VMware Aria Operations Reviews

In comparison to the other management suite that we tried, StrataCloud (which started out as Reflex), vROps has a very quick heads-up display that is nicely concise on what's going on in the environment. It shows the overall health of the environment with weather maps, and it quickly drills down - seems to be - a bit deeper than the other products that I've tried. Not so much fluff, more tech talk.

In terms of what we found the most useful, we were having storage problems and instead of, where StrataCloud points you to another map that goes one level deeper, vROps is very concise; it'll give you the HBA number, the LUN, and exactly what it's seeing. It was latency in our case.

Another benefit is the kind of manager-based mapping it can do and the layout; they love that kind of stuff.

We have another management platform installed in another one of our clusters, for a different department. When we get help ticket calls and I have to use that other platform, it seems to take me forever to actually drill down to what the problem is. vROps is faster. vROps just drills down to the nitty-gritty and if you're a tech, it tells you what you need to see. The important information.

We have nothing documented, but when we first put in vROps, we were having storage latency problems and we weren't sure where it was coming from. We weren't even sure it was a storage latency problem and immediately after installing vROps, it narrowed the issue down right to the VM store and the iSCSI adapters that were causing us our problems.

It also helped us with performance management: virtual CPUs, under-sizing and over-sizing, and the RAM.

Personally, from what I've seen, I think what I'd like to do is get the inside log added to it now for an even deeper drill down into what's going on in the environment. Based on what I saw at VMworld, I think I might be missing stuff. I don't know if I have any proof of that. With vROps, you're not seeing small faulted events unless you drill down deeply. With the VM login site added to it, it's going to tell me everything: initial events and it builds very nice graphs of events and the amount of events that occur over time to customizable periods.

I think I’d like it to be easier to see that type of information, based on what I saw in a lab at VMworld. I really didn't know I was missing anything, and I might not be, but based on the lab, I think that we are not getting full visibility right now without that.

Also, I think it should be cheaper, especially at an enterprise level. If it could be cheaper, that would be great.

I've had no issues with stability.

I don't know; we've never had to grow it out beyond the initial install, so I don't know if I can speak to that either.

We have 600 VDIs; that's one install, and then we have probably about 300 and so servers.

We've used our SE as technical support, and he's really good. He knows the product and whenever we were having trouble, he was able to help us out. It was more with the install; haven't had a lot of trouble since the install.

We started with nothing and then we bought another product, StrataCloud, because we were aware it was taking way too long and we just didn't know what was going on. You get the ticket call saying things are slow and without a product like that, where do you start? I think initially the investment was in StrataCloud because vROps was just too expensive.

We got into it because it was included in our licensing level with VDI. As soon as we installed VDI, it just quickly showed us a ton of problems we were having we didn't even know about. After seeing it there now this year, what I'd like to do is push back, see if I could get the product we're using out and invest on this one on the other side - on our production server side also.

We had some initial setup issues; I think there was some kind of a shim driver we had to install, if I'm remembering correctly. We had some issues with that shim driver initially. He did it remotely; he called in and we got over it quickly, the initial problems.
The full install was a few hours.

We had a request for proposals on management suites and the winner of that RFP was the StrataCloud suite. At that time, we had 6 or 7 competing products come in (all of their names escape me right now). They were all demo’d and we chose the one we were on based on a number of different areas, but I think the biggest one was price.

Price wasn't the most important part to me; it was important to the people buying, the end financial guy. To the technicians, we all wanted the best technical product.
I don't know if that is vROps, but right now it seems to me to be the best one.

For me, from what I've seen, just go with the vendor’s monitoring product. It seems to be that they always know the product best. If you go for somebody else, I think for the most part you might not be seeing the information presented the same way.

The most valuable features of VMware vRealize Operations (vROps) are capacity and performance management.

VMware vRealize Operations (vROps) can improve the Layer 3 hypervisor VM infrastructure because we do not manage other applications. We need a package, which is too expensive. We would like to manage native VMware applications, VMware native components, hypervisor, and storage, such as vSAN.

I have been using VMware vRealize Operations (vROps) for approximately two years.

The stability of VMware vRealize Operations (vROps) could improve. It can help us to build a dashboard report on a job, but it seems very slow to produce or deliver the dashboards. We are tunning it to make it go fast.

The support provided by VMware vRealize Operations (vROps) is average.

The initial setup of VMware vRealize Operations (vROps) was very minimal.

