VMware Aria Operations Reviews

I would say the operational management piece for policy management and remediation as well as the predictive analytics and smart alerts. This can come in real handy in an environment that is constantly changing whether you are taking resources out or putting them in. Also the trending analytics you get from the performance monitoring as well as the capacity management features for planning and better optimization for the overall IT Infrastructure.

I would say for the short term and initial benefit of installing the software is capacity management which is something that immediately returns valuable data. Your ability once installed to see your entire virtual computer environment and what resources are over or under allocated such as vCPU, memory and storage. This can provide large savings in hardware purchases as well as allow you to recapture those resources and re-purpose them. The more long term benefits are felt in the policy management and the automated/guided remediation that can be setup to help analyze and resolve operational bottlenecks.

I would say the reporting side could be more flexible as well as including more information, maybe adding additional graphics and charts to better summarize the data it captures for operational review.

I've used it for over four years. We have integrated Operations Manager into the various layers of our IT infrastructure both virtual and physical. This assisted us in proactively monitoring as well as performing the analyzation and automated remediation of operational resources with in our dedicated and shared service environments. It also gave us the ability to provide high level operational reports to the companies senior management.

No pretty straight forward deployment via OVA wizard roll-out to get the x2 appliances up and running on the network. From there, it's just a matter of configuring the remainder of the software to talk to your IT infrastructure via the ops manager web console interface. This includes adding your Virtual and Physical hardware that you want to include for monitoring and analytics.

Not at all. The product itself is very stable and since its appliances are virtual DRS and vmotion can be configured to create an HA hosted environment. Outages in this configuration are very few and far between.

This product is designed to scale and assists you in planning with your infrastructure, including computing demand and growth. It's designed to guide you through the various areas of infrastructure operations and makes adding new virtual and/or physical hardware to the Ops Manager core console very easy and scheduled. Adding a vCenter or a piece of physical hardware is as simple as entering in an IP address and username/password. Since all environments are sized different you should establish a Ratio for vCOPS to manage, for example, so many virtual or physical components.

VMware’s customer services is one of the best in the market and they also provide TAM services full or part time that can help any company implement their cloud software suites successfully.

VMware's engineers are very knowledgeable about their products and can handle infrastructures with the complexity of an enterprise level service provider right down to the small to mid-range dedicated IT foot prints.

We used quite a few different solutions to get the same feature sets that this one product offers. We switched in order to consolidate into one solution that could support all of the features we needed as well as reduce our overall capitol spend on multiple software brands and service contracts.

Very straightforward even in a multi-networked environment which is what you tend to find from service providers. The install itself is wizard driven and asks you for the information needed to configure the software step by step.

We did the install via an in-house team which included myself and a network engineer. That’s all it took to get the project planned out and implemented successfully.

The ROI for us is a reduced overall software and support costs by consolidating our monitoring and analytic tool set from many products to one. This reduced the operation software capital expense required to provide monitoring and analytic services for a managed solution.

Licensing for vCOPs comes in two models, Per Processor with unlimited VM’s and/or Per Virtual Machine or Physical Server in 25 VM packs (one pack = 25 VM’s). A cost analysis should be done to determine which model your company operations best fits.

Yes but it was software previously installed and vCOPs was used as a replacement.

I would say that the above score is based on the level of licensing which you use within your Infrastructure. I use the Advanced edition which is designed more for use in a enterprise level environments. This will look at both the virtual and physical sides of Infrastructure Operations which includes Predictive Analytics, Policy Management, Automated and guided remediation as well as customizable dashboards and reports. On the performance monitoring and analytics advanced can examine your vSphere performance and Health beyond what the standard vCenter monitoring tools has to offer, it can provide SAN storage analytics, application discovery and dependency mapping, OS Monitoring (Windows, Linux, Solaris, etc for both Physical and Virtual servers). Advanced also includes additional features for configuration and compliance management for vSphere Harding. Last but not least there is some additional Extensibility with 3rd party management packs for server, storage and network monitoring tools. Some example of packs are Brocade SAN Analytics, EMC Storage Analytics, NetApp Storage, Oracle OEM, SAP Hana, HP OneView, Microsoft Hyper-V.

