VMware Aria Operations Reviews

Tells us about alerts and risk that we might not know about. The Help feature's probably the best, that's what we look at all the time. Go in and look, if something's red we're jumping on it.

We weren't aware of these alerts beforehand. So, if there was an application slow-down, latency, nobody knew if it was the server, the application or what. Now we can actually point to it and eliminate the server as the problem and look for the application as the issue.

I don't know if there's a way to e-mail alerts from it. We always have to go look into it. We have other monitoring solutions that will e-mail our whole team, or text them if there's a critical alert. I don't know if vRealize has that capability, because I know we're not getting alerts from it. We just go and look every morning.

Fabulous. We haven't had any issue with it yet

I don't know if this is relevant. I guess it's scalable. For us, we haven't really needed to use scalability or it hasn't had to scale in our case, I guess.

Maybe one of my systems guys has used technical support once. I think he called about an issue, but I have not.

When we got here, there weren't any solutions monitoring our systems. We're a new team in the last couple years, and we knew we needed something to monitor what's going on. One of our vendors introduced us to this and it was a great tool. We actually went to a class all about vRealize. We ended up purchasing the solution a few months later, so it was great.

I wasn't involved in this, the systems guy was.

I know our predecessors went through a whole rip and repair, new hardware as well as software, and they eliminated a lot of servers they didn't need. It's a big project. You have to go through and see what you have in the company and probably eliminate a lot.

Peer. We don't have them yet. We're doing a PoC with them, but the people that I've dealt with, their customer service is great.

I would say customer service is important. It's one of the higher things in terms of priority. My systems guys would say the product itself is most important - what it does. But I think customer service is key. If you can't get service when you have a problem, it's not even worth having the product.

VMware has been solid. Stable. I say hands down, VMware. There are other solutions out there, but VMware works.

The historical performance monitoring and the ability to introduce it.

It's good, because it's about being able to scale. To know if we're going to hit our limits, as far as scale, and also when we need to buy more hardware.

Better artificial intelligence (AI) as far as its ability to give suggestions over precise mediums and those types of things.

It has been good so far.

It has been good so far.

I have not used it yet.

Fogbyte.

We needed a solution, or a better solution, versus very non-standardized solutions on that scale.

Was not involved.

If interested in the product, try to prearrange a training as quickly as you can. Get a lot of training. It's a big product.

Main criteria for selecting a vendor:

• Full scalability
• Price
• Vendor relationship.

The reporting:

• Being able to look into how everything is running.
• How our equipment is running.
• What's going on in the overall environment.

Expressed to management when we're overseeing commitment and when we need more hardware. It helps us to determine that.

Easier management and it should be more user-friendly. When you look at it, and you see a lot of badges, you think, "Oh my god, that looks terrible." But it's really not, they just need to make it easier to read, a better UI.

It seems like a pretty stable product. We do have occasions where we have to reboot some of the appliances, but that's normal operations.

Seems to be fairly able to easily balance it out across datacenters and environments, although we've remained pretty static in terms of scaling.

Tech support is always good. They always work well. There are Irish guys, those are our late night calls and I don't really want to be on those.

I wasn't involved in the setup.

For us, they have to be on our approved list to begin with. There are a lot of legal ramifications for us.

They always do a comparison of different tools, whether it's DMC or if it's for different solutions. We have two or three different vendors we can go to. Personally, I'd prefer to stay with the VMware stuff.

VMware does a really good job of integrating all of their tools together, whereas you get some third parties where they kind of haphazardly integrate in, and they may or may not stay well-integrated. Or, they have difficulty getting integrated. You have to a lot API calls, WMI, and that kind of stuff.

Make sure initially you set it up properly. Don't try taking shortcuts.

The performance graphing, and being able to dig in if there are any issues with a particular VM alerting.

It helps with troubleshooting times, or at least proves to somebody it's not a virtualization issue. Shows what's going on inside the VMs and the environment as a whole.

I don't know if this really helps us with anything stability-wise. It can uncover some things that we may not have known, and it will bubble them up to the surface.

I definitely would like to see the development of dashboards not requiringe a PhD. There's so much data in there. There's so many knobs and things you can turn, that's all great and all, but just to get the basic data that I think is usable, and to build an easy to use dashboard, could be simplified. More of a drag and drop type model, without having to dig into things for correlations.

