VMware Aria Operations Reviews

We use vROps primarily for maximizing efficiency across the boards. We also use it for monitoring servers, seeing where we can gain back some efficiencies, and where we're wasting resources.

This solution has improved my organization by claiming back resources that have been wasted on applications or on servers that just didn't need them. Having a tool that shows that information on a pretty regular basis has been very helpful.

Definitely has reduced time to troubleshoot. You can get a lot of information out of it very quickly, whereas traditionally, you'd be going on servers and pulling out logs and doing it the long way around. Whereas here it is sort of a single pane, where you can access things quite quickly.

The most valuable features would be the forecasting and the ability to see where waste is.

I very much find this solution to be intuitive and user-friendly. It's like all VMware products. Once you know one of them, you can navigate around most of them.

I know that they talk a lot about AI and a sort of forecasting ahead of time. It's a good application, but it has to wait for a certain period of time to actually do an analysis. If it would give you that ahead of time, or even forecasting, it would be really improved.

Has been extremely stable. We've had no outages or any issues with it across the board, since it's gone in on day one.

In terms of scalability, it's grown along with ourselves. We're a constantly expanding company, and it's scaled to fit every time. I haven't had to go back and re-architect it at any stage.

Their technical support is extremely technical. I'd give them a nine out of ten when it comes to technical capabilities. We're constantly upscaling all the time and have to go back and retrain on certain areas. That is a great advantage.

We use a third party reseller, called Triangle Technologies. We have used them for a lot of our hardware as well. They worked hand in hand to bring VMware in.

I would rate this solution a solid nine because there's always room for improvement. I would highly suggest using the product. Its benefits vastly outweigh the price that it costs, the time it takes to implement, and what it can do for your SaS is unbelievable.

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.

We use it to manage our VDI infrastructure.

It gives the real-time info that we need to diagnose any problems that we have with our VDI infrastructure. With over 18,000 VDIs, it can be a daunting task to manage all that stuff. The solution has helped reduce time to troubleshoot issues, improve quality of service to users, and provide cost savings through higher capacity utilization.

It gives us deep insight into the entire VDI environment, where we have of over 18,000 VDIs. It helps us keep up on uptime, gives us real-time monitoring, tracking, and troubleshooting.

It integrates well with our vCenter. Having that real-time access through vCenter and through vROps is very useful for us.

I'd like to see a little more training, free training on the VMware site; to get some more information within the VMware community. There's quite a bit of stuff out there but getting that access can be daunting sometimes.

We've never had any problems with it, it's always been up, 100 percent of the time. We do have it in a DR situation in case something would happen. But we've never had a problem before.

It's been growing with us. We've been growing at around 5,000 VDIs per year and it's been scaling with us throughout that time.

I walked into the situation with this solution in place. I don't know anything else.

The most important criteria when selecting a vendor are

• product availability
• interoperability with our current environment
• ease of use.

We like to have a really nice GUI interface, something that people can be trained on very quickly, especially when we have new staff come in who are not familiar with the product. We like to get them up and running as quickly as possible. For us, having that flexibility is a real game-changer.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

We use it for monitoring and maintenance of VMware environments.

It provides easier troubleshooting. Especially on the Horizon side of things, it helps us to troubleshoot if there are CPU issues or memory issues in the environment. It has resulted in shorter times for troubleshooting issues. It's easier to isolate an issue, especially things like bad neighbors. It helps me determine whether a host is having an issue. Suppose I'm troubleshooting a VM that's having an issue. I may actually find out that it's not that VM but it's a set of VMs that are encountering a bad-neighbor situation.

It also helps us determine whether or not we need to expand capacity, add more user licenses, etc. It helps us in capacity planning, in deciding when we need to introduce new hardware.

• Capacity planning
• Project management
• Troubleshooting

It gives us a pane of glass to troubleshoot all our VMware technologies in one place. Also, we haven't gotten into any of the automation yet, but a lot of the automation tools show promise of automating with vROps.

It's also user-friendly. It's a lot easier than the older versions. It has the multiple categories when you log in. It's a lot cleaner and easier to find solutions to what you're looking for.

I would like to see an improvement in the cost features, and by that, I mean the chargeback functions, because my company won't go all the way into vRA for the automation piece. We're looking at different tools for automation. If they could find some way to incorporate that, it's the primary thing that I would look for right now.

Also, I would like to find a tool that is a single pane of glass for everything. The endpoint operations agent doesn't really do much when you install it on an endpoint - for example, on a Windows Server or a Linux server. You don't really get any beneficial information at the OS level from VMware tools. That's something that I would like to see.

