VMware Aria Operations Reviews

The most valuable feature is that I see the whole infrastructure. I get the information from my source system, switches, and VMs. I can see what capacity will look like or what capacity I will need in the future, and where the issues will be, risks and so on.

It reduced the number of tickets or support calls we have. It reduced the number of incidents or problems, in a good way.

It also has helped us avoid outages. There was a particular case when we had some issues on the network level. We had a lot of dropped packets and suddenly we realized that there's a component that is going to fail in the near future. So we replaced it and we did not have an outage.

It has not helped us save on storage that much, but we saved a lot from the memory perspective and the CPU perspective. We were able to reduce over-provisioned VM's; we reduced the amount of resources.

We have seen performance improvements. We had several systems that were running okay. After we implemented vROps, we were able to identify the systems. We could see that we have an issue with the system, and why it's not performing that well. It gave us the insight we needed.

Compared to, maybe, an easy-to-use solution such as Veeam, I think the user interface could get a bit more responsive. For the users that are not familiar with VMware, it should be more focused, to give them a better quick start, so that they get faster into the product and see the positive things faster. Make troubleshooting easier. There is a lot of information; make it even simpler for the user.

I've had some stability issues with past releases that stopped collecting information. Support calls did help. Nothing bad.

Interestingly, we usually don't have really huge environments. But for the environments in which we used it to scale out, it’s very good. We deployed multiple nodes and we were able to monitor the whole environment for our customer.

I'll give technical support for vROps a 7/10. Sometimes it takes a bit more effort. We are also a partner. We are at the first level of support. So we ask for logs and real basic questions. It would be nice for us as a partner to have a direct path to second-level or third-level support, to escalate it, because sometimes first-level support just takes too much time.

We previously used Veeam, the management pack, but the way vROps is able to connect with our source system, the network switch, you get the whole view. You don't only get the view on your virtual environments. If we want, you get the whole overview of the whole system. That's why we switched.

Initial setup was straightforward; very easy to set up. We did some PoCs or optimization assessments. Customer liked the way it sets up. Simply, setup is real good.

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

The most important criteria when selecting a vendor like VMWare are quality of the product and support. We had some issues with past releases and with vSphere. But, generally speaking, the products of VMware are really well engineered, and you can count on support if you have an issue.

It's not that straightforward to get in. If they start troubleshooting, it is a bit complex. It's huge, but it takes some time to get into it. That's the reason for my rating.

It's a really good product. I like using it. I like the feedback I receive from my customers.

I would definitely recommend checking out vROps because of the whole package, the overview of the whole infrastructure.

I guess the faults, the alerts, are the most valuable feature; being able to see what could become a problem when I'm running out of virtual machine capacity, and definitely the faults, as far as whether there any issues with the VM storage, any performance issues. I mostly use it for CPU contention, memory contention, as well as latency, obviously; to correlate latency between data stores and virtual machine latency, virtual machine disk latency as well.

I have a dashboard now; I set up dashboards for the help desk team. They are able to look at the dashboard and see right away if there's a VM issue, or whether it’s an actual guest OS issue or an application issue. I think that's the easiest. That's the best feature that I've gotten out of it, as far as the organization is concerned. They are able to understand the information they're seeing.

I was able to sell some custom dashboards to the community. I was able to download some of the dashboards that they have and it's like a help desk central type of a dashboard, where you can drill down to the VM that you're having issues with, and it'll tell you right there and then if there's memory, CPU or a storage contention problem. That's the easiest thing to go by.

I would like to see better built-in policies, so when you deploy an environment, you are able to apply policies that are more realistic for a production environment. That would definitely be a nice release.

They do have some policies now centered around a production environment; maybe easier to make exceptions with where, if you have an alert, you can say, "Don't worry about it. It's an exception. Don't notify me again about this issue.", instead of having it come back up again after a few months. That would be nice.

Once I figure I know this is not a real issue, maybe I can flag something saying, "This is something I know about. You don't need to notify me again about this." Or maybe say "This can be an exception to this rule.", without needing to change the whole policy around, just for that one VM. Maybe there is a way of doing that, I don't know, but I haven't figured it out.

I've had no issues with stability, to be honest; it's worked really well.

We only have two sites on which we use it, so we have two of the servers deployed. So far, for our needs, the scale is fine. It's a web-driven menu just like the web client, so it's kind of sluggish sometimes when I'm down in to certain menus, but overall it's not so bad.

I have not used technical support since this release. I have used it in the past when it used to be called vCloud Operations. When it was vCOps, that's when I had more issues with it. I had to call technical support. But now that it's vROps, no, I've had no issues.

It’s the first-use solution I've used for VMware.

I was the one to set it up. The new setup environment's pretty straightforward. Setting up the alerts, definitions and actions were kind of tricky because there's a lot of false positives. A lot of things it alerts you on are not really problems, so you have to go in and tweak the policies around to see the actual real issues. Sometimes the notifications can be too aggressive, where it notifies you of almost every little thing that can possibly be wrong but in reality, it's not an issue. That tweaking does take a while to get figured out. It's an ongoing process. I'm still doing it to this day. It takes a while.

