VMware Aria Operations Reviews

I use the solution in my company as it comes along with our VMware license, and it is very useful for analyzing our issues and incidents. It is quite a well-performing tool.

The most valuable features for capacity planning revolve around the fact that real-time alerts are good for us. For capacity planning, even if you see any kind of computing, I get proper updates via logs from VMware vROps and Aria Operations.

Regarding what the tool is meant for, I believe that we will get a proper response from it in our company. It is a good product.

There are some delays in response to the solution's technical support, making it an area where improvements are needed.

I have been using VMware Aria Operations for two to three years. My company has a partnership with VMware.

It is a good and stable solution.

It is a scalable solution. Scalability-wise, I rate the solution a nine out of ten.

I am just a customer of the tool. Our company has an environment with VMware Aria Operations and other platforms, and we are happy with them.

I rate the technical support a five or six out of ten.

Neutral

I rate the product's initial setup phase a seven or eight on a scale of one to ten, where one is difficult, and ten is easy.

The product's deployment phase was managed in a few hours.

The solution is deployed on an on-premises model.

The tool comes with a VMware ESXi license. I don't know whether the tool is expensive. If one is cheap and ten is expensive, I rate the product price an eight out of ten.

Our company doesn't have any automation processes in our infrastructure. My company has not integrated VMware Aria Operations with any automation tool.

I am not sure about the tool's AI part, but for analyzing and insights, it is a very good tool.

I recommend the solution to others.

I rate the tool a nine out of ten.

I use the solution in my company for monitoring and capacity management.

The solution's most valuable feature is a native product from VMware itself, so it tightly works with VMware products. Using events in VMware Aria Operations, we can easily automate tasks by integrating with vRO workflows.

The only area of concern when using the integration features is when we want to forward the logs from VMware vRealize Log Insight to Apache Kafka. Apache Kafka is an enterprise solution for data management. We cannot forward the logs to Apache because we cannot find the right solution.

Currently, whatever our company raises goes to GSE. The technical support person has to start from scratch, so he doesn't have the knowledge on the HSBC side. There are a lot of issues. There is probably a need to sort the account management layer only. Account management strategy is an area of concern where improvements are needed.

I have been using VMware Aria Operations for more than ten years. My company is a customer of the tool.

My company did not experience any stability issues with the tool. The tool is 100 percent stable.

My company did not explore the solution's scalability.

In terms of scalability, the tool has clustering technology. It has been the clustering technology in infrastructure that makes the tool easily scalable.

My company is never 100 percent satisfied with the solution's technical support. I rate the technical support a six to seven out of ten.

Neutral

I use VMware Aria Operations, VMware Skyline, and VMware vRealize Log Insight.

The product's initial setup phase is straightforward.

My company's SMEs do the product's maintenance.

One person can deploy the solution.

The solution can be deployed in less than an hour.

I don't know if the tool helped with cost savings since it was implemented a long time ago, and back then, we did not convert it to dollar savings.

When it comes to the tool's automation capabilities, my company is not using the native one. Based on the events, we will pick up certain things and integrate them with vRO, and then we will run a few workflows, which is what automation is for us.

I did not see many issues with the product's integration features.

I think the tool usually has patches, especially critical ones. The tool normally sends notifications to customers. There are just regular patches from VMware.

Right now, with the current acquisition of VMware, maybe not as of now because of the impact on the cost plus the current transition that's one thing is the support. Yeah. So maybe the recommendation will be to have different virtualization technologies such as Nutanix and Red Hat OpenShift.

The tool might have integration features, but we are not using it.

I rate the tool an eight out of ten.

We use VMware Aria Operations for the provisioning of the servers.

The solution gives suggestions regarding whether resources are underutilized or overutilized. It can also do automatic rescheduling like we do in the cloud. The solution's predictive analysis helps us in our future planning for procurement of the server, provisioning of the server, and capacity planning.

The solution’s pricing could be improved.

I have been using VMware Aria Operations for a couple of years.

VMware Aria Operations is a stable solution.

VMware Aria Operations is a scalable solution. More than 10,000 users are using the solution, and we have plans to increase the usage.

The solution’s technical support is good.

