VMware Aria Operations Reviews

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.

We use vROPs primarily on our VEI side. It gives us a lot of insight into the session experience that I haven't found in another product. It matches PC over IP latency times, packet loss times; I just haven't been able to find that using another product anywhere.

I think it pretty much covers everything I need. I can monitor my storage performance with it. Obviously my host hardware, my virtual desktops. I know it can do virtual servers if we were licensed for that. We don't have NSX. I'm sure that there are add-ins for NSX for it.

It helps us verify when a customer complains about, or an end user complains about VDI performance. "Is there something going on in the session, network related between the endpoint and the virtual desktop?" Sometimes we are even able to find performance problems or identify network issues before an end user notices it and opens a ticket.

Monitoring our vSAN environment still seems to be touch and go. It doesn't always report correctly on that.

What would be helpful is more intuitive troubleshooting or more intuitive messages. Some of the messages that you see really don't make sense. When you start diving in to them, it gets better, but a lot of times there is still a lot of lack of clarity. For example, where do I go to try to figure out exactly what is causing this? Something a little more solid, maybe even link it to some KBs or that that might be related.

It's been a very stable product. The upgrades are simple, overall. I haven't had any problems that have come out of updates at all or upgrades to it. Very solid.

We are only using it on a VDI environment of about 550 desktops, but I know from reading the guides that it scales out really well.

I have had to contact tech support once or twice. I had a little trouble getting the deployment set up so it would exclude servers, because we aren't licensed to monitor servers with it. Sometimes, certain versions, when you add a feature, pack it in. Sometimes they don't work like you expect them to. But tech support has been great on that and they help get it figured out.

It was deployed when I got there, back in the vCOPS days, and I basically abandoned that installation and did a fresh vROps deployment because we were so far behind it was easier than trying to do the stepped upgrade.

Some of the earlier releases were a bit more complex to get deployed. Newer versions have been really easy. I think I did one other complete redeployment again because we left to get out of scope, and I had a lot fewer questions and a lot fewer issues the second time.

Overall, vROps is a very mature product. It is stable. It's got a lot of features in it and sometimes that's the downside. There is so much power to it it's hard to know how to use it completely.

If you are going to deploy vROps, make sure that you've got time to dedicate to learning it. The deployment is relatively easy. The learning how to leverage all the features of it afterwards can take some time. Leverage educational resources, whether it be through VMware or leveraging a partner if you need to. It is a really good product, it can just be a little overwhelming when you first get a hold of it.

vROps was there before me. When I got there, I was asked if I felt that there was value in keeping it and I said yes, absolutely.

The most important points in vendor selection are

• the vendor's reputation
• how good their products truly are
• how long they've been around
• the features supported
• the capabilities of their product
• how user friendly it is
• the comfort of the interface
• the overall stability of the product.