VMware Aria Operations Reviews

The most valuable feature is the fact that it understands what is normal for a workload and alerts only if you go outside the given boundary. It knows if a workload spikes at the end of the month, that doesn't mean it has to alert, because if that workload is spiking every time at the end of the month, it knows this is normal for that workload and will not alert. It'll only alert if that spike goes beyond the normal range of that spike.

It has the ability to filter and alert you only when you want to be alerted. It understands the IO profile of the workload. It knows when it has spikes, when it has valleys, in a manner of speaking, and accordingly will alert you.

It's a great troubleshooting tool. If you have enough management packs in it, you can see the entire supply chain all the way from storage to compute. It helps you see where exactly, potentially the problem is happening.

Of the newest features, the workload balancing is something we might use. Currently, the way our clusters are laid out we truly do not have a need for that use case. We are not a good candidate for that use case, but the fact is it might help us when we try to consolidate data centers. It can help us to take two clusters into the data center and perhaps migrate workload between the two. It might be used for a data center migration, the way I look at it.

As far as using the capacity and performance management features to save on storage, I cannot answer to that because we have a different team for storage. They manage the storage, they monitor performance and capacity. We monitor the compute side. We use vROps on a regular basis from a capacity management for the compute side; the built-in features, views, heat maps, and whatever they have are pretty good indicators of when we need to add capacity. It has been pretty reliable from that perspective in the sense that it tells us we have a defined threshold that it takes us x number of days to add capacity. It has been pretty reliable from that perspective.

I haven't yet truly used it for proactive monitoring. It's been reactive, but it helps nail down the issue very quickly, based on a VM, a host, or whatever. Their views are the biggest source of views out there.

I think they need to make the UI a little bit more simplistic. It can be a little overwhelming for people who have never used the tool before. For someone who is using these products, you can find things very easily once you're in the UI, but we tried for our users so that they can go in and look for their stuff in there. If they can make the UI a little bit more simplistic, that would probably be one thing I would ask for.

We are trying to empower the users. They should be able to go in and look for their VMs and do minor-level troubleshooting and similar tasks. The UI is a little cluttered from that perspective. If they can make the UI a little bit easier, similar to Google, it would help a lot.

We run infrastructure. Users have a mindset of different things they look for. For them, if there's a custom dashboard that we could set up with a very simple basic UI, where they can see the obvious things. They could just jump in there and see that dashboard, see where the problems are happening right away, instead of moving all over the place. That's why I haven’t given the product a perfect rating.

If it is designed well, it is quite stable. You need to know how many VMs will be reporting up to it. Based on that, if you stand up the cluster with a sufficient number of nodes; data nodes, management nodes and remote collectors. If you design it accordingly, based on the requirements, it performs really well.

So far it's been working well. We have a pretty big cluster; it's around seven nodes. It has been working just fine.

I have run into issues and the support I have needed was more from a guidance perspective than any big help; just asking them, having an upgrade, what would be the steps? What is the recommended procedure, if any? Is there any good guidance around it? They have been pretty helpful with that.

I haven’t actually had many issues with technical support. Once they kind of laid it out, given the environment, “This is how we would recommend that you do the upgrade.” The upgrade itself takes time just because of the scale of the environment. Beyond that, not much.

I was not involved in the initial set up, but I have been involved since then. The solution was already stood up by another team member of ours. He's no longer there, so I inherited the solution, but I have expanded the cluster and I've incorporated additional BUs that we have all over the U.S. and they're reporting into vROps now.

It's a pretty big product. From our perspective, it does a lot for you. You just need to do your homework and try to understand what you're looking for. It has all the answers in there. It does. You just have to know what you're looking for and know where to go to look for it because it can be a very complex product for a first time user. It can be.

• Troubleshooting: All the way from the cluster level down to the VM, you can see it as a whole perspective or troubleshoot the individual VM.
• Creating custom dashboards
• Customer reporting

We use it to monitor CPU and memory usage. We also monitor our storage for latency, and things like that.

