VMware Aria Operations Reviews

We use it for monitoring and troubleshooting the performance and stability of our VMware.

If we get reports of applications that are running slowly, we are able to drill into the VM and all the statistics, and see where the bottlenecks are or what the issues are.

The solution has helped reduce the time to troubleshoot issues. It gives us greater insight into all capacity utilization, which helps us plan better.

For us, the most valuable feature is the insight into real-time performance.

At times we find the solution to be intuitive and user-friendly. It's getting better. Version 6 was terrible but 7 is a lot better. There is still room for improvement. It needs to be a bit more intuitive.

I would like to see more integration between vRealize Operations, Log Insight, and Network Insight. It would be nice if they worked a bit better together.

So far, stability is fine.

As for scalability, we've already added an extra node and it was a nice and simple, click, click, done. The scalability is good so far.

We have not had to use technical support yet.

We didn't have a solution that gave us in-depth performance stats or capacity planning in the VMware stack. We were a VMware customer, so it made sense to go with a VMware product. Compared to other products the feature set, use cases, and costs of vROps are fine. It's the integration points that led us to go with VMware, there's better, tighter integration using vROps.

The initial setup was straightforward. It took us half a day.

We used a consultant for the deployment. We used Assist Inc, and they were brilliant.

In terms of ROI, we're getting there. However, it's only been live for a couple months.

We've looked at other solutions before, but we've never found one that does what VROps does. We've looked at Veeam ONE and VMTurbo, but I don't think they're around anymore. That's part of the problem: There were vendors that did the monitoring and they've all crashed and burned. VROps wouldn't do that.

My advice would be, do a hands-on lab. Get to grips with it before you deploy it.

I rate it at eight out of ten. It's a great product. It integrates well with the VMware stack. It covers all the VMware technologies. I just need it to be more intuitive, so that's why it's an eight and not a nine or a ten.

Our primary use case for this solution is to troubleshoot workloads. 

We have effectively reduced a lot of our memory and we love the Idle VMs. We can scale back the over-provisioning of systems based on actual facts and metrics. We've really been able to tidy up the over-provisioning. 

The charts, form, and metrics that you can visually display out to other sites that IT can't, and the visibility are the features that we have found most valuable. 

We do not find this solution to be user-friendly. There's still a lot of work that needs to be done and a lot of work has to go into getting the graphs right. It's not a "plug and play" type of thing. You really have to put in a lot of work. You always have to be aware of what's going on within the machines. It needs to be improved from end-to-end. 

I would like to see more visibility into the machine's working and an easier way to find out what the workings are. There are agents but they're tricky. I would like to see something more agent-less. 

I have rated this solution an eight because it's at an excellent level but it's still lacking on the end-to-end side. It has gotten better, visually, but it's still not quite there. It's clunky looking and they could have done a lot better with the interface. 

There are problems with stability. 

Scalability is getting better. It needs to be resized and it's not that easy. 

I recently used technical support to do an upgrade. They did excellent work.

I have a contact at VMware who I spoke to about software issues and he pointed us to this solution. We used RVTools many years ago but we needed something more enterprise. 

The initial setup was complex. 

This solution is expensive. Businesses don't see the true value of it, whereas IT operations do, which makes it a hard sell. 

IT sees a lot of benefit from this solution, mainly regarding troubleshooting, identifying issues, and retrospective trouble-shooting. It offers a timeline in which you can go in and see how the machine was behaving. It identifies deep issues at high levels. 

I would tell someone looking into this solution that you need high-level tools. You can't be relying on the free tools or on vCenter free questions. You need a step up to aggregate that information. I would look at all of the available solutions. 

Our primary use case of this solution is mostly monitoring and the capacity for tracking. The organization I work for has lots of different data centers. Our team is responsible for monitoring how much capacity is left. 

It has improved our organization because it allows for a bit more transparency regarding consumption and it also helps us plan ahead. 

The integrated metrics are the most valuable feature. 

We don't find this solution to be user-friendly. If you want to use integrated features then it is quite easy, but if you want to use it for a specific metrics model or monitor then it starts becoming more complicated. If you want to create different networks then it's quite complex. 

The stability is working. 

The initial setup was quite straightforward. It was quite simple. To get benefits you have to dig deeper. 

We deployed this solution in-house. 

