VMware Aria Operations Reviews

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%.

Our customers use the solution to monitor the health of the cloud platform and ensure everything is okay.

Heat maps are valuable. The alerting feature has been the most beneficial in managing virtualized environments.

The solution must provide better training options to help us make the most of the tool. The learning curve is fairly high. It's a deceptively easy product when we first look at it, but it has tremendous depth. There's a lot to it.

I have been using the solution for five years.

The tool is stable.

The tool is scalable. We use a lot of different installations of the product. Our customers are small, medium, and large enterprises.

The support is good. We often wonder whether the support team will meet the SLAs. I'm very reluctant to make all of our support issues P1. VMware is reasonably good at fixing problems. They probably don't have enough qualified engineers in Aria Operations’ support. When you get them on the phone, they are very knowledgeable.

Positive

We used Turbonomic. We do not use it anymore because it isn’t as useful. It didn't have all the features that we needed in an MSP solution.

The solution is easy to deploy. We have a lot of configuration, so it takes a lot longer. However, the basic installation takes 20 to 30 minutes. One engineer is more than enough to deploy the tool. It is reasonably easy to maintain the product.

The return on investment is reasonable. However, the features we would most want from an MSP perspective are those we can't afford because we can't pass on the costs to the customers. We will have an issue if we need more hosts and storage. Our customers cannot afford it.

Reducing the cost would be the most beneficial. The product is too expensive to implement. We can't afford the extra features because it's simply too expensive.

We are cloud providers. We use the solution as a part of our support for the customers. We should be able to model our requirements and purchase in advance. Modeling would be very useful if our platform is growing. If a customer has a particular amount of CPU, storage, and memory requirements, we'd like to model it and get ahead of the storage availability and CPU memory availability issues. We could also model the upgrades when there is a need for maintenance. Such modeling is very useful to an MSP. Overall, I rate the product an eight out of ten.

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.

The primary use case is operations management for our customers, who are looking for more insight into their environments.

Our customer was able to tell their environment was overprovisioning VMs. So, they decommissioned some VMs, which had been created, and also wrote a policy around the creation of VMs. Now, people don't just randomly create VMs and use up all the company's resources.

It helps an organization quickly create test and dev environments for developers to come up with new software and patch tests.

• Its predication ability.
• Its GUI is easy to use, which makes it user-friendly.

Stability is good right from the start. Everything works smoothly. Integration with other systems is good. 

Scalability is very good. For example, there was one VM that we thought would not need a lot of resources, then we had to expand its resources on the fly.

Tech support is amazing. They will walk you through the implementation.

The initial setup is straightforward and intuitive. If you have all the data, networks, IPs, etc., then everything is easy.

The customer also has a chance to migrate some of their physical infrastructure onto the virtual environment.

The real ROI is the amount of savings seen on the infrastructure.

Get the right licensing and increase your licensing as you upgrade and grow. If you get the wrong licensing, it will be expensive, especially if you plan improperly. 

I've tried other solutions in the industry, and vROps is a good product in comparison.

I would definitely recommend the solution.

It is next, next, and next to use. You don't need to have much high tech knowledge. It is very intuitive.