Maybe after the fact, we looked at VMTurbo a little bit, but that was already after I'd purchased vROps. So it wasn't very realistic as far as going after that product. We also have Veeam Availability Suite, which comprised the same functionality as well. That's because of the way we purchased Veeam for our backup environment. The Availability Suite just came with the backup environment. The vendor gave it to us that way. We don't really use it too much. It seems like Veeam is a nice product as well.

Definitely look into your other products, along with vROps as well. We were short on time, so we made a decision when we should have probably researched more. See what's out there. See how well it compares to other products. I'm sure there are other products that'll do just as well. That would be my number one recommendation. Try to do a PoC with multiple products.

See what fits best for your environment, and what fits best for your staff as well. If you have a dedicated VMware guy, maybe vROps is great. Or maybe, if you need that level of trainability, vROps is great. If you want something right out of the box that just works and just tells you the high-level information and the kind of nuts and bolts of what's wrong with your environment, without having to do too much modifications or tweaking, then maybe something out there is maybe better.

We use VMware Aria Operations for complete visibility of the configurations. It provides us with predictive analysis of the capacity, helping us plan the scalability of resources.

The product has business intelligence features. We can view daily reports of the cloud products.

The product's support services need improvement.

We have been using VMware Aria Operations for more than four years.

I rate the product's stability a nine out of ten.

I rate VMware Aria Operations a nine and a half out of ten.

The technical support services could be better. We need to know the business requirements to get the reports. It is a time-consuming process. Sometimes, we have to search for every detail to make a holistic report.

The initial setup is easy. It can be deployed in any environment. It's a very dynamic product.

It is a very good product. We can download and integrate features from the portal using templates instead of creating them. I rate it a nine out of ten.

Our primary use case of this solution is to use it as an operations tool.

It hasn't improved our organization, we have monitoring in place already, too much overlapping monitoring because wasteful operationally.  Also, the learned behavior thing at first sounds like a great benefit, but when an alert is triggered just because a VMs behavior changes, like for example it uses more network than usual and crosses a threshold but isn't really taxing the underlying infrastructure, well it essentially creates a scenario where admins are logging in to address the alert, but its there really isn't anything wrong.  This stuff should be simple and not overly complicated, and in my opinion the product has become overly complicated over the years. 

Reporting is a fantastic tool. It's a great tool for generating reports on different things, and for historically looking at performance metrics to help solve performance problems in an application stack. There are some great uses for it, but I think that VMware needs to take a step back and simplify it a little bit more, without trying to bombard us with everything they can possibly think of. Some of the stuff isn't important, and it's not operationally useful.

I used to use the old version, and I liked the old version before it was rebranded. The interface was more intuitive, it was more familiar with traditional vSphere client type interfaces. When I deployed the most recent version, I logged in and I was shocked that I didn't know where to go to do what I wanted to do. The whole interface is an information overload, it just bombards me with messages, warnings, and alerts. When I follow through on the majority of these messages, I realize that I'm really just wasting time because they're not real problems.

There's a time to live metric that keeps flashing all the time saying things like "Your cluster is only going to have 45 days left before this resource is going to run out." It's not true. It simply doesn't happen. We could run our clusters with these warnings for another two years. I'm not happy with that. I don't want to be warned just because one VM deviates a little bit from what it would be doing on a normal basis. I'll only want to be alerted when that specific VM causes a genuine problem within the physical infrastructure, where it's going to create some sort of bottleneck of performance for a larger number of VMs collectively. There's x amount of bandwidth on a physical network interface card as the traffic flows over it. It's not really ever gonna be a bottleneck until that card itself becomes saturated. I don't want to see an alert about a VM that's running over a network card when the card itself isn't saturated. 

These are things that bother me about the product: information overload, too many warnings that are false alerts. After a while, when I see these things all the time I don't want to act on anything anymore. I don't want to log into the product because I know that when I log into it I'm going to see too much stuff that's just going to waste my time.

It is stable. 

We don't scale very quickly in our environment and we only have fixed licensing to a specific product. Even as we add new hosts and classes, we only use that particular product against the assets we are licensed to use it against. We acquired the VRealize operations bundle in a large purchase, as part of a solution for our SAP environment. It actually monitors all the hosts and VMs associated with our SAP infrastructure.

OK

We use foglight, and I have to admit vrealize is way better, but we really don't spend much time in either product.  We haven't switched we use both to manage different assets

The initial setup was very simple. We have a relatively small environment we were running it against and we didn't have to plug multiple components. We just employed everything all at one server VM stack.

in house

Cant' really say there is one, you buy it, you spend money on it, but it doesn't really allow for a return on your investment, it only burns more of your operation teams cycles just to learn it and use it, and respond to the alerts it creates.  Bottom line, if you size your infrastructure correctly you don't need this.  If you want to stack VMs on the host to its tipping point, good luck no matter what you monitor with.   