I rated this solution an eight because it's a good product but it's a bit complicated. I'm rating it based on my expectations of this kind of product. Once you install it you can expect it to help predict issues. In order to understand all of these metrics, you have to delve and dig into them yourself. If you don't know where you're looking for a problem and need it to be more specific then you have to customize it on your own.

I would advise somebody looking into this product that you have to know exactly what you're looking to get; what kind of metrics and what they involve. It is quite expensive and if you just implement it just because you can then you won't get any benefit from it. You have to think through and plan ahead. You have to understand what the issues are that you want to solve with this solution. Otherwise, this solution is a waste of money. 

We use it for a general health check of the environment: What is broken and what is not performing right. 

We can do a lot more with it, and we want to, but we haven't gotten as deep into it as we want to.

It allows us to engineer our infrastructure more efficiently, because vROps will tell us capacity-wise if we are overbuilt, so we can scale back. We have learned to right-size our stuff much better since we have been using vROps.

The dashboards are great. You can quickly see things at a glance without having to dig through a lot of data.

It allows us better visibility into our virtual infrastructure than we could get through vCenter or other tools by providing us a lot of metrics. vROps is good at spotting problems.

Some of the more advanced stuff takes a bit of time to dig into it. It takes a little longer to setup if you want really detailed stuff. They could make the learning curve smoother.

Stability has been good. We haven't had any downtime.

We haven't scaled ours out beyond a single appliance, but I know it can scale out farther.

The technical support is good and responsive.

The initial setup is straightforward. I was able to do it with little to no initial reading.

It has reduced the time to troubleshoot, because we would have to go to ten different places otherwise to get all the data that it gives you in one single picture. 

Start small. Don't try to put too much stuff in it at one time. This way you won't have information overload when you start receiving data back from it.

I was able to start using it quickly the first time.

I have been working with VMware for forever. It has been a good experience.

Most important information when selecting a vendor: 

• Be responsive.
• Provide good support.
• Have a solid product.

The value from vROps, from a traditional sense that we had, is the visibility into the back-end, to know when we are having issues with VMs before it actually becomes an end user issue. Especially with hard drives, making sure we extend those out, memory and CPU utilization, as well as overloading host.

I would like to see a free offering. Cost is always a factor in any sort of line. Obviously, the value added is there and it's worth it.

The automation piece could be done simpler.

REST APIs: more REST API calls. It seems like all of the technologies are facilitating those calls back and forth. The more we can get inside vROps, the easier it's going to be to integrate other product lines with it as well.

It's very stable. We've had no issues with it that I can be aware of; even through the upgrade process everything has been very clean.

It will scale, we've seen that as we've ramped up, we've had a 30% increase year-over-year over the last five years. We've never had any issue with the VMware or vROps installations at any of them. As a matter of fact, we only see increased usage and availability with it.

Tech support has been very good. Quite honestly, sometimes they're better than we are. As opposed to getting back to them, they almost hassle us to make sure that they're getting the information. They want to make sure that they get the solution in hand and they close those tickets. It seems that we don't move as timely as they do lots of times.

It's fairly straightforward, obviously, with their initial installation. The more you become an automated system, the more you really delve into the dynamics of vROps, it can become more complicated, but no more so than any other product line. I feel like it's the easiest of any product line to get through. Obviously, there's intricacies with any of this technology.

In terms of the most important criteria when selecting a vendor, I feel like you have to look at it all. You have equal shares.

I work in an industry that is a very secure environment, and you have to have the long-term stability there. One thing that we're asking all vendors that we're looking at their product lines is, "Are you viable five, 10, 20 years from now?" We don't have that three-year turnover rate that a lot of other industries have. We want to make sure that whoever we partner with is going to be there, to support us for the long haul. We don't want it to be purchased and gobbled up, in an environment that is today.

We know that VMware isn't going to be. It is a very well-maintained product line throughout its life expectancy and will continue to be.

As I said, I would probably give it a 10, or greater if I could, if it had more of those REST APIs. They open it up a little bit more to integration with, honestly, the competition, as well as some of the newer technologies that are coming out. I feel they'll have to, and they'll mature in that respect over the next year to two years, but I wish we had a little bit more today.

vRealize Operations enables us to do a lot more looking at the data. Basically, it enables us to look at the information coming in from vCenter, vSphere. We fully integrate it in our end user computing side. So Horizon, plug it into our Horizon data.

For vRealize, in the state that we use it in, for our Horizon end points, there's probably a little bit more data that they could have available for Horizon than they do today. I think it's more vCenter focused. Their integration with Horizon probably could be a little bit better.

