VMware Aria Operations Reviews

I like the dashboards. I like being able to just look at it and see what my environment's doing.

Something that I have talked to them about is communication. We have a lot of issues that end up going to VMware engineering, and I would like them to improve communication from engineering, rather than having our SR just sit there with no communication or update at all. Occasionally we'll get a response e-mail saying engineering still has it, that they're working on it. It would be nice to have engineering come back and say, this is what we're working on specifically. Maybe an ETA for a patch, or something like that. That's one of my biggest complaints.

We had an issue a couple weeks ago, opened the case and the person never responded. I escalated twice and we finally got a call back the day I provided this review. When we did get a call back, we got a call back from a level one. Most of us are level three status; when they call us back, they should be giving us somebody who's above our level rather than somebody who's going to ask us the same questions of possible resolutions that we've already tried. We were still waiting to fix that problem as far as I know from my e-mail contact an hour before I provided this review.

I have been using it for three or four years.

It's pretty stable. It's at 98% of the time. If we have issues with it, it's usually minor and most likely related to the environment and not the product.

I see it meeting our needs going forward. It's scalable. We have a big environment. We've doubled it in the last six months or in the last year. It's handled that transition quite well.

It's great support. We contact them by e-mail, phone, and so on. We have an MCS contract. We have a TAM with whom we’re on a first-name basis.

We weren't previously using a different solution.

I don't remember what the trigger was to bring this on board. I was not involved in purchasing or making that decision. I'm on the support side of it.

Plan it well.

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.

The most valuable feature is being able to see what's actually going on, down to the VMware storage level. And the fact that it can give you a suggested change and it'll explain why.

The most common thing we see is that we've got too many CPUs on a virtual machine. It'll say - and there's always a debate - or someone thinks it could be running out of memory, and it's actually because it has too many CPUs.

A lot of guys want to add more memory or more CPUs and it'll know why. It helps me with the other guys on the team and to show them why, because if you look at it, it'll tell you: This is what's going on and this is what you need to do. Also, a lot of times, there's a link for more information. You can find that information and read up on it, such as a KB article that explains what the product is telling you. There's not a lot of space in the product itself; just a little synopsis about why you should do it. It's readable for a VMware admin. If you're a regular system administrator, you might not understand what they're saying or doing.

Probably the most common benefit is catching problems. It has a view where it shows you a hot spot that starts turning red and you're see there's an issue. It also shows trends, so you can see how long it has been going on and other things like that.

We don't currently use the increased automation feature or integration with DRS for load balancing and scheduling. We're looking into doing it, but it's a trust factor. We're afraid it'll add a CPU or take away a CPU – things like that – on the fly, and we're not comfortable with that yet. It gives us suggestions and we'll implement those, but we don't want it to just automatically do it. I expect in the future, we will. We've had about six months and we're happy with it so far.

It’s difficult to say whether we have had specific cases where it has helped us avoid outages or shortened outage times, because when something comes up, we usually address it. So, I wouldn't know if we avoided an outage. I haven't seen anything super serious.

It has helped us with performance management; getting the VMs tuned better. And that's what I think it's really good at. We have a staff of six VMware admins, and some are less experienced than others, so they'll overbuild a VM or something like that.

Even though we don't have the full license for the full vRealize automation and some automation is already built in, I’d like to see them expand that and make it a little easier to use.

Also, it is very CPU intensive. It's hitting the storage, or I guess more storage. Our storage admins are always complaining it's one of the most utilized virtual machines out there. They're saying it's just as high as any of our big databases. If they could improve the performance, so our storage guys will quit complaining about the usage on the data storage. They're saying the virtual machine is probably using more IOPS than almost every other virtual machine in the environment. It's constantly checking the environment.

I think the learning curve on setting it up could be improved; it takes a while to understand it. I wouldn't say I’ve mastered it at all. I'm still working on it. If you really want to get into the automation portion, you've got to learn a lot of Python and things like that, because that's what it's using underneath.

I think it's pretty stable.

As far as scalability goes, we have fairly a decent-sized environment and it doesn't seem to have an issue. We don't see a performance issue, but when our storage guys are looking at their console, they're getting worried because it's one virtual machine and this product stores a lot more than all the others.

I have not used technical support. I don't think we've used technical support; we've used our TAM to help us set it up, get it going and fix it up. I think we had one issue because we couldn't get it set up correctly and we had to call support. They were very good at resolving the issue, they just kind of walked us through it.

We previously used SolarWinds Virtualization, and it was not real time. We wanted something that was real time. It was always behind, because it was polling once in a while; it goes and grabs the data. So you'd be looking at all the data and it wasn't real. A problem would no longer, even though I'm looking at it. It's fine, I guess, for long-term monitoring, but when I wanted to deal with issues that were immediate, it wasn't a good fit for us.

There were no other vendors on our short list. We did the proofs of concept and liked vROps, so we went from there.