We are experts and we install VMware vRealize Operations (vROps) on a host, and we import an appliance, such as OVA, and we deploy it.

We have a team of four people that does the maintenance and support of the solution.

I would advise others that VMware vRealize Operations (vROps) is a good tool to manage VMware application components, for sending storage on RPMs. For example, if we have a basic hypervisor or storage based on VMware files, such as VMFS. It is a great tool for that.

I rate VMware vRealize Operations (vROps) a nine out of ten.

There is a newer version available which will have better features.

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.

We use vROps to gather all of the information about the infrastructure. We have a huge infrastructure which means that we need a central location where we can find anything and any kind of data. We also massively use it for reporting. 

This solution has improved my organization because it's much easier to keep track of installed software versions. 

The most valuable feature would be the reporting function and the central location for everything. We need reporting for all of the components.

This solution is intuitive and user-friendly. It has evolved pretty well. It wasn't that simple in the beginning but now it's getting better.

The speed of the user interface and the upgrade process of the components are features that I would like to see included in the next release. 

This solution is stable. It has improved a lot. 

We use one of the largest installations of vROps and it is scalable. 

VMware provides good support. We are a GSS customer which means that we have global support with a dedicated engineer from VMware's side so we have no issues with support. 

We use a large installation of this solution with multiple nodes and so the setup was pretty complex. 

We haven't seen ROI yet. It might come later.  

I would rate this solution a seven because it's not the best it can be yet. It has room for improvement but it has definitely evolved to become above average. 

We use this solution to determine what systems are being utilized and whether there are issues with VMs.

It has improved our organization because it allows us to be proactive in regards to catching systems prior to them becoming a critical state.

It has helped improve the quality of service to users. It's made sure that we don't have servers that are over-subscribed with storage that starts to end up being at the minimalist points. 

It helps us to determine, over the course of time, whether we need to supply more hardware, memory, or storage.

For the most part, we have found it to be user-friendly. It has gotten better over time since the first version of vROps that I used. The interface has really improved since then. 

I haven't had any problems with stability. It has been fine. 

We haven't done a lot in scalability since it's been implemented. 

We haven't had to use their technical support. 

We had an option of using this solution or not and our group chose to move forward with it. 

After a few earlier iterations, I think the latest version was very easy to deploy. I didn't have to problems with the setup at all, it was very easy. 

Not having any downtime is always a return on investment.

We use a multiple-monitoring solution but vROps is more tailored towards the environment that we use. We use both solutions hand in hand. The monitoring solutions that we currently use notify us of any issues and whatnot. We use vROps to tell us what the VMs or servers are doing over time. 

I would tell somebody looking into vROps or a similar solution that it's a good product. I haven't had any problems with it. I want to continue using this product moving forward and I would definitely recommend it to a colleague.

I rated this solution a nine because we haven't had any problems with it. It has provided me with the information that I've needed to make sure that our environment stays stable and it provides our users with the needed applications.

Our use case is the monitoring of our storage system. 

We had Oracle running on VMware and wanted to have some metrics about the performance. Also, we wanted some metrics and benchmark tools for our applications, which are highly critical and latency sensitive, to integrate into dashboards so we can pinpoint issues and how they are related.

When we were having trouble with our Oracle Database, we could pinpoint the root cause that it was disk-related, i.e., disk misconfiguration. Therefore, in vROps, we could see the problem was related to disks.

It is easy to drill down directly to the root cause of a problem. It goes from network to storage and having access to all the metrics. When you run 100 percent virtual, then everything is in one tool.

I would like more application dashboards to be available.

It's very stable. We have never had issues with it.

It's very scalable. We have never had issues with it.

I have never needed to use their technical support.

We were not using another solution previously. We did not consider anything else before, because nothing else could read our entire VMware stack.

It was straightforward; next, next, and we were finished.

It was cost effective, because it fixed our problems.

We did consider some other vendors, but due to the pricing and features of those products, we skipped them quite quickly.

It creates simple dashboards. Let it run for a couple of weeks, then it collect all the data you need and you can start to play with it. It is easy to use.

Its first versions were a bit less user-friendly. However, in its latest versions, everything is done with the wizard. We just follow the wizard, and not much knowledge is needed to start directly with the product.

The primary use case for it is monitoring our VMware state and helping with troubleshooting the VMs. In terms of the performance, it works well for what we're using it for. We hope to expand its use in the future.

