VMware Aria Operations Reviews

The most valuable feature is being able to see what's going on in the environment, to identify where problems might be or where we could potentially have problems in the future.

I'm pretty pleased with the product. Right now, I can't really say anything negative about it.

We probably used the older version for the last couple of years. We're actually in the process of rolling out the new vRealize Operations, so we don't have it fully implemented yet; that's where we're at. We changed our licensing model to buy the vCloud Standard, which included it. Right now, we're in the process of getting it spun up.

It seems very stable. I know the previous version was stable. No downtime at all.

It seems to be very scalable for the environment that I'm dealing with, which is a fairly large environment. It's not the biggest environment in the world, but it's definitely scalable for my environment.

I think their support has some challenges. I've had better support from other vendors, to be honest. Some of my biggest complaints are delays in getting problems resolved and getting responses. I can say that is pretty much the same for my colleagues as well.

Initial setup is straightforward. We set it up in-house.

I recommend it. I think it's a great solution. I think it's a great product as far as vSphere environments, because it is geared towards vSphere; made by the people who created vSphere.

When I decide to work with a vendor, I think longevity is an important criteria. I like to make sure that I'm partnering with a vendor that's going to be around tomorrow. I like to see a large footprint. That way I know there's widespread adoption for their product. I like responsiveness, when I have a demand, or a need.

One of the most beneficial features is a single pane of glass as well as the interoperability that it comes with additional features. When you add in management packs, you have the ability to really extend upon the infrastructure and really fine tune what you want to see within the environment. When it first came out many, many moons ago, it was something that was very default and it was a very good attempt. But as it's progressed over the years, it's gotten a lot more extensible so that you can actually fine tune which workloads you want to monitor. They've progressed, and while there are definitely still a few gaps, these are probably the most valuable features.

It helps us do a lot of the VMware optimization assessments, which is one of the first things that our company does. We go in and we understand what the environment is looking like from a one- to seven- to 30-day window, and where their gaps are currently located, so we can deploy an evaluation license of VMware Operations Manager. We can deploy a couple of custom reports and provide them a path forward.

vROps has also helped us avoid outages and shorten our outage time. When you do data center consolidation, you understand a little bit more about the systems in there so you can map where they're going to go.

As far as capacity management, on the one hand, it has helped us, but on the other, it hasn’t. One of the shortfalls with the algorithms of vRealize Operations is that if you want to add additional capacity and you're moving from one, just as an example, Intel generation to another generation, generally speaking, vROps only does it by megahertz, and not the new spec end values, as other tools can. When it comes to capacity planning, if you're doing a consolidation of virtual machines, it makes sense because you're going into a target platform. But if you're adding additional hosts that are a new generation, it's not as accurate.

Similarly, for performance management, it has only partially helped us. There aren’t many vendors that do anything better than CPU monitoring of a virtual machine, because that's what their bread and butter is. But when it comes to memory management, they look at a best guess unless you have an agent in there. That - when you deal with business-critical applications - is a very touchy subject. The perfect example is, you oversize for these VMs, vROps is number one on the list and they say don't resize vROps because it keeps memory for the database. Well, it's the same thing with SQL and some other items, so that's one of the things.

Things that are already on the road map include improvements in guest monitoring when it comes to memory management. Right now, it does a very good guest with VMware tools.

One of the things they'd like to push is Hyperic. Unfortunately, it’s not there yet.
One of the other things that I could foresee happening is, to download different management packs, have it as a link within the appliance rather than having to go to a solution change.

Stability is much improved, much improved.

Scalability is also much improved.

I do not use technical support often. Usually, it's mostly just myself and whoever helps deploy them. So, it's usually the partners that help me out.

I probably have not used it at all, because usually the issues that I come up with, they haven't had a documented issue yet.

I did not previously use a different solution. I saw the demo many years ago and decided this one had some pretty good potential and just followed through with it.
No other vendors were really on my short list at the time.

I'm usually involved in all the initial setups that we do for customers; just not the tool itself. I set the tool up for customers. It's not complex to deploy. Complexity comes with the fine tuning of the policies and what you want to monitor, so you see what you need to see and not a plethora of information that you don't need to know. Setup is easy.

Before choosing this product, I did not evaluate other options.

When I select a vendor like VMware, the decision comes down to customer requirements, and that's what we go from, from the beginning. We go in, we discover, we understand what the customer’s requirements are, and then we use that as a basis of what meets their business needs.

The most valuable features are the ability to look at performance metrics historically, and the capacity planning where we can see waste in our environment. Primarily, that's what we're using it for now. A company as big as us, we tend to over-provision. That's based on application requirements. Sometimes politics can be involved with that. We use vROps right now as a way to show application teams how much their server's working and how little it's working, so we can potentially take that stuff back.

