VMware Aria Operations Reviews

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.

Why vRealize is the most valuable for us, for my company, is that we use it to measure and monitor the environment.

We're saving resources, because we are monitoring them. We know where they go and how the capacity is spent, thus we are saving.

The dashboard is too complicated. Those badges that they give you as a rating badge are too hard to understand what they mean. This is something that they need to figure out.

Three years.

No issues. So far, so good. We are happy with it.

So far from our environment, it is okay.

We haven't used it yet.

I have a contact in VMware. Every time that I call VMware, they help as I expect, though they are not that easy to reach compared to say, Cisco support.

We used to use SolarWinds and the support was not great.

VMware has been much better.

I was involved in the setup. It was straightforward.

It was just that the dashboard is a little hard to understand at the beginning, but after you get used to it, you're fine.

In-house. They were were helpful.

We went straight from SolarWinds to VMware.

We chose VMware because of its time on the market, the company's reputation, and the support.

I mostly use VMware products. They integrate well together. I also participate on VMTN, the VMware community online.

We invested in this solution because monitoring was really important for us.

I would definitely recommend this solution.

I like the availability features and the capacity management. The availability features, like system uptime, we are using some of the endpoint monitoring features for service availability.

The user interface is good.

It definitely has a better view and visibility for everything that's going on, and helps keep tabs and makes sure everything is running well.

Continue on the endpoint side, so you can dig deeper into the Windows operating system, services, and events, because we're trying to use it to replace System Center Operations Manager (SCOM). It doesn't quite do everything, but it's getting there.

We've upgraded a few times, probably a year and a half.

We haven't had any issues with it. It's worked well for us.

It works fine for us. Our environment is pretty small. We have eight hosts on the service side and eight hosts on the desktop side. We're still working on integrating it with the desktop side, but it's fairly small, that has worked for us.

I have not personally used it for this solution, but we're a BCS customer, so we can get support pretty easily if we need to.

Just Microsoft Systems Center.

We were missing things, and weren't seeing alerts for different things. We're pretty heavily invested in VMware, so it integrated more easily.

It was straightforward.

It was pretty much Microsoft or VMware, from our concerns. So, we started with one and went the other way.

It's worth giving it a shot. I think there's a lot of benefit with it. It does pretty much everything you should need it to do.

Also, I find being part of the VMware community useful.

Whatever you go with, make sure you are able to get good support.

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 automation is the most valuable feature; the whole automation and building a VM from scratch, all the way to the VM and life cycle the VM.

We can build a VM faster. From the same business unit, we can deploy VM in less time than we were doing it before.

There's some improvements that they can do as far as make it more user-friendly and get away from Java.

It's not that easy to understand and I found even at VMware, it is really hard to get someone that can answer some of the questions we have as far as the product.
I think they released a new solution recently, so I need to go back and see what's new on it but I’ve already seen some things that got fixed as far as going from one version to another. For example, there's more integration with vRA now.

Stability’s good; no problems at all.

Scalability is great.

I have not really used technical support.

We were doing a lot of scripting, and that doesn't scale to the way we wanted it to, so that's why we're going to use vRA.

Our most important criteria when selecting a vendor like VMware is that it will support Unix and Windows at the same time; VMware was more user-friendly with Unix machines; it comes with certain versions and flavors of Unix.

The initial setup was easy, but what came after that was complex, due to the fact that we needed to have multiple modules.

We’re thinking of Microsoft Azure Stack. It's not out on the market yet, but we're waiting on that.

Is it worth the money? That would be the question.

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.

The most valuable feature is its ability to monitor the trends and accurately make predictions about when and where and how and what you need to buy to, first of all, get ahead of your sprawling growth. Also, at the same time, you can keep that sprawl under control because you are able to see easily that the sprawl is happening and where it's happening, who's doing it and how. It gives you the tools and the information you need to be able to bring it all together, and keep the sprawl from happening.

Previously, I was with a managed service provider and it would have been awesome if we had been able to do it as a managed service for people with multitenancy. I kind of hacked it into Log Insight; I wasn't really able to do it with vRealize Operations Manager, but that would be really big for us; would have been really big for us when I was doing that.