If your virtualized infrastructure is primarily VMware and you are having issues with monitoring, analyzing and planning from an operational perspective this is the software to use. It will save you time and money in various areas of your IT infrastructures operations

We use vROps as a monitoring solution because it is good at that. It is designed to monitor VMware data centers. 

I am using AWS and Azure. I prefer AWS, but it depends on the budget of the company as well. Having customers in the cloud is cheaper than on-premises, but it is completely different.

Many of the features in this solution have helped out and improved my customer's organizations, such as creating, monitoring, splitting, modifying, playing with the VLRs and alarm definitions, notifications, performance analysis, cost analysis, and cost-calculations report comparisons.

Improves performance for the CPU. Helps us develop a future plan.

The VMware data center has helped us be more proactive in anticipating and solving problems by splitting the production servers. I can combine it with other solutions, like Horizons Cloud. This helps in general.

vRealize Log Insight has affected our overall troubleshooting by allowing us to have a single point to check everything. For example, when I was using Dell EMC RecoveryPoint for virtual machines, which is protection software, they had a single dashboard inside the vCenter in order to check the overall information on the dashboard, such as storage. Previously, I would need to connect to vCenter to check every single log or if there was an alert. With this solution, I do not need to connect to the dashboard or vCenter. By using the UI of vRealize, I can connect independently from my home computer with no need to access vCenter. I have a single dashboard where I can check everything I need, such as alerts, emails, any critical situation, or Log Insight, all from one single place.

The most favorable features of the solution are it has a good design, is easy to use, and can be used for a large variety of solutions. You are able to combine it with many tools and solutions, such as LDAP, Active Directory, and automation solutions.

The UI is user-friendly and easy to use. For example, with a colleague that has just started in the IT field, I can easily explain how to use this solution. It is very intuitive. It has graphics and a lot of details. When comparing it to other vendor monitoring tools. It is much simpler to manage, configure, automate, and do reporting.

It is useful for performance monitoring, alert monitoring, and capacity planning. In the latest version, you have the ability to calculate how much you are spending on your infrastructure for every single machine or the final price of one of your virtual machines. Additionally, you can look at the information between on-premises and AWS, then compare the differences.

There is proactive monitoring available. You need to adjust the appropriate settings, accordingly.

The solution can improve by offering more flexible integration with other platforms or products, such as Hyper-V or Azure. Not everyone uses VMware. It would be beneficial to have a more open-source concept for integration, creating more visibility across multiple clouds.

Sometimes, from a normal user's perspective, I feel like I want to get to the main dashboard faster because there are a lot of options to get to the final step. To get to our main dashboard on Windows machines, you need to click about 10 times and change a lot of options. It would be better if they could organize it to be only three to five steps.

I have been using VMware vRealize Operations (vROps) for approximately five years. I apply and implement it in different businesses and companies as a consultant.

I use vROps daily as a user and administrator. I also explain the solution to colleagues.

It is very stable without downtime. They have improved the solution over previous versions. 

I do the daily tasks, like monitoring. Since I am using the version, I haven't had to apply any upgrades, do any migrations to new appliances, or apply remote collectors.

You can scale up by combining all your vCenters and add collectors. It is very flexible.

In the small companies that I work with, there are about 50 users who are using it for monitoring critical solutions, like finance programs, SQL Servers, IIS, NGINX, Data Domain, and Avamar. 

In general, VMware has good technical support. They have top guys.

I have contacted VMware about Dell EMC issues, but they only focus on vROps support.

There is a strong user community with blogs, which is very important. The community is really extensive. A lot of people help you. We share information there.

I have used other solutions previously and it was impossible to get the dashboard from Dell EMC appliances. We found this solution does it perfectly.

I was previously using other tools combined with Windows, such as RVTools. Now, I only use one solution that has an all-inclusive virtual appliance. vROps is always improving, e.g., the UI, and a benefit to our operations. In general, it is a great product.

I have integrated vROps with vRealize Log Insight and vRealize automation. After integrating vRealize, we tried to split and combine the logs from the login sites for more alerts and information to organize the whole infrastructure and have automation. We used many different types of scripts trying to orchestrate them all together into one solution, replacing, for example, Elasticsearch and some other scripts.