It has helped the company function when we run reports. Every once in a while, we'll get complaints from our end users that an application is slow. The vendor gets on a phone call with us and says, "It’s your VM environment." They'll call us up and say VMware is slow. We use vCOPS to look at the analytical data of those VMs in question. We can show them: If you're having issues at this time, we don't see any CPU usage, we don't see a CPU usage increase, we don't see a memory increase, we don't see it needing more memory, we see low disk activity. We'll show those graphs to them in an email. Once we show them that, they typically back off.

Personally, I’d like to see improvement in its usability. As an IT professional, we're tasked with having to jump between various platforms. A tool like vCOPS, from my experience, requires a little bit of a higher learning curve. I believe they can work on that. For example, with reporting, it does a whole bunch more stuff that we don't even use it for right now. You have to put time in to learn all of that, such as creating the dashboards, all the widgets and so on. It's a high learning curve at first, and difficult to learn. You have to put in a lot of time with it. That could take years for some people at their company.

I would like to have the ability where, for example, you bring up clients into your environment for the first time. There should be an option to have all the alerts go into that. You turn the alerts off in vCenter and have them go through vCOPS. That would be a big help for me, personally.

It's available. However, we run into issues where it gets very slow, where you try to log in, you can't log in; or, if you log in and you search for an item, it doesn't take you to the right window. We've had issues with integration with the web clients; if you search for a VM in the vSphere web client, there should be a link to vCOPS. That link does not work for us right now.

We also had an issue where it just stopped working. The disk filled up, so we had to call VMware support. They had to clear out some temp files or something like that.

I think that's where the slowness, for us, comes in. As we add more VMs and similar items, it seems like it's slower, but at times it could be fast. I don't know if that's another bug.

Our environment is roughly 1,500 virtual machines and across 60-70 hosts. We've experienced that, as time goes by, it seems to be getting slower.

We call technical support whenever it's broken.

For the last issue, it was pretty straightforward. It was a documented issue, so hopefully it's a bug and it gets released in a fix.

Actually, at that time, nothing else existed. We, at the time, really fought to get that in the house.

Initial setup was straightforward; you just import the OVF file. Give it a name, IP, and so on; connect it to vCenter and you're all set.

We did not evaluate any other products.

Always look at the competition first, obviously. That's part of our job. PoC it first. Make an informed decision after that.

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.

We use this solution for creating workflows and managing different clouds. We are system integrators. I'm a project manager. 

This is a very good tool, because we can customize it according to the needs of our customers. It enables automation, and the customization of workflows in a short period of time with the help of our PSOs. It has a user-friendly dashboard. 

I'd like to be able to access some demo sessions to enable a deeper understanding of the product to help our clients because it's quite a complex solution. 

I've been using this solution for five years. 

The solution is stable. 

The solution is scalable.

We have access to the vendor team who assist with any problems we have and we're happy with the support they provide. 

Positive

The initial setup is quite complex although it's becoming easier with each new version. 

VMware offers a suite of products with many licensing options. 

I think this is a good solution and rate it nine out of 10. 

This year, we introduced the vROps feature to our platform, as part of our infrastructure.

The main use is to provide us with visibility of our environment. It helps with proactively detecting and dealing with issues that may arise, such as problems with our hardware. It provides us with alerts when there are things that we need to perform. For example, it may say that I need to expand my disk space.

From my perspective, the visibility that it provides into our apps and infrastructure is fine. There are no concerns or issues because we only use VMware.

We are currently integrating it with different VMware products including vCenter and Cloud Director. 

This product contains features for proactive monitoring but we do not use it because we have our own monitoring solution. It can do things such as sending an email in response to an event.

The most valuable feature for me is the pre-implemented, existing dashboards. The fact that I don't need to create a dashboard myself is helpful. You have the option to create them but most of the dashboards and reports that we need have already been created.

I have not compared the vROps interface against other similar technology, but with respect to it being user-friendly, I haven't had any issues with it. The most commonly used functions are easy to access.

As somebody who works in operations, the capacity management features are very important. It's a very good product in that regard.

I would like to have more documentation, in the form of knowledge bases, that better explain the technology, related products, and what the capabilities are.

Having an installation guide that assists with installation and integration would be helpful.

I have been using VMware vRealize Operations for approximately six months. We are still in the beginning phase.

To this point, I haven't encountered any issues or had any alerts with this product. As we grow, maybe later it could happen, or we could experience instability in the product, but for now, it's okay.