The solution is easy to deploy and doesn't require much effort. The solution's documentation helped us to do the installation and configuration.

We implemented the solution through an in-house team. For deployment, we consider doing some certifications, which is the best place to keep some items, whether on-premises or on the cloud, the cost, and compliance. After that, we make a plan and then do the deployment.

The solution is slightly expensive.

VMware Aria Operations is deployed on the cloud in our organization. If users have a valid case, they should go for the solution. Users need to pay more if they go for the premium support.

The solution's integration with other tools is good. Sometimes, we need to connect the solution with different tools, and all the tools are easily integrable.

Overall, I rate VMware Aria Operations ten out of ten.

VMware Aria Operations is a new platform that provides visibility into different areas of the infrastructure, reduces or eliminates downtime, and makes customers more proactive. It gives customers the insights they need to be proactive rather than not active, and it helps them plan for capacity needs, ensuring that they are doing their best to avoid over-provisioning or experiencing contention. It also has a self-service option so that end users can be more independent from the infrastructure team and monitor their needs.

Avoiding problems in the monitoring area is our strength. We use real-time monitoring models and real-time monitoring to do this. We also provide other capabilities, such as seeing changes in the environment.

The VMware Aria Operations solution is a very technical product and is not for everyone. As a top-of-the-chain VMware tool, it is only normal that it has a learning curve. While the UI has been improved, it may still be difficult for some users. The solution has a lot of functionality and can monitor all areas of infrastructure, such as storage and network.

I have been using VMware Aria Operations as a partner for seven years.

I rate the solution’s stability a ten out of ten.

I rate the solution’s scalability a ten out of ten.

The documentation is perfect.

Positive

The initial setup is easy. The setup time depends on the scale, but it can be as short as a few hours. Once the valet solution is deployed, you must link it to the infrastructure. This process takes a few hours, as the key must pull data from all the infrastructure components. In most cases, the valet solution will remove the entire infrastructure into CRM within a few hours or less.

I rate the initial setup an eight out of ten. 

Most small users don't adopt VMware Aria Operations until it's necessary. Small businesses are looking for it, too. We need more monitoring and insights, so we're analyzing solutions to help us out here.

I rate the solution’s pricing a five out of ten.

VMware Aria Operations has many hands-on plug-ins that can help you monitor all the elements in your infrastructure, such as storage, networks, and more, beyond VMware infrastructure itself.

Overall, I rate the solution a nine out of ten.

We wanted a tool for monitoring the entire virtualization infrastructure. In addition to infrastructure monitoring, a second use case was application monitoring. At the time we were looking, they had a tool called EPOps through which you could do application monitoring. We also heard about some other components, partner integrations for VMware, through which we could monitor the SAP landscape and storage performance.

There was a team of five or six members. Only one member implemented the vROps, but the visibility was provided to all five of the core infrastructure members. They have been able to use the tool effectively to monitor all the applications from an infrastructure point of view.

We also created an application-specific dashboard, from an infra point of view, which was released to end application teams, so that they can then monitor the performance of their applications: How is the CPU and memory? How is the software: working or not working? It is a one-of-a-kind solution where we have onboarded application teams and given them logins for their specific areas.

vROps also provides proactive monitoring, at some level. It's not practical to keep on logging in to the tool to look at it. So you can create alerts and it will alert you if memory utilization is going beyond 80 or CPU utilization is going above 90. It significantly improves the monitoring, because we are able to act on it beforehand, before the system goes down. It has decreased our downtime by 20 percent. We are more proactive in anticipating and solving problems, and it has also reduced our mean time to resolution for infrastructure by about 10 percent.

We also use it for capacity management, for buying new capacity. It has saved us on hardware costs because we're able to plan properly and we're able to buy the necessary hardware. It has saved us around 50 lakh in Indian rupees [about $70,000 at the time of this review]. And because we are not buying as much infrastructure, the licensing requirements and costs have also been reduced. And it has saved us about 5 to 10 lakh [about $7,000 to $14,000 at the time of this review] in power and other data center costs.

For VMware monitoring, it gives a good amount of data, which can be circled back with the IT hierarchy, or application owner, to have a discussion. 

VM rightsizing is another very good feature and capacity planning is something else that I like about it.