The initial setup of the solution is easy. 

The deployment takes less than 20 minutes.

It is easy to deploy the settings. It is not complex at all. You can start all over and organize everything differently.

First, I choose on-premises because I want to feel in first person how difficult or easy the installation or deployment is from other data centers. Also, I combine it with Active Directory as well as VMware Workspace. Even if it is a PoC, I do the installation to production.

I also work with third-parties and providers.

vROps has helped decrease downtime by approximately 35% by giving me a warning when the VMs are down.

We are receiving approximately 75% workload placement efficiency. vROps is good in this case.

By using the cloud solution, it helps save on costs. We did not have to allocate money or resources for what is typically associated with on-premise solutions, such as installations, upgrades, maintenance, and network hardware.

The virtual appliance is not power-intensive. It does not use a lot of CPU, RAM, etc.

It gets better with every version.

The licensing is not clear at the moment if the on-premises pricing is the same as on the cloud. I am checking on the pricing. However, you can save a lot of money with the cloud solution because you need to spend time installing, upgrading, and connecting with the on-premises solution. Also, you don't need to spend time scheduling the maintenance and maintaining the solution when using the cloud version.

I recommend it to colleagues and companies, but people have complained that it is expensive. I think the pricing is fair.

I tested SolarWinds, ManageEngine, and HPE. I was looking for a product to help with monitoring of some special appliances from Dell EMC. I tested different products, and this solution was the only one that helped my customers and me to get the final solution that I was looking for. It is really difficult, practically impossible, to get a monitoring system for these types of Dell EMC physical appliances: Avamar, Data Domain, and RecoverPoint. I tried different products, like Zabbix, Nagios, and PRTG. Whereas, vROps is perfect for this type of job.

Dell EMC doesn't have any idea how to monitor. They offer coding, scripting, APIs, and connecting to vCenter. They don't offer a knowledge base or advice for monitoring problems. I discovered vROps for monitoring their problems.

While open sources are free, you have to spend a lot of time training and explaining to people how to use them.  

I am reading and checking for different solutions all the time.

My advice is to test the product.

I am monitoring VxRail from vROps.

Our average time for resolution depends on the issue. For example, if I receive a notification, and there is a large latency or the hard disk is filling up too fast, it will depend on the end administrator who is monitoring it.

I rate VMware vROps vRealize Operations an eight out of 10.

Our private data center has been built on VMware technology. We are using vSAN and we use vROps as a monitoring solution to monitor the full stack, from applications to hardware. That includes the servers and Cisco switches.

The solution is deployed on-premises in our private data center.

It enables us to monitor the full software-defined infrastructure from the app level to the hardware level. This is the main benefit for our organization.

When there is an issue at the disk level in vSAN, vROps gives us an alarm that the issue is happening on particular disks. Other solutions cannot give this type of alert for vCenter. Even vCenter cannot give that type of information. That's what makes this feature valuable for me.

The visibility it provides from apps to infrastructure is very good, compared to other monitoring solutions in the market. We have used other solutions, and we are still using them, but for monitoring your VMware infrastructure, vROps is very good.

vROps is user-friendly, but configuration is a little bit hard. It is also hard if you want to customize it for your data center, especially without VMware training. The user interface should be improved so that a new user can easily configure it for his own use.

I have been using VMware vRealize Operations for the last four years.

The stability is good enough to monitor private and hybrid clouds. Even though we are using very few of the features of vROps, it is very good. It is very useful for a cloud provider that is managing large-scale VMware technology for their cloud. It is good monitoring and operations software for them.

It is highly scalable.

We are already in the middle of a project to increase our infrastructure and we have included vROps in that project.

Customer support is good, but the main problem is that VMware support is very costly compared to other organizations' support. When you purchase a VMware product, such as vSphere or vROps, the license is perpetual, but you also have to purchase the support service for a number of years. The support service pricing is very high compared to the license, and compared to competitive vendors.

Before vROps, we were using SolarWinds NPM. The primary reason we switched was that we were looking for a solution that would give in-depth monitoring capabilities for VMware infrastructure.