The stability is good. There are some issues, at least from my end, when it runs out of space. I don't know that I necessarily get notifications. Some of it is that I don't check the Health tab as often as I should. But it has run out of space once or twice and shut off. When that happens I have to manually add space to it.

Scalability is relatively simple. You just spin up a new appliance and you either add it to an existing vROps manager or you can create a new environment. You can forward statistics. If I have multiple data centers, I can spin up remote nodes and send our information back to our primary one. So the scalability is good.

Technical support has been hit or miss. We're a BCS customer and it's a struggle at times. Sometimes it's difficult to get support on the phone, sometimes it's a lack of resources issue, sometimes they'll still send it to a tier-1 person when it's a tier-3 issue.

We've looked at other solutions but we stick with the vRealize Operations mainly for the usability and the integration with VMware.

I rate this solution an eight out of 10. What would make it a 10 are improved features for the endpoint operations agent and the ability to more easily monitor solutions other than just VMware. We have a mixed environment that includes VMware, some oVirt and KVM, and some other things. The main goal of our management is a single pane of glass, if possible, and that is something that I would like to see.

vRealize Operations enables us to do a lot more looking at the data. Basically, it enables us to look at the information coming in from vCenter, vSphere. We fully integrate it in our end user computing side. So Horizon, plug it into our Horizon data.

For vRealize, in the state that we use it in, for our Horizon end points, there's probably a little bit more data that they could have available for Horizon than they do today. I think it's more vCenter focused. Their integration with Horizon probably could be a little bit better.

It's a stable solution. It's still growing. It's got room to grow, I would say. There are a lot of things they could do to make it better. I think they're pretty open to that feedback, and allowing us to expand it more.

It's highly scalable.

Tech support's really good. Anytime we've had any issues whatsoever, any of our engineers, or whoever we contact, is pretty available within a few hours of our posting a problem to support.

Setup's a little complex at first. But once you actually know what you're doing, and when you're setting up some of the other nodes - besides the primary one - the collectors and everything, it tends to go a little bit better.

From my standpoint, when selecting a vendor, we look at support, their customer service, what is their responsiveness to any of the problems we have. Scalability, "ease-ability" in the product. Is the solution fully integrated into what we need it to do?

I rate it a seven right now just because it's a little bit complex in its setup. But, I think, like I said, as they improve it, get a little bit better, then it'll make it easier to use.

Why vRealize is the most valuable for us, for my company, is that we use it to measure and monitor the environment.

We're saving resources, because we are monitoring them. We know where they go and how the capacity is spent, thus we are saving.

The dashboard is too complicated. Those badges that they give you as a rating badge are too hard to understand what they mean. This is something that they need to figure out.

Three years.

No issues. So far, so good. We are happy with it.

So far from our environment, it is okay.

We haven't used it yet.

I have a contact in VMware. Every time that I call VMware, they help as I expect, though they are not that easy to reach compared to say, Cisco support.

We used to use SolarWinds and the support was not great.

VMware has been much better.

I was involved in the setup. It was straightforward.

It was just that the dashboard is a little hard to understand at the beginning, but after you get used to it, you're fine.

In-house. They were were helpful.

We went straight from SolarWinds to VMware.

We chose VMware because of its time on the market, the company's reputation, and the support.

I mostly use VMware products. They integrate well together. I also participate on VMTN, the VMware community online.

We invested in this solution because monitoring was really important for us.

I would definitely recommend this solution.

I like the availability features and the capacity management. The availability features, like system uptime, we are using some of the endpoint monitoring features for service availability.

The user interface is good.

It definitely has a better view and visibility for everything that's going on, and helps keep tabs and makes sure everything is running well.

Continue on the endpoint side, so you can dig deeper into the Windows operating system, services, and events, because we're trying to use it to replace System Center Operations Manager (SCOM). It doesn't quite do everything, but it's getting there.

We've upgraded a few times, probably a year and a half.

We haven't had any issues with it. It's worked well for us.

It works fine for us. Our environment is pretty small. We have eight hosts on the service side and eight hosts on the desktop side. We're still working on integrating it with the desktop side, but it's fairly small, that has worked for us.

I have not personally used it for this solution, but we're a BCS customer, so we can get support pretty easily if we need to.

Just Microsoft Systems Center.

We were missing things, and weren't seeing alerts for different things. We're pretty heavily invested in VMware, so it integrated more easily.

It was straightforward.

It was pretty much Microsoft or VMware, from our concerns. So, we started with one and went the other way.

It's worth giving it a shot. I think there's a lot of benefit with it. It does pretty much everything you should need it to do.

Also, I find being part of the VMware community useful.

Whatever you go with, make sure you are able to get good support.