For the most part, we have not used the new features in version 6, such as integration with DRS and capacity planning.

It has helped identify bottlenecks and contention. One of them was a storage issue; trying to find out what VMs were pulling the highest latency or a highest IOPS, and narrowing it down from there. It also identifies any type of CPU contention ready time or memory issues.

The biggest improvement I'd like to see is when you create custom dashboards, there isn’t an easy way to specify custom time settings. When you create a dashboard, it is always statically set for a specific time frame versus specifying a different time frame.
The other improvement would be to be able to create a custom report out of a dashboard you just created.

We do a little bit of reporting. We'd like to get a little more, though.

I'm going to mess with 6.3; maybe it's better. It's improved, but I don't know how much yet.

It's very stable. I'm having no issues with stability.

I haven't really had an issue with it scaling out. We have over 5,000 VMs. No issues.

I've not used technical support for vROps.

We were using a little bit of SolarWinds, which was probably the biggest one that we're using at the time.

You can get a lot more granular with vROps, and it's made for what we need specifically, for VMware.

Initial setup was straightforward. It was very simple; right out of the box, it worked. We've been using vROps since they first came out with 5.0 and 5.5. It's come along way with 6.0.

I don’t have any issues with configurations. Once you understand how the templates and the reporting stuff works – once you understand how that comes together – then it's pretty simple to do the reports.

Give it the good 30-day time frame to mess with it and see what it has to offer. Take advantage of the free trial.

vROps provides visibility into the environment and be able to, from a really quick look, see the health of the environment, and find bottlenecks or issues with an environment; and also to predict the future state of the environment or virtual machines that are over-committed or under-committed, whether we need to increase or decrease resources. That's the most important.

We also use the newer automation features, and the increased integration with DRS for workload balancing and scheduling. One of the pieces I would like to use more is vRealize Orchestrator, which is part of the automation solution for vRealize.

For example, a lot of times developers normally ask for virtual machines to be oversized, meaning that probably from the vendors, they have requirements for a certain amount of CPU and memory. A lot of times they require, say, 12 CPUs and 64GB of RAM. After they require this, will we have a way to prove that they are not using all those resources? The way to prove it is by using vROps to keep an eye on the utilization for a month. After that month, we what the true resources the VM uses. Then, based on that, we talk to the developers and we can resize the virtual machines.

It probably has also shortened outage times. There was a really widespread issue in our environment; most of our larger systems were not responsive. I was able to log on to vROps and I saw that it was a storage problem that somehow got reflected on other systems. That saved us a lot of time because it was really creating a problem for us.

We have also saved on the CPU and memory side, although not on the storage side.
With its performance management, we saw things speed up. Fine-tuning the VMs helped improve the overall performance for the environment.

Definitely something that I would like to be included is more interactions with the multiple vendors, and to be the single management tool or monitoring tool. To be able to manage the storage or network; basically, to integrate with more management tools. For example, for our networking, we use HP OpenView, and then we have a ticketing system to generate alerts and so on. We would like to see more integration on that, with those systems.

It is stable. We haven't had any problems with it.

Our environment is definitely growing, but I will say that we've designed the architecture for what we were looking for. At this point, we didn't go above or further up.

We have used technical support sometimes. It could be a little bit challenging. A lot of times when we got support, the first person that is working on the ticket probably is not that knowledgeable. Sometimes, we didn't get the answers or the problem solved in a timely fashion, so we needed to escalate. Sometimes that escalation process or escalation person is able to fix the problem basically.

We previously used multiple vendors. There were probably four or five vendors. We evaluated vRanger. We evaluated Veeam’s management piece.

We decided to go with vROps basically because for the other vendors, monitoring and managing the virtual environment was a problem, but it was part of a larger problem, their enterprise solution. On the other hand, to get the small piece for VMware, we should get the bigger piece for everything else that we probably won't use.

Initial setup was straightforward. It wasn't that complex.