I think the most important criteria when we went with vROps was because it was a VMware product. We were more likely to choose it. They were getting the integration we wanted, so we didn't really look at a lot of other products.

Do the proof of concept. I think that'll tell you what you need to know; if it's going to be a good fit for your environment. I would say that's probably applicable for anything you're going to look at.

Because we're only using the foundation version, it's really nice to be able to have the one spot to look at all the details over the last six hours, troubleshooting, tagging on the performance statistics together.

We typically dive into it for troubleshooting when our customers complain of performance issues. It really helps by showing a little bit better-detailed report of how high latency is, storage and networking.

Because we're using the free version, it's nice that we can show our management team that, hey, it is a useful feature, so maybe we need to invest in a better monitoring tool for these solutions.

t also helps some of my newer technicians understand how the different components of a vSphere infrastructure actually work, or tied together a little bit.

I'd like a little bit more usability out of the foundation level, because our customers say it's really small. So it's hard to justify going up to that next level.

One of the biggest areas with room for improvement is more automated reports, so I don't have to send technicians in to get them.

I haven't had any stability issues at all.

Our problem is we're a management solution provider for multiple customers. All our sites are very distributed and have their own vCenters. So the problem is that I have no single console to view all of our environments in a singular spot. Each site gets their own vROps or vCOPS. Then we have to go into each one and review it as needed.

We do not really use technical support. We don't have a lot of need to go to technical support for the monitoring solution.

Initial setup was really straightforward because we just use the virtual appliance deployment.

We use this solution because I need a way to show my customers what we're doing in order to justify what they're paying for support.

I haven't had a chance yet to look at any other vendors, so far.

With the foundation version being included with vSphere software, it doesn't hurt to have it in there. So usually at least deploy that because then, if you upgrade, all that data comes with it.

If I was using the standard version with all the additional features, I might have rated it a little bit higher.

The most valuable feature is getting straight to the problem; figuring out the problem and getting to it. It allows me to verify what the problem is and then to dig deep into the problem to see what the solution would be.

• Quicker solutions to problems that appear out of the blue

vROps has not helped me avoid any critical outages, but I can see things coming up and I'll adjust. That's the big thing, so I don't even get close to an outage preferably.
I see the same type of improvements from vROps’ capacity management and performance management features. Seeing ahead is what avoids any problems.

When it finds a problem, the product currently provides certain solutions for you to implement to resolve the problem. It might be nice to have a trigger that would actually implement that solution directly into the VMware or into the WM itself; an action.

I have not encountered any stability issues at all.

I haven't had to think about scalability.

I used technical support in the beginning, but just during setup. Since then, nothing.
At the time, technical support was fine. It worked out fine.

The problem was that I wasn't using anything and I was going all over the place in VMware and vSphere to try and figure out issues. I also wanted to see ahead of myself; what was coming down the chain and vROps allows that. It gives me a short-term and a long-term view of my environment.

Initial setup was pretty easy. I just ran into a problem involving a previous version or two versions behind, called support and it was solved.

I think there were other vendors on my shortlist, but I really didn't get into it.

When selecting the vendor, and not the product, the most important criteria would be support. That's really big. And how the vendor presents itself – you know, presenting itself, the company, and presenting the application or software that they're selling to us.

Give it a shot.

Earlier versions were working fine and helping a lot, but the latest version simplified the management view. I can get to the view I want much easier. That's why I gave it 4.5 stars; probably, previous versions would be less than that.

It'll ask me basically to obtain information regarding the statistics of all my servers in real-time. It's very important for us, because we have a large scale of VSX servers that we have to monitor. It allows us to find out if something is wrong in our resources, or there is, basically, an ESXi server that might be having some issues in real time.

It has improved us because in the past, in order for us to approach a problem, we needed to look into it on a server-by-server basis. Now, with vROps, we can see all the dependencies that are part of that server. If there is a problem with a virtual machine, we can find out if the problem is related to the virtual machine, to the host, or to the cluster that particular machine belongs to.

vROps has helped us avoid outages and shortened our outage time, because we've got a capacity manager; we are able to identify those clusters that are running out of resources and we are able to add resources to them before they run out of resources.

At the capacity-management level, it has helped us, because every time there is a new project and we need to account for new resources, it allows us to bring reports and, in real time, show our management team, "Look, in order for us to stand up these type of applications, these are the resources that we need." It has allowed us to provide management a visual of why we are asking for more resources.

Regarding performance management, let's say, as an example, if a virtual machine has been affected by a performance issue, there are many dependencies; it could be storage, it could be the computer, it could be networking. With vROps, we are able to see in a single pane of glass what might be affecting the VM itself.

I would like more alarm notification improvements; that's something that I would like to see. In comparison with technologies that are the competition, that would be something nice to see.

It's very stable. We haven't had any problems whatsoever. We run two different clusters of vROps: one in America and one in our European data center. Up to this point, we haven't had any issues.

It allows you to scale very fast because every time that you need to add a server into it to expand your data footprint, you're able to do it without any problems.

