VMware Aria Operations Reviews

The most valuable feature is the single pane of glass to see everything in your infrastructure and know when you're running low on resources, and things are over-provisioned and under-provisioned and so on. Whereas, without it, you are relying on scripting and other things like that. From that perspective, it has been a big help.

The biggest issue we have with it, honestly, is the interface, it's very unintuitive. To really know how to get the most out of it, you almost need a course; it's very complicated. While we think we know a lot about it, I bet you there is stuff that we haven't tapped in to yet. I think they could have made the interface a little bit more intuitive for the user to be able to understand things without having to go to a course.

I took a lot of points off my rating because vROps is not intuitive; because that to me is huge. I have a lot of stuff to manage and I don't want to have to figure out every one to the nth degree. I shouldn't be expected to be a next-level expert on this particular product just to be able to get basic functionality out of it; that's what I feel like the issue is with this one.

We have been using it for a couple of years. We used it back when it was vCOPS, two years ago.

It hasn’t been consistently stable. We've had a couple of glitchy issues with it; nothing major, but it hasn't been 100% easy to live with. I don't know why that is; maybe because it's a newer product. It just seems like it’s not as mature as it could be.

We haven't had to scale it, so I guess I can't really address that, as we haven't gone down that road.

I have found VMware support to be somewhat lacking. It's hit or miss. Sometimes we'll get somebody who really knows what they're talking about and they'll be able to resolve our issue really quickly; other times they keep requesting log files until we're blue in the face and they never come back with anything, after we provide all of this data to them. It's hit or miss; I feel like it depends who you get on that day. It's been spotty to be honest.

When I’m deciding on a vendor, I really like to work with companies that are accessible; you call a support line, you're not hassled with, "Give me this license number," and we'll send you on to the next guy. I want to call up and get somebody on the phone and talk to them, the first person I talk to. VMware has sometimes been like that for us and then sometimes not. That's what I look for. I look for responsiveness, communication. I don't want to be only communicating over email; I like to talk to people. It seems like in the technical support industry that is become less and less favored as a communication mechanism; it's more email and so on.

Honestly, we saw it on the VMware website and it caught our interest. We hadn't necessarily been looking for it because we had done a lot of scripting for our monitoring and that kind of work. We downloaded it, tried it out and said, "Hey this thing’s actually pretty useful." That's that.

Take a class. I think there are videos we watched online, where people were going through some features and so on. If you try to just understand it right out of the box without reading a lot or going online and looking at something like that, you might have some troubles with it. But I definitely think it's good to have; it's certainly better than not having a solution in that area.

We are deploying this solution to monitor our customers' environments. We use it to look at IOPS and the VMs and for monitoring consumption.

This solution has helped improve our organization because we can now monitor our customers' environmental problems as well as our own and give the correct answers as to what the source of a problem is. 

It has also reduced the time it takes to troubleshoot problems and has improved the quality of service for our users.

Monitoring is the most valuable feature for us. When our customers have a problem and we can monitor it in real time or evaluate the history of the problem.

We have found this solution to be user-friendly because it's fairly simple to navigate. We can see if it connects problems with storage, consumption, or other issues.

I rated this solution an eight and not a ten because we work to give a multi-tenant product to our customers and vROps doesn't meet our needs.

The stability is good because we can do an HA environment. 

Scalability works well. We have many customers and have never had any issues with it. 

We got this solution because we knew we needed a monitoring solution. We decided on this specific solution because of its direct integration features.

The initial setup was straightforward. It was a simple deployment. 

We implemented it ourselves. 

Our ROI is that we have been able to reduce the time it takes to look into a problem. 

Cost isn't a problem for us because it's included in our licensing. 

Opsview was another vendor we looked at. We didn't go with it because we liked vROps' use case. It allows us to see simply and graphically what a problem is and we can export a report of the problem for our customer, which is very valuable to us. Opsview gave us some information but we found it to be slower. With vROps, we can monitor every feature and vendor; we can monitor the environment which means we can monitor everything. 

Cost savings isn't a problem for us because we have enough resources with the cloud provider.

If you're looking into vROps and similar solutions, I would recommend vROps because it's a good program.

We use it to monitor our virtual infrastructure for VDI. It is also used in our server infrastructure for basic monitoring or solving issues.

Our organization is a government company which is focused on thinking about other nations and companies.

It can compare hardware to software, and I have all the information in one place.

It is sometimes quite hard to use. If I need details, there is a huge amount of information that I need to review. It isn't a three-click solution.

We would like better integration with other systems (e.g., Zabbix). We would also like to increase our network monitoring in one place.

We haven't had problems with the stability. It is okay.

We are so small. We don't need to scale.

We don't directly use technical support. We have suppliers who help us.

When we are looking for new solutions, we usually ask the vendors. We ask them directly and they present their products.

We didn't do the first setup. Everything was integrated for us, and we just use it.

We use an integrator, who is very good. He has helped us outside the standard hours.

The solution has helped to reduce the time to troubleshoot issues.

I can recommend the solution for VDI.

We use it to monitor our entire infrastructure, scaling across everything compute and our Horizon implementation.

The benefit is that we are able to monitor the small things, catch them at the beginning, before they become large things.

The most valuable feature is the metrics, the ability to deep-dive into any issue we may be having from a virtual machine to a data store. Latency is a big thing - it's able to give us that metric pretty swiftly. And with our custom dashboards, it's all readily available.

Going from 6.5.1 to 6.6.1, the UI has increased tremendously. It's user-friendly.

