn't too bad, but you're limited to a couple of VMs. Now, you can just add new VMs.

I actually haven't had to use technical support. A couple of the other guys have, and it seems to be really good.

We were using Foglight a long time ago. I barely touched it, but I remember it being just a giant pain to manage. It's hard to configure. To me, it seemed kind of convoluted.

Actually, both five and six were pretty easy to setup initially.

You have to play with the thresholds and make sure they meet your needs. If you see something red, don't freak out because it could just be an abnormal spike from 10% to 20%.

We use it for data center virtualization and management.

I like the fact that the performance is good and that it makes it easy to consolidate all your servers.

If the cost of the license could be cheaper, it would be good.

We have been dealing with this solution for about three years now.

VMware vRealize Operations (vROps) is stable.

It is a scalable solution. We have two clients who are using the product.

The technical support is very good. They get it sorted within the SLA.

The initial setup is straightforward. It took about two weeks to deploy it.

We had a team of one or two engineers for the implementation process.

Our customers who have used it have definitely seen an ROI. Instead of using so many physical servers to achieve the same thing, they've reduced it to five physical servers, and they are able to do much more with those five servers.

The licensing model is annual. Compared to the price of other products, VMware vRealize Operations (vROps) is a bit on the high side. If it could be cheaper, it would be good.

I would absolutely recommend the product and would give it an eight out of ten.

We use this solution to see what we have inside of the virtual environment. We can see the compute nodes and what issues it has. We can also see the networking, data storage, all the recommendations, the issues, and the compilation as well.

This solution has helped to improve my organization because we use it for reporting when management wants to know what we have in the data center in our virtualization environment. We can just send the reports over the vRealize Operations and it will tell how much we consume in our environment. Also, it can alert us as to what resources we need to buy for the next financial year.

When you open the vRealize Operations, usually it will alert you what the misconfiguration is in your environment and that misconfiguration can cause failures in your environment. It alerts you with more than one type of alert like, blue, red, critical, just a warning, and with a daily solving for issues that prevent a lot of downtime. For example, it will alert you if you have thin provisioning and what's overcommitment in your storage. It will alert you that you are consuming most of the storage and that you will have a coming failure. This helps you to move forward before the downtime happens. 

For the cost saving, it has a feature that will tell if you can provide computer resources to a better machine that isn't being used so you can retrieve back those resources and provide it to another department. It will enable you to efficiently use the resources that you have, more than just wasting the resources of the department. You can retrieve it back, and you will get all of the suggestions from reports in the Operations manager. You will save a lot with it.

The most valuable feature is the feature that alerts you when you have any issues or when you may face any upcoming issues. It can alert you within the day or two days before. It can also help you if you want to scale your environment. It will give you a scalable plan to scale your storage or the compute nodes. You can give it the percentage you want to scale it and it will guide you to have the resources for that.

Usually, we use it for reporting when the management's asking us, without any technical output, they want to know what we have in the data center in our virtualization environment. We can just send the reports over the vRealize Operations, and it will tell how much we consume in our environment.

It is user-friendly. As it's a management product, you usually don't have downtime. It will not impact anything.

They can change the interface for the 6.7 vSphere that would make it more simple and more friendly. I think changing the interface of the operations manager would be good. It's friendly to use right now but it would simplify it more.

It's stable. We don't have any bugs or any issues with it.

VMware always gives us the best support. They are friendly to talk to and they understand the real impact of what's happening. They try to get into the issue as one of your team. They also fit into your working hours to solve your issues. 

We installed it with a partner, Epsilon ITs. It was a very simple installation. We did not request an advanced team. 

We measure ROI by seeing the graph of our investment in the data center for the computer resources, as well on the storage. We see the graph starting to lower because we start reusing the resources that we provide to the other departments. If we have a scale of 30% for every three years, it becomes twenty or fifteen.

I would give this solution a nine. One for the future improvement. 

I would recommend it, and especially if you have a huge environment, it will easily give you a complete view of what's inside and what configuration is in it. 

Our primary use case of this solution is that it enables us to show value to our customer. We show them how they can get the most out of their state. It also shows us our investment and what we can do better to enhance our environment to get the most out of it.

This solution has improved my organization because we work with several other companies and we've seen them automate more of their workloads, get better visibility of their workloads, and get further insights into how their databases are operating. 

It has reduced the time it takes to troubleshoot issues. We have customers trying to pinpoint and isolate issues using vROps. The information it provides helps them to pinpoint the issue a lot faster and resolve anything a lot quicker as well. They have a lot less downtime. 

The most valuable feature would be that it can show us how to get the most out of our infrastructure, how we can scale, and what will happen in the future, over the next twelve months. 

This solution is intuitive and user-friendly. It's pretty easy, just plug and play.

The integration points can use improvement. We currently use a lot of third-party management packs to get insights for SQL, HP, or Dell EMC. If we could have more integration built in as a standard feature that would make it slightly better. 