I have used technical support sometimes, when there is a question that we cannot answer ourselves regarding the functionality of the product; definitely, we'll reach out to technical support. So far, we have had a very good experience with them.

I previously used a different solution. Due to the fact that we are a video game software company, we use a lot of open-source software and there were technologies that did not offer the functionality that we needed in order for us to monitor our infrastructure. That's the reason why we looked into vROps. We are a VMware shop, so what better technology than vROps to use for monitoring?

I was the one that set it up. With any new technology, there's always complexity that you have to account for. Before I deployed the technology, I went to training and I got myself training about the technology. It was easy for me to set up because I already knew it.

We are always looking to different solutions, but due to the nature that we're a VMware shop, that's the first type of solutions that we're looking to.

Compared to other solutions that are in the market, for example, Splunk, vROps, in my opinion, has a leg up because it allows you to integrate with other VMware products, so to speak, so that's one of the beauties that I like about vROps.

When selecting a vendor like VMware, we always look for a company that invests in their own technology. If it is a new technology that, let's say as an example, has been on the market for one year, and we don't see that the company has a roadmap for the next five years into the future, that's something that disinterests the company that I work for.

Go for it. Don't think about it. It will save you a lot of time.

I have given it a perfect rating because it has helped me a lot in the past; that's the reason why, I will be sincere.

The most valuable features are probably capacity management and performance monitoring.

It improves the way my company functions because it's a better look at the ways that we can purchase hardware. We're able to make slightly more intelligent decisions on when we need it, how quickly we need it. Then, from a performance standpoint, it really helps us to be able to determine when we're getting clusters that are in contention or certain VMs and similar items that might need additional resources and so on. It's been able to spot issues on VMs that needed additional resources.

I don't think it speeds anything up. It might improve the ability of a VM but it doesn't really improve our process any.

I think there's always room to grow.

I'd like to see better integration between the tools, such as login sites. Having to go between the two of them is kind of a pain. It would be nice if you could kind of pull those up in between; or stay in one tool would be really nice. I'd really like to see some of the metrics and stuff that we get from vROps show up in vCenter as well.

The learning curve on some of the dashboards and similar items could be a bit more intuitive; getting the policies and similar items tuned out. It would be nice to be a little bit easier.

Stability has been pretty good. The later releases here have been really well. We've had some really good success with it.

So far it has scaled well. It's holding our thousands of machines, so it seems to be good.

I personally have not yet used technical support.

We did a proof of concept against vROps and a couple of their competitors, and we liked the vROps. It went really well from a licensing model, and the metrics and information are a little bit easier to read. It kind of won out against the other ones. I don’t remember the other solutions we considered, though.

When selecting a vendor like VMware, it really depends on what we're looking for, drives the evaluation matrix, but typically for some of the big ones, we look at how long they've been around, what the user base is like, what the support's like. Obviously, cost is always out there. Usually, those are pretty common across all of our evaluations. Then there are specific criteria for each of the products.

Initial setup was pretty straightforward. We followed the best practice guides and everything else that were already published out there. It was pretty good. The wizard was pretty helpful and everything, so we just followed the wizard. It was really what the best practice guide said to do. It was really well done.

Evaluate it. Run the PoC. There are plenty of opportunities out there to put it into your environment. Let it pull some metrics in and really see what the power of it is.
It's a really robust product. We've had really good luck with it. It definitely helps out in the environment, so it's definitely four stars. Not quite five because there are a couple of things that would be nice to have smoothed out a little bit, but definitely not bad.

The most valuable feature of the product is the visibility into the infrastructure and user experience of the customer's network. It shows detailed metrics that are otherwise very difficult to collect on your own. You can pull up the latency between your storage arrays, your CPU, contention that you would have between there, and RAM utilization based on host, based on VM, and based on application cluster.

It allows them to remedy problems much quicker in their environments, get that continuous health and improvement; a continuous improvement process.

We have used it to identify problems that avoids outages or shortens outage time, and for performance and capacity management.

I would like to see a rewrite of the database; a rewrite of the underlying supporting infrastructure.

It should be able to capture historical in-guest metrics for VDI. Currently, it has a limited set of data that it can keep over time, which is challenging when trying to support an organization long-term.

I’m not as comfortable with regard to stability. Some of the limitations of the database concern me. It is able to accept third-party data, but limits the amount it can take, in order to keep performance up. VMware actually limits their partners on what data they want them to send, as well as limit some of the information the partners collect because it'll overrun the schema. There are some architectural changes that must be made that will take time and resources.

Again, I have concerns regarding the underlying database architecture.
I have not experienced slowness.

Personally, I have not used technical support. Our customers do though.

We were previously using multiple tools, so this product collapsed a lot of tools into a singular platform to view all the information.

We also use LogicMonitor, and there are a couple of others out there that we're using right now.

Validate your environment in terms of how large you plan to grow, and ensure that the environment is going to give you what you need.