The solution itself has been very stable. Upgrades are easy, and it's been real stable.

We haven't scaled it since we deployed it from the initial sizing other than adding disc space to it, but to add extra collector nodes, or whatever. Simple.

Not for vROps.

I was not involved.

It's not always the easiest product to work around in, and build (meaningful) dashboards. I think the UI has improved greatly over the years, but I think there's definitely room for improvements to make it overall easier to manage the product without having to be a specialist in the product.

Do your due diligence. Evaluate all of the products, and make sure what you're buying is going to meet your needs and criteria. Whatever that may be.

Things to look out for:

• Definitely functionality
• Ease of use
• Scalability
• Cost value

The most valuable features of the product are probably the monitoring and the dashboarding; for me, just from a management perspective, the dashboarding. It shows information for everything from, operational-wise, a lot of our daily tasks, things that were manual that you'd have to go and look at in the dashboard. They don't have to manually go in and do it; vROps flags it. They can just look at the dashboard each time. For us, it's really about the performance metrics; a lot of operational, tactical things. Being the manager, I don't have to look at it every day.

The other piece that I use is the projections, being able to see when I'm going to run out of resources, features like that. We use it a lot for resource planning, around where we're going to be next month. Every other week, I look at it and I can see where we're at on utilization of the environment and then use that for load balancing and similar tasks.

It gives me the information that I need when I need it. It's that easy.

It has helped us avoid outages or reduced outage time. Everything we're doing is proactive. If we weren't using our dashboards for management, being able to see where the issues are ahead of time, there’d be outages.

Even though I can't put a number on it, it saves us a ton of time with capacity management. We actually use that part of it.

Regarding performance management, I don't think it really helps us speeding up. It helps us avoid bottlenecks and things of that nature.

I'd like to see more granular reporting; the ability to simplify the reporting and being able to create the reports. There's a lot there, but when you dive down in there, I’d like to be able to break it out different ways. It’s been a challenge being able to train my folks to be able to get me the information that I want, so they can build those reports out.

The reports are usable, readable for the most part, but it's difficult to get my guys to be able to build the reports correctly, based on what I'm looking for. It seems like my requirements and the data mart can only go so far.

As far as the UI – for me, personally, accessing it because I don’t access it a lot – I feel like the usability could be a little bit better. They could streamline that a little bit better.

I've never seen a problem with it. We had one issue during an upgrade. We went with a clean upgrade. We had to run both environments for a little while, but outside of that, it's stable. It works. We’ve run into a couple of bugs here and there, but VMware is pretty responsive in getting them fixed. The bugs were with the reporting; when you're getting down to certain metrics within the data, to tweak it the way you want it. A lot of times they didn't think about, that's the way we'd want it. Items like that. How granular you get the data.

I’ve never had a problem with scalability.

My team uses technical support on a regular basis. I've always had a good experience with VMware technical support. No issues.

We used to use Foglight for that and we didn't like that. It was difficult to maintain and it was buggy.

My team did everything from ground up. Initial setup had medium complexity. It's not intuitive initially, so you have to go through a level of training to be able to get where you want to go.

Make sure you get training. Do the proper training. You need to have your folks trained to be able to manage it on an on-going question.

The most valuable feature of the product is the historical logging of the performance and other data.

It lets us analyze results even when customers aren't necessarily seeing problems in real time. It lets us go back, look, troubleshoot and perform similar tasks.

We've used it for some capacity management. I use it every day for that; mostly just monitoring the usage in the environment.

As far as compute resources, in some instances, it's helped us save. We use it to right-size VMs all the time.

Similarly, with performance management, we use it with right-sizing; they have all the recommendations and whatever their black box does, as well as some intelligent views into some historical metrics and seeing what VMs we're actually using, or seeing the performance profile.

They need to start including more compliance stuff, more granular compliance checks. For example, they're adding the 6.0 hardening guide, but my own compliance requirements are much more detailed than that. For our state government, we have to meet all kinds of regulatory requirements. Basically, I need a full view into all of the configurations and settings, so we can run compliance against a much wider swath of settings and configurations.