In addition, over time it has become more user-friendly. When we deployed, it was only three-years-old. Recently, it has matured enough to monitor cloud infra also, but we have not tried that yet. But it has matured over the time. The GUI has become more user-friendly and it is very lightweight now.

It shows end-to-end visibility for infrastructure: CPU, memory, and all the processes that are running on the server. It will provide you everything. It will provide you some information about applications, depending on the tool capability, but it is not an application performance monitoring solution.

We integrated vROps with vRealize Log Insight, but it was not helpful to me. It was not giving me any good data.

Another area where there is room for improvement is an area which I've not looked at: cloud management and how efficiently it can do it. 

Also, while it is able to do VMware management very effectively, if you have any other hypervisor solution, I don't know how effectively it would work. It should scale to other infrastructure also.

We have been using VMware vRealize Operations (vROps) for the last five to six years now.

The product is more or less stable. We may find a database-related issue once in a year because it uses the open source Cassandra DB, so sometimes that does not work the way it should. 

Also, high-availability within the product is not so good. They have tried to improve it over the time. We have created a two-node cluster where, if one cluster goes down, the other node will take over. Whenever we have tried, it was not that seamless, and we had to involve their support.

It is scalable. It is easy to scale. We also implemented it in a remote location, where we just had to install a remote connector. All you need is good connectivity.

In a given week we were using vROps three to four times. That frequency has been reduced and now we use it about twice a week. I look at it in my role as manager of IT infrastructure and data center. On my team there are three people and they also look at vROps from time to time. They create VMs. They are database, software, and backup administrators. Above me there is our leadership team that also looks at it on a case-by-case basis.

Technical support is very good, no doubt about it. If you raise a very high-priority case, you will get an immediate response. And most of the people are able to solve the problems. You don't have to roll the case over to the next available or superior agent.

We didn't have any tools before vROps, but it provides a single tool for virtualized infrastructure monitoring.

The initial setup was a complex process, and it is still a complex process. There are too many products: the UI, database, and you have to properly size it according to your requirements, otherwise it does not work well.

Our deployment was a one-year project.

We took a full suite of licenses for all the VMs which we had. And that time we had some 600 VMs. We took two types of licensing, advanced and enterprise, where we were trying to achieve our application monitoring in the enterprise licensing. The advanced was used to create dashboards and other kinds of reporting.

Besides this, we used one more product, VMware Compliance Manager, which they have now stopped. That is one area which they have now integrated into vROps, but we have not tried it so far.

We used VMware professional services. Our experience with them was okay. We thought we would implement way further, with VMware onboarding, but it took a year to complete the project.

We haven't really seen ROI. That was not the idea at the time. We wanted a monitoring platform. Return on investment on such a product is also fairly difficult to calculate.

Over time they have changed the pricing and the licensing model. Five or six years ago, when we took it, it was a very good option. Now, I think I have to reevaluate, to be honest.

We looked at SolarWinds and BMC. One of the primary reasons we went with vROps was that we had a large VMware infrastructure. Also, at that time, the dashboards were very good. Also, at some level, it was an agentless solution. In all the other cases you had to install an agent in the end VMs. But because vROps is tightly integrated with VMware, it monitors without agents. That was a factor. Cost was also a factor.

My advice would be to look at it holistically, meaning look at what you want to achieve in the final endgame. Also, evaluate a couple of products to get a feel for them and which product suits you. In addition, create roles within your company, because this needs dedicated attention when you implement it and attention to sustain it. There should also be alignment with an application team or leadership team when implementing this kind of solution.

I use VMware Aria Operations in my company for monitoring the virtualized environment along with vRealize Operations (vROps).

We are using the tool for monitoring purposes, creating reports, storage utilization, CPU utilization, and RAM utilization. We use the tool for capacity planning in our infrastructure.

For capacity planning, we have to create a view, and then we have to create some particular VMs. The tool is beneficial for capacity planning, such as in the area of CPU utilization.

If, on a particular VM, we have more computing resources, then we can monitor IT operations for a particular fifteen days. With the tool, we can reduce the computing resources on particular VMs, and it is the type of monitoring we have done using the tool.