It is definitely a really reliable solution that completely integrates with VMware.

The quick dashboard visibility into the environment is the product’s most valuable feature. It gives you a quick comparison of health states; is something deviating from best practices, or are there capacity problems? Potential problems, things like that; those are some of the key things; the quick view of the environments.

One, we can quickly, whether we're dealing with a customer, a project, a new deal, or somebody's environment, to help them improve their environment. After deploying it, we can quickly analyze the environment, and see quick trouble points that we can actually start targeting and then fixing.

An improvement would definitely be quick analytics on what to do. I know they have some of that, but when the product shows a problem, it should also provide recommendations; what can we do to resolve the issue? They just added something like that in version 6.3, from what I saw in a presentation at VMworld. I'm hoping, I haven't seen it yet. That's what I was looking for.

Stability has actually improved over the years. The new distributor model they came out with in version 6 is a lot of improvement there. I appreciate it.

Scalability is part of the improvement in version 6, where you can distribute the load and start easily out deploying appliances. Version 6, I think, is greatly improved.

For some cases, I have used technical support. The biggest need we have and that comes our way, is how to analyze the data. You have a whole lot of features in there and most people think, Can I call support and ask them about it? That covers most of the questions that I get: How to look at this data and how to interpret it? Here are the metrics vROps shows. What does it really mean? Those are the questions I get more than anything on the support aspect of that.

From a technical infrastructure side, they’re technical support is great. It might require more explanation to people to help them with the interpretation of the data.

Actually, there wasn't much that existed, as far as being able to get quick visibility in the environment or point you to pain points. Otherwise, you have to analyze flat file logs and really go through them. That takes a lot of time, especially from an engineer’s perspective, to analyze and see where problems are. Now, you have vROps and the data's fed in and they can quickly say, Here are the stress points; here are the pain points; here are the health points. That's key. As the virtual environment grows, you quickly see where the trouble points are.

At the time, I was evaluating all of the other alternatives; I mean third-party providers and similar solutions. In the beginning, there was a lot of data and I couldn’t really utilize it, but it's more intuitive now. I looked at other products, too, but everybody was in that infancy stage at that point in time.

My rating reflects the improvements I've been seeing over the years. As far as being able to get that data analyzed, it started out as a good product but it's really made some good strides in helping me, and doing thing in different environment.

Definitely, take it for a spin. Analyze your environment, look at what it can tell you. Look at the custom reports and dashboards that can really quickly give you a daily view of what your environments performance and their capacity is. That's it.

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.

I mainly use VMware vROps for capacity planning, performance tuning, and lower-sized VMs.

VMware vROps' most valuable feature is that it integrates well with our VMware infrastructure, which is helpful for us because we can closely monitor our VMs and their performance.

An area for improvement would be application-level monitoring.

I've been working with VMware vROps for four years.

VMware vROps' stability is good.

The scalability is fine - normally, it comes with analytic and user-interface VMs, but we've combined them as single VMs, so now we can manage our roots with a single VM.

VMware's technical support is good.

We previously used Spectrum but switched to VMware because we already had a VMware environment.

The initial setup was straightforward.

We used a vendor team.

I would recommend VMware vROps for those with a VMware infrastructure and would rate it as nine out of ten.

It's typically used for our interactions with our software engineers, especially when we are configuring or assigning resources to them. It is the way we get the virtual machine to be right-sized. They usually ask for more resources than they need and with this tool I can manage the resources.

There was a system with a Docker cluster that was having really bad issues. A server would go down and the machine would move to another server, in this case a virtual machine, bringing down the whole cluster. Thanks to vROps I was able to closely check the resource usage to spread the load, so instead of having three servers we moved to a more stable solution using eight servers.

vROps has helped to decrease overall downtime by about 20 percent.