Stability’s been fine for us; haven't had any problems.

I think we have used technical support in the past. I think with some old versions, when it was vCOPS, but it was a separate guy. I don't know what the details of the tickets were.

It's been there since I started, so I can't answer.

An educated guess would be that my company was not looking into other solutions at the time when they were looking into vROps, because we were invested in VMware, so we were just using their tool to monitor what we had.

Throw it in the lab. Use it. I don't know. Nothing special.

The most valuable feature has definitely been the ability to drill down on the performance metrics, to troubleshoot issues that arise.

Some of the areas that we have run into issues with are the upgrades, sometimes. We've had a few issues with that and had to work with support with that before.

I think managing the size, the sizing of the actually product itself can be improved. Several times, we had to go back and reevaluate how we had sized the environment.

The only other thing would be to make it easier for our end users to consume the data. Sometimes we've had to do a lot to try to customize dashboards; we spent a lot of time on that. If they develop ways to make that a little bit easier, so we can make it a little simpler for our users.

I've been using vROps for about three years.

It has been consistently stable. As I’ve mentioned, the only issues we've had are some upgrades, really.

The support has generally been pretty good with that. We've had some tough issues, so it's been pretty good. They managed to resolve them. We've got one that's in the queue right now, but they are working with us on it. It has to do with tagging.

Even though we became more virtualized, we were using traditional products such as HP OpenView and so on; we really weren't getting the full picture. We knew we needed something that was more hypervisor aware. It’s made a huge difference.

It really became mandatory as we started virtualizing things such as SQL Server and Oracle, because we really had spent a lot of time troubleshooting them.

There's some complexity to the initial setup, to do it right. We did have an engagement with VMware, for them to actually install it, because we knew there was some complexity to it.

It's a good solution. A warning: You probably need to make sure you can give it the proper amount of attention and time. You're just not going to throw it out there, hit the wizard and just walk away and say "Well, it's done." You're not going to be fair to the product or to yourself if you don't do that.

My personal requirements for a vendor are:

• Obviously, integration with our current tools, with the hypervisor and so on, which helps VMware a lot.
• Ease of maintenance, so far as updates and so on. I don't really want to spend a whole lot of time on that. Actually, vROps performs properly. We've had products before that just didn't perform very well. When that happens, the users just won't use it. It's very important.

I would have to say the most valuable features are the active monitoring and the integration into Virtual Center; then, just the logging and history. It monitors the health of the system, as well as resources such as CPU, memory, RAM, and disk usage – not only on the data store, but on the OS level, as well.

One of the big benefits was when we were introducing a new solution for the data center and our vendor needed historical data to right-size a solution for us. We were able to pull everything out of Ops Manager and provide that to them, and then they were able to right-size a current-need, as well as future-needs, type solution for us.

The capacity management was key when we just purchased new hardware. We do not necessarily measure its value by what we save but by making sure that what we bought is going to meet today's needs and tomorrow's needs, as well.

After using the Capacity Planner, if you install new hardware, obviously, you're going to notice a big difference, so we have seen cases where performance has improved.

I would like to see some better dashboards, overall dashboards. There are a lot of dashboards – easily more than 20 canned ones – and I’d like to see something that encapsulates everything into an easier interface to look at from a 30,000-foot view.

I would like to see them do something about the complexity of the reporting mechanisms. It's not just for anybody. You've got to get in there and roll up your sleeves. I learned by doing just that: rolling up my sleeves, getting in there, reading documentation and so on.

It's never had an issue with stability.

We're a four-host environment, so we're not a major big environment. We've got about 60 VMs and four hosts. There have been no issues. It has never slowed down.

I have not needed to use technical support, really. It's pretty much, set it and forget it.

I wasn't getting visibility into the operations of the virtual machines. Performance charts are great and whatnot, but I was not able to dive deeper into web server activity, database activity, and so on, without having to buy third-party products.

Because we're such a small shop, trying to minimize the number of vendors is key. Looking out there, sometimes I'm a little hesitant to go outside the box in a sense. That’s one reason why we chose vROps.

I set it up, and it was pretty straightforward. It took about a week, off and on. It wasn't too difficult.

First, ask yourself what you're trying to accomplish. If that's what the product gives you, then go for it.