It would be good if the tool gives more monitoring features like the ones offered by the other monitoring solutions, especially in areas like dashboards. Using critical alerts on the email also gives the same information on the dashboard for particular data to L1 team members so that they can continuously monitor particular VMs with VMware Aria Operations, but if the host goes down, it just goes down. If the host goes down, such information is not sent to the user via email. We have just been notified about such incidents via VMware vCenter, but when we are off duty, the issues should be sent via email to us.

I have been using VMware Aria Operations for six months. I use the solution for my data center. I use VMware Aria Operations 8.6.

It is a stable solution. Stability-wise, I rate the solution an eight out of ten.

The solution's technical support is responsive. I rate the technical support an eight to nine out of ten.

Positive

For cost savings, we use the tool to create a three-month capacity planning plan. For capacity planning, we can manage our storage or compute resources for our VMs. The tool is a cost-effective product in my company.

The analytics capabilities have improved the analytics operations. In my company, the analytics is managed by L3 and L4 teams. The L3 and L4 teams in my company asked me to create a particular view for the VMs. The L4 team manages the analytics part.

For operational productivity, we don't we don't have to go with another open-source tool or another product like SolarWinds for monitoring purposes. We are in the banking sector. I mostly use the tool in the banking sector. In the banking sector, banks do not use open-source products. They just have some license of the product. The tool is cost-effective, particularly from a licensing perspective for monitoring purposes.

My company is not going with the AI part for now.

I recommend the tool to others.

I would not recommend the tool to those working on open-source products like Zabbix. Open-source products give you a report, but it is not accurate. Other companies offer features like dashboards and alerts, but we do not go with such tools. We use VMWare Aria Operations. We are mostly given the banking sectors or companies that do not use open-source products.

I rate the tool a five to six out of ten.

The most common use case for vROps is to monitor infrastructure. Infrastructure includes, for example, your virtual machines. 

If a customer has an on-premises data center, they tend to integrate their adapters with vROps. This means that if there are any issues, alerts, or anything else that goes wrong with the system, vROps will pick it up. 

It will then use an inbuilt algorithm, depending on the events and alert system that you have configured, to trigger an email. This can help you to avoid a lot of problems in the future. 

For example, if there are a few appliances that are being monitored by vROps and their root directory or any other issues are getting beyond thresholds, say 80%, it will automatically trigger an email. If you have any ticketing system integrated with vROps, it will then trigger a severity one or severity two ticket to the respective team so that they are aware that there is something that might go wrong if it is not looked at on time. 

So, it is basically helping customers to avoid those situations where they might get into any issues or trouble. So, it is monitoring your system. 

Another stuff, so it is like if you want to have any visual representation of the data, of the performances, or of the data that has gone through in the last hour, last week, you can create a lot of dashboards on that, which is a visual presentation of the data. 

So, it helps you in a long way to monitor and understand your environment.

One of the things that is really valuable is its ability to help you implement security measures into your organization's standards. It helps you to have full control over more than 90% of the hardware and network infrastructure where you are installing vROps, so that you can have granular control over the infrastructure, which is pretty important these days. 

It's deployed mostly on-premises, but you can deploy it on the cloud as well. So, as most customers today are going for hybrid cloud deployment, they need a tool like vROps to give them a standardized, centralized view to monitor their infrastructure across both on-premises and cloud environments. It provides a single pane of glass to see what is going on across the entire infrastructure. 

vROps is a VMware tool, and most of the applications that our customers are running are virtual machines. So, when you have an infrastructure that mostly uses ESXi hypervisors, vROps really help you to have better control over your infrastructure and what is going on. This can help customers to run their day-to-day operations more smoothly. 

Moreover, in the older days, we used to perform health checks and other stuff manually. vROps automates a lot of these tasks, which lowers the burden on the operations team so that they don't have to worry about keeping an eye on each and every sort of thing. Even in the off business hours, when no one is there to take care of any stuff, vROps is still monitoring all of the data, appliances, and everything else. This helps them out in a big way.

The first area of improvement is cost. VMware licensing is always a bit costly. It has never been an open-source tool or something like that. So there are costs associated with that. 