I would like to see more functionality. I would also like to see better support, because the pack that we use, the Horizon, is an additional pack. It's not currently actually built by VMware, it's built by a separate company. When they merge the two, there will be better support in the future.

The stability is great.

The scalability is great. With vRealize Operations Manager, we are able to create remote collection nodes if we feel that it's too intensive for the current deployment. The remote collection nodes allow us to collect more metrics from other sources.

We are currently measuring this solution against other products. We have several different monitoring tools in the environment. We are trying to whittle it down.

The most important criteria when selecting a vendor for our company is cost.

I use it for monitoring and DRS automation.

It gives me metrics that I can share with the rest of my team. I can say, "Look, this server is performing poorly." Even down into the Windows Servers, which are my primary bread and butter, it gives me visibility into situations such as when they're running out of storage and I need to expand the drives. It gives that top-level visibility to get in and fix a lot of problems.

It helps us provide better quality of service. I'm still not going to it first for troubleshooting. I'm going to it and discovering things that I need to troubleshoot.

The visibility of the whole stack, everything all in one plane. 

One thing I don't like is that all the scales are self-referencing. So when I get a "one," is that one out of ten, one out of a hundred? I don't know. So I can say these servers are performing ten times better than that server but I don't know where the scale goes.

Also, the first "20 percent" of it is user-friendly, that quick, "fix this." The first level is easy, but to really dig down and get more information out of it, it gets beyond the scope of time that I have to put into it. A lot of it is that it indicates: "And there is a problem," and not all of those problems are autofix. And that's where I get stuck: "Oh there's a problem." It doesn't always give me the information to go fix it.

It has been rock solid.

I'm a small fish, so I'm not going to outgrow it any time soon.

I had some issues getting things set up in the beginning. I don't know what I did differently but somewhere in there it just clicked and it worked.

Most of my infrastructure is Windows, but Hyper-V isn't in the same class as VMware. It still feels like the new kid on the block. I've literally been using VMware since '99, product one. And being here, 20 years later, it's just VMware, it's there, it's what you use.

I don't know how to move past where I am. I feel like I'm only scratching the top 20 percent.

When looking to work with a vendor, I look for one that is knowledgeable, that understands my problems and the way I work, and that will be there when I need help.

It moves our projects faster. We also use it for alarms.

It is user-friendly and intuitive. The mix of analytics and automatization is good.

It has reduced time, troubleshooting issues, and improved the quality of our service. When I need to increase CPUs and VMs, it speeds up operations management.

• It's a great tool for monitoring and tracking data of our entire environment.
• It projects costs and growth of VMs.
• The UI on the latest release is cool.

I would like to see more features, especially in the way of Flash to HTML5.

We have had no issues with stability.

We have been able to scale.

Technical support has been helpful when we contacted them.

It is simple: Deploy WVF file, put in an IP address, and go live.

We got vROps because it was integrated in the platform.

We will be implementing NSX next month.

It gives us good information when there's an issue of where to pinpoint the source of the issue within the virtual infrastructure.

A lot of the stuff we need assistance with is trying to get us help on our internal process of actually implementing stuff. So the right sizing of VMs and things like that. If there was some way in which it could identify the amount of resources in use, and scale them up and down on the fly, that would be fantastic.

No, it's very stable. It's part of the VMR Stack, so it's protected by all the core VMR features, like HA, vMotion, and DRS. You can put SRM on it.

You can put it on the whole VM infrastructure. Anywhere your VMs are, you have vROps that can act on that space.

They're knowledgeable. Sometimes, you have through the first level to get to the next level of engineering. Once you get past that, they're very knowledgeable with the products, usually able to help us in a short amount of time.

We also have someone on site to help us with the more advanced stuff on an ongoing basis as well, in addition to our TAM who can help escalate stuff and find the right answers.

It's fairly straightforward.

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor: Everything is important.

• Reputation is certainly good for us, being a bank.
• The relationship is huge.
• We have to partner with someone that we trust, who we think is going to do a good job for us, and responds to the issues that we have.

We're running a couple of different flavors of vRealize Operations. vRealize Operations gives us the ability and the insight to be able to see what our VMs are actually doing.

• Who's the hungriest?
• Have we got any runaways?
• Have we got any noisy neighbors?

We can address those things. We can separate our test from our production, and make sure our production workloads are getting the launch share of the resources.

I think some of the improvements should be to the adapters, and the adapters which are available to customers. I know there's a lot in the marketplace, but we're looking for more, because we are a pretty large-scale company throughout the State of Louisiana. We've got a lot of different products, and we're looking for a lot of visibility from those other products that we have inside of vRealize Operations.

vROps has gone through a maturation process, and we've grown along with it. We've come to appreciate the things which are offered.

It is a very stable product.

It's quite scalable. We're adding additional vCenters at different regions to a single instance of our vRealize Operations for our virtual server management.

vROps tech support is super. Any issue that we've had, even in a how-to perspective, they've been able to assist us. We've had some things happen late at night or early in the morning where we've needed to open a preemptive service request, for an upgrade, support for a module, or a plugin that we needed to do, and they've been right there for us.

The vRealize Operations setup, installation, and configurations are pretty straightforward. We, as a customer, actually did two of our environments ourselves. We used an implementation service for the first. Then, we used that as a blueprint and a pattern to deploy our other two environments.

It's great from a scalability perspective, and it gives us all of the metrics that we need. Our configuration, or dashboard configuration, and deployment are quite easy.