The pricing and licensing structure of this solution weren't so bad. Although the larger scales become more expensive because it's a per-socket model and that's the way VMware prices its stuff out. This particular product could benefit from a different model like a per-VM count rather than a per-socket count. We bought it as part of a bundle and we got a good deal on it. 

We have another solution from Dell EMC called Foglight, and it's way worse. vRealize is ten times better than that product. Although they both leave us with too much nonsense to bother with.

I would rate this solution a six.

The analytics and operations management are our primary use cases of this solution. It's been performing well. 

The ability to analyze optimizations, the performance, and balance have all helped my organization. 

It provides my team the awareness to see what's going on with the nodes and the clusters. It will then either rebalance them or allow the automation to rebalance them for us.

The alerts and awareness would be the most valuable features for us. 

I have found this solution to be user-friendly and intuitive. I also like the integration point and that it's a single pane of glass.

It's very stable. 

Scalability is good. I've used it in previous versions and I'm looking forward to using it in the current version, 6.7. I think it's phenomenal. I look forward to the product growing even further. I understand version 7.0 is coming out soon.

I haven't had to use technical support for this version but I have had to use them in the past with other versions. There have been some challenges with them. It's hard to get through to the right person and resolving issues in previous versions was hard. 

The initial setup was straightforward. 

Our primary use case of this solution is for the capacity planning and also for the monitoring.  It has helped us get a clear view of the infrastructure. We spoke to people from VMware and realized this was the right solution for us. 

It has helped our organization because now we have been able to reclaim about 40 percent of our infrastructure resources.

It has also helped us reduce the time it takes to troubleshoot issues. It helps us pinpoint the locations of the program which allows us to reduce the time it takes to figure out a solution. 

The dashboard is a valuable feature for us as well as the personalized reports. Our management doesn't really care about the incident, rather they care about the reporting so it's a good tool for us.

At first, it was not so user-friendly because there was so much information that we were lost. Now, we can use it very powerfully. After we played with it for a few months it became easier to use.

Stability is very good. 

It's very scalable. It has many capabilities. We only use around 30 or 40 percent of the tools, we still have to evolve with it. 

Their technical support is good. We haven't had too much use for them. 

We are public services, so we talk to all the companies that want to work with us. Sometimes we can have more than ten companies that we work with so we just talk to them and we consider different factors like budget and from there come up with the right solution. 

The initial setup is not complex because we had a team help us and they helped with the beginning of the installation. Around one hour after we could already start seeing what we could do with it.

We implemented in-house. 

I would rate this solution an eight because we don't know how to maximize all of the features. Once we do, maybe it'll go up to a nine.

I would advise someone looking into this or a similar solution to first analyze your infrastructure. Take a look at what you need and then directly focus on your objective. This way you can maximize the solution.

We use it for making VMware assessments.

I am a system integrator, so it's not implemented in my organization. I implement it in other customers' organizations.

I can install it in 30 minutes to an hour. In about two hours, I have data to give to my customers. In about a week, I have reports to give to the administration, so we can decide which products that they can farm.

• It is easy to install the product, so we can make it available to our customers. 
• It provides good insights into a client's infrastructure.

I would like the product to be more interoperable with other solutions: more hybrids.

It's a very stable product. I don't have any problems with it.

It is very scalable.

I would rate the technical support for this solution an eight out of ten.

This is my first solution of this type.

The initial setup is very straightforward. It is very intuitive to install.

I am an integrator for this type of solution.

I have reduced the time to troubleshoot for my customers. This solution can be used towards a problem that has been existing in infrastructure for months, and no one know what is. Then, in a matter of minutes, I can find the solution and provide it to my customer.

Install and use it. It is a very good, though it needs a few tweaks.

I use it for full diagnostics and predictive problems for the applications or services that we run.

Over-provisioning helps us a bit, and we have a lot over-provisioned VMs. Thus, we show different teams that this type of resource can help manage their environment.

With over-provisioning, we track it all. This is one of the main benefits as it is a reactive and proactive full diagnostic. We can see if the servers are behaving differently and why: Is it quiet or busy? The system is quite good.

• I like the dashboards. We can view in our service groups before something in our service goes wrong and causes issues.
• It is user-friendly, because you can visually set up dashboards for people, such as traffic light systems. 
• The integration with vCenter is what makes it a superior product. 
• There is no hassle setting it up, as it works straight out-of-the-box.
• It has a nice user interface.
• Its ease of use.

In vCenter 6.7, there are themes. I would like to see that add to vRealize Operations as well. It is very nice.

The stability has been good. It is just an appliance that needs to be installed. Give it an IP address, name it, and it works fine.

The scalability has been fine.

The technical support has been fine.

We had a license already for this product. Therefore, we thought we would use the license rather than buying a new product.

The initial setup was easy. We installed the appliance, gave it an IP address, and assigned the relevant passwords.

We installed it ourselves.

If the VMs were trimmed, then we wouldn't have to buy as much software/hardware, and this means less licenses. While most of it is VMware licenses, which are relatively cheap, there are SQL licenses for Microsoft, and this is where we could start saving a lot of money.

I would recommend to try the solution.