VMware Aria Operations Reviews

I think the best thing I like about vROps is that all the information is in vCenter’s database, but most customers won't take the time to mine the data in vCenter. vROps presents that data in an easy-to-consume format. You don't have to dig in to all the numbers as to why something needs to change or why you might have to improve performance.

It's huge in the performance management arena because it has the ability to really show us that we are over-provisioning a lot of the virtual machines to the point where they're hurting themselves; too many virtual processors, too much memory. The virtual machines can actually be built smaller and perform better.

vROps has the ability to provide insight, fully look at and monitor your environment, and give you recommendations on optimization, efficiency, and risk management.

For instance, let's say that I have a virtual machine that appears to be starving for memory. vROps has the ability to monitor that virtual machine in real time, and give you a recommendation on how to make that virtual machine perform better. Possibly by, say, moving it to another host.

For troubleshooting, it can also be pretty cool, and give you an idea if you're having issues, say, at storage level. Let's say latency has gone too high on one of my LUNs; it has the ability to monitor that by working with SIOC. and some other products on the hypervisor. Also, it has the ability to look at troubleshooting from a performance standpoint; troubleshooting between networking devices.

We have also used capacity management to definitely save on the compute side.

Given that I help others learn how to use the product, in most cases, even with the default dashboards that come with the product, most customers get a wealth of information. Then you couple that with the ability to customize those dashboards for their specific environment. One of the things I've always enjoyed is that we've been teaching and preaching for years on the training side: Right-size your virtual machines to get the best ROIs. The efficiency badge in vROps will tell you exactly how many virtual processors you can reclaim, and how much memory you can reclaim. It's not just an administrator saying, "Hey your virtual machine could be smaller." It's the product actually telling you that you could get a lot more out of your environment.

I would probably like to see better recommendations. I think sometimes the recommendations for performance optimizations tend to be a little too simplistic. The recommendations could be a little bit more in depth, as to why you need to do this or that.

For instance, in a performance optimization, it might say you just need to move this virtual machine from here to here. If you really look at the virtual machine’s overall performance, moving it might be a way to fix it, but resizing the virtual machine might by a better recommendation. Or moving it to another data store might be a better recommendation. I think the recommendations could be a little more tightened up and probably a little bit more in depth.

Also, one of the things I like about vROps is the ability to add the additional adapters to monitor other kinds of products, whether it's NSX, or storage, or even physical hardware to a degree; cloud-based environments. I'd like to see more on that front, to continue developing those additional adapters, those additional third-party add-ons. For example, working with Palo Alto Networks, working with some of our additional storage vendors. There are some good adapters out there, for sure, but there's new stuff coming out all the time.

Finally, I think its ability to interact with vRealize Automation could be enhanced.

We've been teaching on it now for four or five years now.

So far, stability's been pretty good. I can't think of anything off the top of my head where we've had any issues.

Scaling is pretty good, especially when you have the ability to put nodes in remote offices to grab the information then pull it over for it to be crunched. From a scalability standpoint, pretty good.

I personally have not used technical support.

The initial setup is actually quite easy because you just go through the wizard and you deploy your different nodes: your master and your slave secondary, and then your data nodes. It's pretty easy to deploy these days, and then they've got different versions. They've got a version that will run on Red Hat; I've got one customer that uses that. I've got most of my customers using the Windows version.

Definitely get training on it. Of course I represent that, but it's a very complex product. Out of the box, you can get a lot out of it, but there's so much more customization available with vROps. If you'll take the time, you'll get much more out of the product, but it usually requires a bit of training. It's probably taken me a good part of the year to understand a lot of the ins and outs to the product.

Reporting is product’s the most valuable feature: VM reporting, ESX reporting, trends, seeing where processes could be improved, seeing where resources could be reclaimed; basically, managing and balancing the vCenters. For what I do, most of the things I monitor are VMs. Application owners at times will have problems with their applications running on the VM and they want to see trends such as when are peak times when their resources are being used, such as CP use or memory, IOs and information like that. I could easily give them feedback - run a customized report - and say, "These are your peak hours, peak times."

It gives you a quicker view into the organization, instead of having to go through manual steps to figure that out; it's right there in front of you. We have app owners that use information. Most of the users currently are other IT folks in a virtualization environment.

The application monitoring helps us avoid outages. For example, we set up an application and we monitored it. Then, once the application started using a lot of resources, we're able to realize that we needed to add more resources to this application to avoid any outage.

Capacity management is awesome, too.

Maybe improve the user interface, immediate access to data, and make it easier to get reports, from the application owner's perspective, not for me. I can go in and I can manipulate the data and get what I want. I'm just thinking from the application owner's perspective. They want a quick report to monitor; see a group of VMs and see the process over time. Something like that.