It's very stable. I haven't seen any downtime. Usually, it's deployed using a redundant pair. It works really well. 

In terms of scalability, I haven't yet hit the max instances and I don't think I ever will. 

The initial setup was pretty easy. It's like setting up any other VM. It's a few clicks and you're ready to go. 

This solution offers a sixty-day free trial so I would advise someone considering this solution to give it a go. At the end of the day, you won't lose anything, you get to play with the product. Make sure to get your technical guy in early to help support you.  

I would rate this solution a solid nine because there's always room for improvement. It's a very good product, very easy to use and it has great integration points with other VMware products. 

Our primary use case of this solution is to monitor our systems and capacity planning. It has been performing great. It's a little bit of a beast to run sometimes, a lot of knobs and dials, but it runs well.

The biggest benefit to us is that it shows us where our pain points are; where we need more storage, where we need more network or bandwidth, where we need more CPU or more memory. We know where our problems are before they happen.

It has helped reduce the time it takes to troubleshoot issues and has improved the quality of service to our users. 

The most valuable feature would be the capacity planning. I can see where we're at as far as usage on our data stores, our CPU and memory. It lets us know where we need to grow. 

We haven't found it to be intuitive or user-friendly. We're on version 6.0, it's gotten better since but there's a lot of things we have to do under the hood to make it work how we want it to work. It doesn't work out of the box very well until it's been fine-tuned.

I would like to see a better interface, something that's more intuitive, one dashboard that shows everything I want to see on. The dashboards that come with it are focused on certain things that aren't the big picture. I'd like a dashboard that does everything faster and also a faster web interface.

It's very stable. It's a beast to get configured but once it's been configured it's easy to use. We don't have any downtime from the product itself. The initial configuration is quite painful. 

It scales very well. It's designed for huge operations, so when it's used for a small company, it's not quite suited for their needs. It takes a lot of time to figure out and to make it work for your needs which is why it's precarious.

Their technical support has been very good to work with. They help us get to where we need to go pretty fast. They're very knowledgeable. 

We bought some tools from vCenter. We had to go through all the logs yourself, all the metrics ourselves. It tied into our UCS system that we had attached to our UCS, Hitachi system, and vCenter system. We could all the stuff in one pane of glass, which is nice, but it was one of those things that we had to do a lot under the covers to make things work for us.

The criteria that we look for when we evaluate a solution are functionality, price, and feature set. 

The initial setup was complex. There's no wizard to install it. We have to read a lot of documents then there's a whole other guideline to install the next part. There are a lot of steps. The documentation was great but there's a lot of pages, around three to four hundred pages of documentation. 

I did most of the installation myself but called support when I needed help. 

We have seen ROI with this solution but it's hard to monitor. 

We looked at ManageEngine and SolarWinds. We chose vROps because we're a large company and they gave us a good price cut. Also because the feature set looked good from the demos. 

I would rate this solution a seven because it's complex. The new versions are a lot better.

If you're considering vROps I would tell you do first do your homework. Make sure that you're ready and that it's going to fit your needs. Make sure there are full-time employees to manage it because it's not something that you just set up and go. It's got to have someone to babysit it and maintain it. Somebody needs to take care of the many different dashboards and functionalities. 

We use it to gain more insight into our environment, with a simple, easy-to-use interface. We are a small team looking after a very large environment and without it we would be lost on a day-to-day basis.

The insight that we get from all our vSAN clusters is probably our biggest use case, and where we get the most use out of it.

We're a pretty lean team. Like most organizations, our training budgets are tight. Without an intuitive product like vROps, we wouldn't be able to get the insight that we do into our environment on a day-to-day basis.

The integration with the rest of the vSphere product suite is the most valuable feature, as we are a big vSAN user. It is fully back integrated into the vSphere Web Client, and we're getting all vSAN analytics that we need.

Stability has been bombproof, as far as we are concerned. We have never had any issues with it.

We have in excess of about 2000 hosts and had no issues from a scale point of view.

We have not used the technical support.

We weren't using anything else previously. It was the case that we were missing a monitoring solution, and this solution was the obvious fit because of the integration with everything that we already had in place.

The initial setup is straightforward. The installation process takes you through in a simple, easy to deploy manner. We were had everything up and running within the space of a day. Then, we have just evoled the product ever since.

We deployed it ourselves.

Our budgets are always tight. We would like to have more features at lower licensing levels for easier access to them.

From a hardware point of view, we looked at SolarWinds. They have a good offering, but the integration is lacking from our point of view. We needed something that would just work without having to put time and effort into it.

I personally have used some of the other solutions in this space. I've found that you tend to have to put more manpower into getting them up and running. This is what drew us to vROps.

Don't knock it because it's a vendor-specific solution. It does do what it says on the tin and helps us on a day-to-day basis.