Scalability-wise, it is good because you can create your own reports. There is no default report, but you can create your own templates or your own reports. You always have the choice of creating a new one or using an existing one.

The infrastructure team is the one that works directly with this solution. As part of that team, we provide VMware features and virtualization for our customers. There are five or six of us on the team.

We have not been in contact with technical support.

Prior to vROps, we did not use another similar solution. We implemented it in order to have as much visibility as possible for resource management. Previously, we only knew about the CPU consumption. Now, we can use the reports to better check the resources.

The initial setup is straightforward. It is just a matter of installing the appliance, setting the IPs, etc, and then performing the integrations between other VMware components. The configuration took approximately two hours.

I completed the deployment on my own.

We did not evaluate other similar solutions prior to implementing vROps.

As we are still in the beginning phase, we have not yet worked with all of the features. For example, I know that it can connect with vROps Log Insight, but we have not integrated it.

Given my experience, I'm not sure at this point whether this solution is applicable to other technologies such as AWS or Azure. However, if the support exists, it is very good because future environments and implementations will rely on multiple technologies. It will not be VMware alone, but rather, it will include AWS, Azure, and others. Support for all of these options is very nice. It appears that VMware has this vision because they already have support for the NSX and NSX-T network technology.

I expect that it will save us money in the future, but still being in the implementation phase, we have not yet had this experience.

My advice for anybody who is implementing this product is to plan for integration with your entire platform and VMware products, such as Cloud Director.

Overall, this is a good product that is easy to install and use, and integration with other products is smooth. Although we have not used all of the features, it does provide us with good visibility.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.

Our primary use case is for the developers to test code. Our customer care uses it to troubleshoot customers' issues. We also have a training business unit and they use it to deploy classes for customers to train. We've been using it for four years and it has been performing well. It does the functions that we need it to. We do have some issues from time to time. We're looking for more maturity out of the product but it's getting better with every release.

It has increased the speed of VM deployment. A normal server request would come in, it could take anywhere from three to four days to deploy and now within 15 minutes they can click and have something up and running. IT support for developers is nice as well because they are able to manage the environment themselves.

The self-service feature is one of the most valuable features for us. It gives the end-users the ability to deploy their own machines and so the administrators are hands off at that point.

We have found it to be intuitive and user-friendly. It requires minimal training to get them up and running to start deploying and accessing machines. 

I would like to see them update the format of the catalog in a different way. There's no option in a lot of the contents for the virtual machine blueprints to change the view.

Stability does go down from time to time. We have had some issues with the appliances sometimes and we have to do reboots in the middle of the day which affects the ability for them to deploy. Now, there's no downtime for existing stuff that already deployed, but it does keep them from deploying at that time.

Scalability is nice. We have it deployed in a highly available environment and scalability is nice because we just add another ESX host and we are able to increase the capacity there.

Their technical support is helpful. Sometimes they can take a little while to get back to us. 

We were using a lab manager before that and that was decommissioned so this was the next solution for what we needed. We needed to have a self-service environment for our developers, customer care, the ability to deploy machines, destroy machines, complete the entire VM life cycle and it does.

The initial setup was very complex. We've been using it for a while now and realized that it's pretty logical. Upgrades are pretty straightforward. We had a lot of problems originally deploying it, between some certificate issues, but we had an engagement with VMware so they were able to help us get a poof of concept environment set up as well which was helpful.

The deployment can be complex so I would advise someone looking into this solution to engage professional services to set up a proof of concept environment and to evaluate it. 

I rated this solution an eight because we've had issues with the stability and the appliances. Other than that, it's a solid product. It does exactly what we need it to do and we're happy with it. 

We primarily use this solution to look at our workloads and determine where there's an additional need for space or capacity needed as well as how to optimize it. We've been using it for a few months. 

It has improved the way my company functions in the way that it quickly identifies problems and addresses them. We're still relatively new to it so we haven't used it to the right size. It addresses problems that we see and then we're going to eventually get to the point where reducing capacity where needed will help.

Troubleshooting is one of the most valuable features for us. It identifies problems that other monitoring solutions give us, offers insight into the problem and then digs into it and finds out what the actual problems are and addresses them.

We have found this solution to be intuitive and user-friendly. The dashboards on the home page are easy to navigate. Once we log in, it's easy to find what we're looking for and to see immediate problems.

Stability is good, we haven't had any issues with it. 

The solution is intuitive so I haven't had the need to use their technical support.

I rated this solution a nine because I haven't had any issues with it and it has been intuitive and easy to use. I don't know it well enough to give it a ten.

If you're considering this solution, I would advise you to consider it and to look at your environment to see how it can assist with troubleshooting.