It has been stable; that's good. I haven't had any issues with it. Like I mentioned, even though I do use it, I'm not the main person who manages it.

It's scalable. Right now, I think we have 10 vCenters all over the place. From my perspective, it has not slowed down.

I have not used technical support.

At my previous job, we used VMTurbo. I was looking into vROps on my own. I actually came across it and I saw that it was cool, so I decided to invest in it because of how it was integrated with the virtualized environment.

At my previous job, I started to set up vROps, but then I left. When I arrived at my current job, it was already configured and everything.

It's a great product. It offers a lot of great benefits. It's something that they should definitely look into.

We use this solution solely for reporting purposes.

We appreciate that this solution gives accurate reporting.

We would like the default views on the reports for this solution to be improved; at present we have to customize the view before use.

We would also like the option for this solution to be cloud operated.

We have been using this solution for just over one year.

We have found this to be a stable solution.

To our knowledge, this is a scalable product.

The initial setup of this solution was easy.

I would rate this solution a seven out of ten.

Our private data center has been built on VMware technology. We are using vSAN and we use vROps as a monitoring solution to monitor the full stack, from applications to hardware. That includes the servers and Cisco switches.

The solution is deployed on-premises in our private data center.

It enables us to monitor the full software-defined infrastructure from the app level to the hardware level. This is the main benefit for our organization.

When there is an issue at the disk level in vSAN, vROps gives us an alarm that the issue is happening on particular disks. Other solutions cannot give this type of alert for vCenter. Even vCenter cannot give that type of information. That's what makes this feature valuable for me.

The visibility it provides from apps to infrastructure is very good, compared to other monitoring solutions in the market. We have used other solutions, and we are still using them, but for monitoring your VMware infrastructure, vROps is very good.

vROps is user-friendly, but configuration is a little bit hard. It is also hard if you want to customize it for your data center, especially without VMware training. The user interface should be improved so that a new user can easily configure it for his own use.

I have been using VMware vRealize Operations for the last four years.

The stability is good enough to monitor private and hybrid clouds. Even though we are using very few of the features of vROps, it is very good. It is very useful for a cloud provider that is managing large-scale VMware technology for their cloud. It is good monitoring and operations software for them.

It is highly scalable.

We are already in the middle of a project to increase our infrastructure and we have included vROps in that project.

Customer support is good, but the main problem is that VMware support is very costly compared to other organizations' support. When you purchase a VMware product, such as vSphere or vROps, the license is perpetual, but you also have to purchase the support service for a number of years. The support service pricing is very high compared to the license, and compared to competitive vendors.

Before vROps, we were using SolarWinds NPM. The primary reason we switched was that we were looking for a solution that would give in-depth monitoring capabilities for VMware infrastructure.

The initial deployment of vROps was straightforward. We deployed ESXi, vCenter, and then vSAN. After that, we deployed vROps on-premises to monitor our VMware vSAN cluster. There was nothing special or complex about it.

It took four to five days to deploy vROps.

We have three people who are using and managing vROps and we are monitoring about 500 virtual machines with the solution.

We used a third-party integration partner that is certified by VMware. I felt that they were not well-trained on vROps.

The value we get from vROps is fine, but it would be better if the support cost were lower.

We did not look into other solutions because, at that time, we already had our VMware infrastructure. vROps is the best option for monitoring VMware infrastructure.

If your infrastructure is VMware-based, meaning you are using vSphere, vSAN, and vCenter, and if you are a large-scale cloud service provider, you should consider vROps as your monitoring and operations solution.

We primarily use it for performance and monitoring and troubleshooting for our virtual infrastructure. We also use it to monitor and troubleshoot our Dell EMC storage arrays.

We have a troubleshooting dashboard that our team uses. If someone complains that a system is slow, they can go there, search for that virtual machine and see if there are any alerts for it. We can start our troubleshooting from that step.

The most valuable feature is the single pane of glass so we can see all our vCenters, all our machines, all our storage arrays. We can see if there are alerts in any of these systems, and follow up on that alert and see if it's impacting just that area or if there is a bigger problem behind it.

It's useful day-to-day. Every day the operations team can go and see if there are any new alerts, and they can monitor the infrastructure through it.

I find it user-friendly. The first stage gives you the overview of all of your infrastructure. It shows you the capacity, how much you have left, how many of your data centers can have more VMs hosted. The tabs are really nice, they're very self-explanatory. You can click them and it will pull out a menu. You don't have to roam around to find things. There are search bars you can use to look for things as well.

The room for improvement is in the definition of the metrics. There are millions of metrics inside the solution, but there is no documentation from VMware for what those exact metrics are. That is a trouble point at times.

We have started to do containers and I would like to see a feature to monitor our container infrastructure. If we can do our monitoring and performance troubleshooting of them through the same tool, that would be a nice-to-have.