In addition, we work here with a five-year budget and we need to have a really good forecast to design solutions because those solutions must last for five years. It's not easy to increase the resources of a solution in the middle of this five-year cycle. So vROps helps a lot in seeing how the load is increasing over time. In that way, I can forecast for more than a two-year period and do so for five years, at least.

The most valuable feature is the ability to check the right-sizing of a machine because that way I can assign the real resources that are needed.

It's also user-friendly. One of the things that I really like are the ready-to-use dashboards. You can get them from a dashboard marketplace where dashboards are contributed by other people. You can use them in your facility without any problem, and some of them are really useful.

The solution also provides proactive monitoring. It's good to have a baseline of how the machine is normally working. After that you can check if it has gone beyond this baseline. If something goes away from this baseline, it usually means you have a problem and you need to fix it.

There is room for improvement when it comes to the integration with Active Directory. Sometimes I need to log in to the application using my Active Directory account, instead of using the regular admin for vRealize Operations. If I want to deploy this tool to more users, I need that.

I used vROps a lot about two years ago and I started with it again about two months ago. I'm the person who designed the whole VMware solution at ALMA Observatory and I support all of it and administer the VMware platform, among other things.

It's quite a stable solution. I have never had a problem with the solution. Every time I want to see something or check something, it's always there.

I have not needed to call VMware for technical support for this solution.

We did not have a previous solution. We only used the typical solution in vCenter for checking performance.

I wouldn't say that vROps replaced a lot of other tools but that's because there aren't too many products that are similar to vROps.

We were already customers for vROps, but at first we were not using a lot. Then we needed to do an upgrade and it was not an easy path to follow. But in terms of the setup and configuration, it was straightforward and much better than the old versions. The last version I used was v4 and, compared to that, it was completely easy.

The deployment, even though I was doing other stuff, took one or two days.

I don't think the solution saves us money, but with it I can better say how the money is spent.

We provide services to our scientists. I can say, "I will provide you with 20 virtual machines, 20 TB of disk, bandwidth, and I know it costs X. The biggest impact is the way I can see where the resources are that we are using. That makes it worth the cost.

The pricing is a little bit expensive.

Licensing is an issue because there are always changes, and by that I mean cost increases. And that's not only for vROps but for VMware, vSphere, and all the products that are involved.

I used Turbonomic a long time ago, but only as a test.

The implementation is easy. You just need to assign resources to install all the virtual machine requirements, but the process is straightforward. My biggest advice is to check the dashboard marketplace because you can find dashboards that are useful to you too. The dashboards are produced by the community. They are free, although some of them need container packs that you need to pay for, or you may need a licensee to use some of them.

VMware vRealize Operations combines multiple VMware components to deliver integrated performance, capacity, and configuration management capabilities for VMware vSphere, physical and hybrid cloud environments.

I have used VMware vRealize Operations for automating the configuration of provisioning various workloads for our ICT Operations staff.

This has reduced the time required to provision the various workloads thereby improving our service delivery as ICT Operations.

This solution provides for easy monitoring of the ICT Infrastructure capacity.

There is Workload Optimization that has new host-based placement, fully automated mode, and a historical view of all the nodes.

The most valuables features are the collection of assets, security, and configuration data settings from each networked virtual environment in the system. This is very key to our decision making.

The introduction of cross-cloud migration is a plus as this improved efficiency for data center staff. 

Certificate Management should be simplified for non-technical staff members.

There is a need for revamping the reporting and improvement on Dashboard to include statistics, which can be used by Finance people on capacity management.

There is a need for improving integration with other hybrid virtual environments. 

The soultion is very stable.

The solution is very scalable. 

The technical support is superb.

We did not use another solution prior to this one.

The initial setup was moderately complex.

It is a mix, where we use our own trained staff with the help of local VMware Partners. The partners are well equipped and have high expertise. 

A lot can be realized in terms of efficiencies, including improved service delivery. 

There is a need for training so as to get qualified staff to set up the environment.

The initial costs are a bit on the higher side but the licensing is flexible. 

We evaluated third-party solutions such as RackNap.