In my current deployment, container monitoring is an area with room for improvement: Docker, Swarm, Kubernetes, Mesos, whatever it's going to be, whatever anybody's going to use; just being able to monitor the Linux container ecosystem, resource utilization, contention, etc.

I've deployed vROps as far back as when it was vCOPS, which is like two-ish years ago, thereabouts. We've used it for a variety of different things from Horizon 7, specifically Horizon 7 monitoring, to VSAN, and all kinds of mostly VMware products, mostly in a virtual space.

I don't thing I've ever had one crash on me before.

I've never really scaled it a whole lot; three to four hundred VMs was the max I've ever used it for, so I can't really address that.

I love VMware support, when I can get them on the phone. That's the one thing, the one rub, is that I always have a very difficult time getting through the auto-dialer service. I have business continuity service, and even now, I still have so much trouble just getting someone on the phone. Once they get on the phone, they either breeze through the problem or they've identified a bug and they get it fixed. Just the management layer is the problem I have.

The initial setup itself is not complex. It's not something that I would consider complex. However, the time it takes until it is useful is very long and it's something that I've seen people take issue with. They want their information, they want to use their new toy, and they want to do it now, and they don't really care about the other stuff. They don't care that you need more data, that you can't just make predictions off of a day's worth of data, because that has no idea what you're actually doing.

You need to stick with it. You're not going to see immediate return on value. You have to trust the product and you have listen to it. You can't think that you know more than it, because it definitely knows more than you do. Whether it's making intelligent decisions, you have to evaluate what it's recommending, but they're utilizing information from across thousands of customers, so trusting the product is very important.

The most valuable feature is the stress ratings of the different servers, with recommendations of how big a server should be. Being able to pull historical data is pretty nice too.

It's nicer for our customers, because if they say the server is slow, we can actually look and see if it really is slow or if it's their application, or figure out what's going on.

We mainly use it for memory and CPU performance monitoring and management; that is what we're most concerned with. It has helped speed things up. We've had a couple systems that people just accepted as being slow, until we got this tool and it started saying, "Hey, you need to give it more memory." We got in contact with the customer, increased the memory, and now it's great. In the past, the feeling was, "I don't know man. It's just your problem."

Out of, maybe, the 500 servers we have, it has helped about 20 of them, performance-wise.

We also like to use it for troubleshooting. Someone will say the server's slow, and it's nice to be able to give them the data to say, "No, it's not. The problem is somewhere else." I don't know how you would measure that. It's very helpful for that.

We use it for historical data and so on. We do have a couple of custom alarms, which are nice. We monitor things such as old snapshots and so on with it.

I'd like to see some more options with outage times, where you can set different parameters. It seems like you can only set one right now, so you have to make all these groups and do some workarounds. It would be nicer if they made that easier.

The maintenance windows items were kind of painful. Group management is a little cumbersome. I just really wish I could say, "I have outages four times a month, and this is what they are." Right now, you can only say, "I have one outage." In order to have more outages, I have to have four groups, each with different outages. It's a whole ordeal.

Dealing with the technical support the first time for that internal CA certificate, was quite painful. Once we figured it out, it was easy, but I kind of wish they had documentation on how to do it, rather than the solution being call technical support and they'll walk you through it. That's why I have not given it a higher rating.

It’s pretty stable. We haven't had any issues with it going down or anything. We just had minor GUI issues with it, but they got resolved.

I don't know about scalability. We only have one and it seems to be doing the job just fine.

Technical support was good. I'd give them 8 out of 10.

They wanted us to use it to try to track down some overprovisioned and underprovisioned servers. We've had a great relationship with VMware. They had a product so we grabbed it.

When selecting a vendor such as VMware, for me, the most important criteria is dealing with technical support, how good they are. If they're technical support is terrible, I won't be as eager to go with them. I also look at how stable the product is. If I never have to call tech support, then I'll totally buy all their stuff, but then, if I do have to call tech support, I want them to be good.

Initial setup was straightforward. The only issue we ran into was replacing the certificate on it with an internal certificate. It was pretty painful, but once I got support on the line, we figured it out.

We wanted to start with VM Ware. If it wasn't great, we would have moved on. It's been great.

It's a great tool. You should buy it.