It has been stable so far. We have not faced an issue where we had to troubleshoot to keep it up and running.

Scalability is good. Since we have had it for our current infrastructure, we haven't grown so large, so I could not comment how big it can scale.

Customer service is good. I haven't used any ticket systems for this solution, I haven't opened any cases for it, so I don't know about technical support.

We have always used this solution. We wanted something so that we have a total view of our infrastructure and that's why we use this product. We haven't used any other product for that purpose.

The most important criteria when selecting a vendor are

• its stability in the market
• how many people are using the product
• what the support structure is like for the product.

Those are the main criteria.

The initial setup was straightforward.

I rate this solution an eight out of ten. It's not a ten because there is no clear definition of the metrics. That is something I would like to see.

We use it for capacity management and optimization. We are just now really getting into using it.

It helps us maintain optimal workloads.

One of the most valuable features is the ability to see "before" and "after". It will show you the current state, and then show you what it looks like after it does the optimization.

It needs dashboards that we can present at the executive level. The GUI, overall, could be better.

Stability is fine.

No issues with scalability.

I have not had to contact technical support.

Make sure it does what you want it to do. For me, when selecting a vendor, the most important criterion is, does the product do what it's supposed to do?

I would rate vROps at seven out of 10, mostly because it needs a better user interface.

It has a lot of great reporting features in it that help us scale with our products, and to scale with different things that we're trying to work on, on a day to day workload. It's a great tool to analyze those type of things for us.

Honestly, I think it's pretty good right where it's at. It could always add more features. But for right now, it's got more than what we know how to run. It's just a great product.

Very stable. It's something I check every morning when I come in. It just runs. It has a lot of great features for a lot of our applications where we're trying to figure out what's going on with them in the background.

It scales great. It basically watches an application and tells us where we might have too much CPU, or not enough memory. It helps us fine tune things pretty nice.

It's awesome. I mean, we get help if we need anything, but a lot of times you don't even have to do anything, because the product just runs.

It's pretty straightforward. We didn't have any trouble setting it up.

It's a good product. It definitely helps troubleshooting, and helps you find things a lot faster than just trying to dig for a needle in a haystack. It's definitely a reliable product, and it's definitely helped us save a lot of time.

As it's the only tool that I've found which I could provide to our NOC team. Because we have our set of tools that we use in system administration, but we do have a NOC team, and the NOC team is not very proficient in the tools we use. Therefore, we had to give them something that is simple enough to use, something they could display on a big screen in their NOC, in order to see alerts in our virtualization infrastructure. vROps was the only tool which we found which was capable at the time to create customized dashboards, and we created the dashboards specifically for our NOC team to find any storage issues and any network latency issues.   

It was also one of the only tools that was available back in 2015 that was able to integrate with our storage area, so it had the management pack. We used to have HP 3PAR at that time, and HP gave us a free management pack to install on our vROps, so not only did we have full visibility into our virtualization infrastructure, we also had the visibility into our 3PAR.

The one thing that I miss the most with vROps is that it's a read-only tool, meaning that you see the issue happening. You can troubleshoot, you can do all kinds of deep-dives into the issue and find out what the root cause is and everything, but in order to get it fixed, whatever it is (doesn't matter what it is), you need to log into another tool in order to fix it. Thus, if you see a latency issue with data store, you can pin point where it happened on your 3PAR, but you need to open the 3PAR management console to get it fixed. Same with a VM. If it tells you that you have a lack of resources, and you need to add 4GBs of RAM to the machine, it doesn't offer to do it for you. You will need to log into vSphere Client and add RAM.

I started using it in 2015. Three years ago.

I would say it is stable, but it does require frequent updates. 

In the early days of vROps, back when it was vCenter Operations, we did have some stability issues with it. Every now and then, we had to reboot it for no good reason because no one was able to log in, but I think with version 6, released a year and a half ago, those things disappeared. Still you need to keep it well-maintained. By comparison, if we upgrade our vSphere infrastructure every six months or so, unless there is a critical patch with vROps, we find ourselves updating it every two to three months.

With version 6, we were able to add instances, so it's very scalable. Once you run out of resources, you can either scale up by adding RAM and virtual CPUs to it, or you can just add another instance. It synchronizes automatically. With version 5, this was not available, like horizontal scaling - just going up. 

I don't have a good opinion of VMware support. 

I remember at one point, one of our instances was corrupted, and they tried their best to recover it, but in the end, after digging in its insides for three days (and they really dug), they just told us, "You need to rebuild the instance. We can't recover any of your data. Just spin up a new instance and start collecting data from scratch." 

So we lost all our historical data. It wasn't business-critical, because we were able to export our dashboards and import them into the new instance, so NOC was operational a few days after the incident.

Other than this experience, we have not had the best experience with VMware support.

The pricing: It's expensive.