The Troubleshooting Dashboard helps us see if there is contention on the VM that's causing performance issues or if it's a problem with the resources it has or if it doesn't have enough. It helps lower the troubleshooting time on virtual machines.

The Troubleshooting Dashboard is probably the best feature, the one that gets used the most.

It's getting better from what it used to be, but it still has a pretty steep learning curve. It's not super-intuitive when you first log into it. To find a lot of the information you need, you have to dig through multiple categories, subcategories, panes, and dashboards and widgets. They've been making it better by presenting some of the most commonly used ones more in the forefront. But some of the more advanced stuff is still pretty difficult to find.

The latest version, it has come a long way and I know the next version coming out looks like it's going further. I think they're making great strides there.

It's pretty stable. We haven't had many problems with it going down. If it does, it's mostly that the machine runs out of disk space but, other than that, it's up, it works.

I think it scales well. We have a pretty large environment, several thousand VMs, several hundred hosts. It handles things pretty well.

We did use tech support when we had problems upgrading it, but otherwise I usually just go in and add a disk space. But tech support has always been pretty good.

It reduces man-hour times when trying to troubleshoot machines. As far as return on investment goes, being that it came with the level of licensing we were already getting, we didn't spend extra for it.

I would definitely suggest you use it. It's a really good tool for what we use it for, for troubleshooting machines. The Troubleshooting Dashboard really highlights things pretty well.

I rate vROps a seven out of ten. It might be a ten if they made it a bit more user-friendly, a little bit more intuitive.

In my previous organization, the basic utilization was to monitor our systems, to do a better job than just performance counters were showing within vSphere.

It was a medical institution and we had implemented a solution called Epic. Epic is a big medical system for things like admitting, billing, patient documentation, etc. It's massive. vROps has a plug-in that actually monitors Epic systems.

In my current organization, it has been performing really well. My current job is also medical and we are going to be using it for the same purposes: Not only monitoring hardware, we're also going to be using it to monitor Epic.

vROps not only monitored my vSphere environment, it was actually able to monitor into my Epic environment, to make sure that all of my transactions and all of the ins and outs of that system were working properly. vROps became a focus of how we monitored and managed the system.

It enables me to anticipate our system needs, to be able to know if a host is overloaded, to be able to move things off of it. In my case, it's medical. This is something that could be considered life or death. It's critical that my clinical people have access to the resources that they need to accomplish their jobs. It's a 24-hour-a-day, seven-day-a-week job and vROps has really helped us focus in on where the trouble spots are, to be able to alleviate those problems before they even become problems, so it's great.

It has reduced time to troubleshoot issues, improved the quality of service to users, and provided cost savings through higher capacity utilization.

Being able to get the proper performance counters was the biggest deal. If you use the vCenter stuff, it's okay when you get the information out of the performance counters there, but vROps actually gives you more realistic numbers.

Between the previous version and this one, they should keep going with the improvements in how intuitive it is, streamline it more, and keep going with that notion.

If possible, for the medical industry, I would like to see it work with Epic, being able to focus in on Epic during the installation and have it move right into the Epic role. That would be great.

Stability has gotten better over time. In general, we haven't had any downtime.

I've never had to scale it up. What we did was we set up high-availability and we added failover ability to keep it going, to keep it continuously operational. So as far scaling, we haven't had the need to do that.

I can see vROps meeting our needs, going forward, for the next five to 10 years.

It was something that we tried out and then it became our solution. It evolved on us and became something that we could mold to our environment.

In this case, what made us look at it was its involvement with Epic, having that plugin for it. That's what originally got us going. Epic is an investment, it's huge. So to have something that could bring those components to the forefront, to show you if there are any problem spots, was worthwhile.

The latest version of it has been a much easier installation. The previous version I had installed needed a lot of resources, a lot of time to sit and mold it. The new one, not so much. It's been a much easier installation.

We didn't work with VMware to install it. That's how intuitive it is now. You simply download it and install it. There is obviously some molding that needs to happen with it, but the installation on this current version is much more intuitive and much easier than the previous ones. They've definitely made some improvements. It's pretty straightforward.

It's priced competitively.

Epic actually has its own product to monitor itself. It wasn't until vROps revealed that it had this, and we could see how it operated, that it came to the forefront. So we really didn't focus in on anything else.

Work with your VMware TAM, work with your VMware support group to get it installed the first go-round, get used to it. Definitely do a PoC, don't just try to roll it into production. Assess it first.