It's a stable solution. It's still growing. It's got room to grow, I would say. There are a lot of things they could do to make it better. I think they're pretty open to that feedback, and allowing us to expand it more.

It's highly scalable.

Tech support's really good. Anytime we've had any issues whatsoever, any of our engineers, or whoever we contact, is pretty available within a few hours of our posting a problem to support.

Setup's a little complex at first. But once you actually know what you're doing, and when you're setting up some of the other nodes - besides the primary one - the collectors and everything, it tends to go a little bit better.

From my standpoint, when selecting a vendor, we look at support, their customer service, what is their responsiveness to any of the problems we have. Scalability, "ease-ability" in the product. Is the solution fully integrated into what we need it to do?

I rate it a seven right now just because it's a little bit complex in its setup. But, I think, like I said, as they improve it, get a little bit better, then it'll make it easier to use.

The historical data: It allows us to go back, look at the VM past historical data, CPU memory usage, and disk latency. Therefore, it helps us troubleshoot a lot of issues.

It allows us to quickly resolve issues. There's some other capabilities in there, some dashboards that allow us to look at environments as a whole, and to identify many issues.

The newer versions currently streamline the process for us.

The password changes: One of the drawbacks I hear from the portability side is the number of passwords it takes to keep it up and running. Limit the number of passwords to keep it up and running.

The GUI could be improved. There's a lot of clicking around to get to stuff at times, but it's pretty good.

Also, make it easier to upgrade.

The newer versions are much better than our experience has been in the past. We're at the latest version 6.6. It's much better than the previous five versions that we were running.

We haven't had any issues with scalability. We have a large environment, but it's been able to handle it.

The VMware staff is usually pretty knowledgeable. We have been pretty satisfied with the support we have received.

We had our previous tools, which were SCOM monitoring stuff. It was brought to our attention from VMware that they had this solution. At the time, we were a small VMware user. So, it sort of developed from that.

While I was not involved in the initial setup, upgrades have been pretty straightforward.

In-house.

I would recommend the solution.

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor:

• Brand reputation
• Brand name
• Support.

We just starting using it in the last month. We've been able to use it to diagnose several performance problems with our environment, and being able to tie it into login site has been incredibly useful.

We've also solved several challenges that have been ongoing for the last several months, within a couple of days, after having vROps in the environment.

I don't think I have enough experience to be able to answer this question fully. Maybe some easier ways of getting some of the NSX monitoring products. It wasn't obvious how it was tied into NSX, and how it was usable at first. It took a couple days of looking at it, and configuring it, and toying with it to get it. I'd be in favor of that being a little easier.

It seems fairly stable. I'm always a little concerned about version changes and things that change when you go up or down a version. So far, it hasn't gone down, so I'd say that's pretty stable for the month it's been up. It's been great.

I see no problems with the DM itself. With that said, it's collecting a lot of diagnostics at this point and it doesn't seem to have any issues at all with latency. It seems it should be able to scale up and out if we needed to.

I haven't used it yet.

We messed that one up. We decided to ask for logins to vROps, for the last two years, and then finally our accounts team said, "Hey, you know you already have one, right?" Turns out we had them but the licensing hadn't been activated and we didn't realize it. Once we realized that, it was awesome. We already made the investment and it was some previous person's decision who is no longer at our company, so I cannot speak to that.

I knew that I wanted it because we have a full 100% virtualization and we're using SolarWinds. SolarWinds is built to monitor everything possible, and we don't need everything possible. I needed VMware monitoring. vROps was the obvious solution there. Once I realized that we already had the licensing for it, being able to install it and configure it within a few days was incredible.

Absolutely straightforward. As I said, we have a full SolarWinds environment and we're trying to move away from it. And then we finally realized we have licensing for the login site and vROps. So I went ahead and installed and configured it and got it running and rolling. Because of it being straightforward, plus the setup, we're probably going to get rid of most of our investment in SolarWinds products, which is a big bonus for our company.

What's important when looking at vendors is

• Ease of talking to them
• Ease of working with their sales team
• Availability

Also their presentation of the products. Having trial versions available to be able to try it out before so you know if it's like, "Oh yeah. I want to use it more." That's the most important.

I would definitely be looking at long term solution, at a way to get better insight into your controlled environment. I don't have too much experience with the different monitoring tools but vROps has been, hands down, the best thing I've reviewed so far.