Another thing is that you somehow need to have high-end people to perform the integrations with vROps as well. It's not as easy as it seems to deploy and integrate it with the different systems you want to monitor. 

It is user-friendly, but everything needs some specific skill sets. For example, if you go for even vRealize Automation, it comes as a bundle. So vROps is just one part of vRealize Automation suite. So, we need to know the product before we can start deploying it or start using it. We need to have people who have experience with specific tools before we can use them in our day-to-day operations.

So, for me, based on my experience, costing is one thing, and then there are the integration challenges that our company faces. And along with that, it does take up a bit of resources as well. It is resource-intensive.

I have not been using it directly because I work as an architect. Whenever there is a project for customers using vRealize Operations in their environment, we are the ones who have been designing the infrastructure with respect to vROps. 

So it has been around 12 months or more that I've been associated with projects where I have been helping customers deploy vROps and how to make proper use of this tool.

The stability of vROps depends on the environment that you are using it in. vROps comes as a suite, and when you're using it with other VMware products, such as vRealize Automation (vRA), vRealize Network Insight (VRNI), and VMware Cloud Foundation modules, it is already compatible with those products and is generally pretty stable. 

For example, when you are using it for virtualized workloads or VMware Virtual Desktop, it's very stable.

It is a scalable solution. You can scale it up depending on your configuration setup. 

There are different options for scaling, such as multi-node setups and collector setups. If you need to collect more information from different tools, you can simply add a collector to your environment. 

vROps is a good choice in terms of scalability. Even when you scale it up, it's not a big hassle to put more load into the system.

As an architect, we mostly design vROps implementations. The day-to-day operations are typically the ones that reach out to the support team. So, the support is mainly for people who are managed in the customer environment. 

We provide guidance on which integrations or adapters to use, and how to get the endpoint systems integrated with vROps. But when it comes to support, it's a matter of cost. VMware offers different levels of support, and the enterprise level of support is quite expensive.

If you're looking for a higher level of support, then it comes with a cost.

When I started working with vROps three years ago, the company mostly used vROps. When I joined, I started with the vRealize Suite. And they have different types of monitors. For example, there are different tools for different monitoring purposes. Like, for security, they'll have different tools for log monitoring.

We use vRealize Operations. We use vRealize Automation (vRA). We use VMware Cloud Foundation. That's vCS. And then, we have been using vRealize Network Insight. Then, we have been using Cisco Insight or Cisco FlashStack. These are the few software that I've been working on in the last twelve months. So, different teams will have different tools which are being used.

The initial setup is quite easy and straightforward.  The majority of the time, implementing vROps is not time-consuming. 

However, if you are migrating from one vROps version to another, you may need to take care of a few things, such as downloading the new configuration and other necessary changes. But overall,  vROps implementation is pretty simple.

So, besides the license overall, you have to pay for the type of support you want. With the license, there is a support cost as well.

Typically, people don't just purchase vROps individually. It's usually part of a larger suite, like the vRealize Suite, which is expensive. So, the suite includes vROps along with other software. 

If a company purchases vCloud Foundation (vCF) or vRealize Suite, vROps comes with it. vCF and the vRealize Suite have been acquired or purchased by large customers who have the financial resources to support the licensing costs. 

For example, I've seen many banking sectors using vROps when they purchase vCS. Recently, I worked on a design for a major European bank, and they were using the entire suite. 

So, no one really goes for the individual product because its value is significantly higher when it's part of the suite. So, there are many customers who use it, but the number of people who use it within a team depends on the company. For example, service-based companies that support multiple customers may have different needs based on the number of customers they support. They may train or onboard more resources to use vROps, depending on their requirements.

The main reason my company goes with VCS is that they already have a current VMware setup. When people go with the VCS suite itself, suppose you have a VMware virtualized network and VMware workloads running on one platform. 

For the network, you may be using different switches, and for storage, you may be using different SANs. So, with this approach, you have to pay different vendors because you're not relying on the same vendor for everything. 

And whenever something goes wrong, you have to open different tickets, which can be costly and time-consuming. So, people go for VCS mostly because they are getting everything in one single setup.

VMware has your networking, your virtualization, vSAN storage, vRealize Automation for automating workloads, vROps for monitoring, and VRNI for monitoring specific networks. So, it comes as a bundle, and it's pretty easy for companies to know that if they buy everything from the same vendor, it streamlines their processes. 

It also leads to operational efficiency because they are dealing with one vendor. And then, when you have two different products bundled in a suite from the same vendor, compatibility is never an issue. That's one of the main things. Because if you have different vendors and products, there is always uncertainty about whether upgrading one product will be compatible with another product from a different vendor. 

And if we look at what VMware has done recently, every year they have validated design guides. So, through that, we'll have everything within that guide, which one is compatible with which, which doesn't work with which, and if there are any limitations with any releases. So, we get everything in one suite. 

So, that's the reason most people go with them because they can foresee their future development in terms of hardware, in terms of their workload, or in terms of their business.

First of all, I would always suggest you go for vROps initially and always go for a temporary trial license. That way, you can check your VMware or any workload stuff you have, how your trial license works, and how it works with your production environment. If you have any workloads that you're going to manage through vROps, always go for a trial license first. Don't straight away go with the production license.

Also, always try to use different workloads, different metrics, and different configurations. This is because it also depends on the specific data center you have and the different products you're using. Ensure you are trying to integrate or get the alert generated for most of the products you are trying to integrate with vROps. A POC (Proof of Concept) kind of thing is always required before you go for the production license.

During the trial period, you can see how your dashboard looks, how the alert system is working, if it's not working, and if it's really meeting your security considerations as well. So, these are the things before you fully decide to go for the production license. Always take a trial license integrated with your current setup, which you have appliances and tests on, before you even decide to go ahead with it.

Overall, I would rate the solution an eight out of ten. The reason is that there are many new advancements coming into the market that are AI-enabled. VMware really needs to do more when it comes to preventing alerts. For example, many security tools use algorithms to detect alerts and give you a whole scenario of the reports that show how you can prevent this action from repeating again. These are a few things they absolutely need to work on more.

Also, security has been a boom for companies in the last few years, and considering how important security is, there have been a lot of tools that do the rating. So, it is more integration-friendly if the current tool can be used for any integrations in any environment, which is something VMware is not yet that efficient at. But I would still give it an eight because most of the workloads currently being used are virtualized ones, VMware workloads. For them, it's perfect.

Our clients use VROps to monitor their virtual machine performance, create reports, do capacity planning, and do project planning. We also use the tenant-student app for billing purposes.

I've found the reporting and analytics features to be the most valuable. 

The latest release of VMware Aria Operations has some great new automation features, but I think the pricing could be improved. It's quite expensive, especially for the entire VM workload.

In future releases, I would like to see VMware Aria Operations integrate with Ansible. I understand that VMware has their own orchestration and automation product, but I think it would be valuable to be able to integrate with Ansible as well. This would give users the flexibility to choose the best tool for the job, without having to invest in two separate products.

I have been using VROps for about eight years.

It is a very stable solution. But it requires a lot of knowledge to manage. For example, if you are collecting a lot of data for analysis, the virtual appliance drive spaces can fill up. In this case, you need engineers who know how to expand those spaces. The procedure is simple: you just add a new VMDK and start the appliance. The appliance will automatically expand the drives with the NVMe and stuff. However, the problem is that you need engineers who know how to manage and clear up the logs and ensure that they are sent as a stop.

I would rate the scalability an eight out of ten.  I did have some scalability issues when working with the VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) stack. For example, if I deployed one instance and needed to scale out to a second instance, I would sometimes run into problems. 

VROps is most suitable for enterprise-level companies.

The initial setup process is fairly simple, especially if you are only setting up a standalone instance. However, if you are setting up a multi-tenant or multi-cluster environment, the setup process can take longer.

Our clients have hosted it on cloud as well as on-premises. 

The licensing is quite expensive for our company. I would probably give it a rating of seven out of ten, where one being expensive and ten being affordable.

I've used both VMware Aria Operations and Veeam ONE.

If I need to troubleshoot a problem, I would use VMware Aria Operations. If I need to get a complete overview of my environment and generate reports, I would use Veeam ONE.

Overall, I would rate the solution a nine out of ten. There is only one area of improvement for me.