The initial deployment of vROps was straightforward. We deployed ESXi, vCenter, and then vSAN. After that, we deployed vROps on-premises to monitor our VMware vSAN cluster. There was nothing special or complex about it.

It took four to five days to deploy vROps.

We have three people who are using and managing vROps and we are monitoring about 500 virtual machines with the solution.

We used a third-party integration partner that is certified by VMware. I felt that they were not well-trained on vROps.

The value we get from vROps is fine, but it would be better if the support cost were lower.

We did not look into other solutions because, at that time, we already had our VMware infrastructure. vROps is the best option for monitoring VMware infrastructure.

If your infrastructure is VMware-based, meaning you are using vSphere, vSAN, and vCenter, and if you are a large-scale cloud service provider, you should consider vROps as your monitoring and operations solution.

Our primary use case is to manage our huge VMware infrastructure based on the public and private cloud and dedicated infrastructure. We use it to see if the VM is a good or bad size and to see if we can reduce the cost. We also use it to adjust the memory, and CPU, and to increase the network storage.

The most valuable feature is the ability it has to adjust the efficiency inside the infrastructure.

We do and we don't find this solution to be user-friendly. It's intuitive because in a manner of a few minutes you can see the value. It's complex to manage because there are a lot of options and metrics. It's complex when you want to do something very specific.

I would like to see them implement multi-tenancy on the product itself and the option to manage it in one team. At the moment some of the objects are only available to one user and I'd like for it to be available to the whole team. 

It's quite stable. We've had one or two issues due to storage space used by the solution because there is no specific agent for monitoring the solution from the outbox.

Scalability is quite nice.

We've never had to request support for this solution. 

We didn't use a solution previously to this one. I think it's the best solution on the market in terms of capacity monitoring. I didn't find a similar solution with the same amount of capacities. This solution was the only one that was on the shortlist because the tool is not concurrent to monitoring tools.

The setup was straightforward and easy.

We deployed ourselves and we also provide service to our customers with this tool.

I would rate this solution a nine because I think that the tool is very powerful and we are very happy with the product. I couldn't imagine finding a similar product that would have the same abilities as this one. 

If you're looking into this or a similar solution I would advise you to do VMware's training on it because it's the best training I have had with VMware. I always refer back to the information I got from the training.

We are deploying this solution to monitor our customers' environments. We use it to look at IOPS and the VMs and for monitoring consumption.

This solution has helped improve our organization because we can now monitor our customers' environmental problems as well as our own and give the correct answers as to what the source of a problem is. 

It has also reduced the time it takes to troubleshoot problems and has improved the quality of service for our users.

Monitoring is the most valuable feature for us. When our customers have a problem and we can monitor it in real time or evaluate the history of the problem.

We have found this solution to be user-friendly because it's fairly simple to navigate. We can see if it connects problems with storage, consumption, or other issues.

I rated this solution an eight and not a ten because we work to give a multi-tenant product to our customers and vROps doesn't meet our needs.

The stability is good because we can do an HA environment. 

Scalability works well. We have many customers and have never had any issues with it. 

We got this solution because we knew we needed a monitoring solution. We decided on this specific solution because of its direct integration features.

The initial setup was straightforward. It was a simple deployment. 

We implemented it ourselves. 

Our ROI is that we have been able to reduce the time it takes to look into a problem. 

Cost isn't a problem for us because it's included in our licensing. 

Opsview was another vendor we looked at. We didn't go with it because we liked vROps' use case. It allows us to see simply and graphically what a problem is and we can export a report of the problem for our customer, which is very valuable to us. Opsview gave us some information but we found it to be slower. With vROps, we can monitor every feature and vendor; we can monitor the environment which means we can monitor everything. 

Cost savings isn't a problem for us because we have enough resources with the cloud provider.

If you're looking into vROps and similar solutions, I would recommend vROps because it's a good program.

We use it to monitor our virtual infrastructure for VDI. It is also used in our server infrastructure for basic monitoring or solving issues.

Our organization is a government company which is focused on thinking about other nations and companies.

It can compare hardware to software, and I have all the information in one place.

It is sometimes quite hard to use. If I need details, there is a huge amount of information that I need to review. It isn't a three-click solution.

We would like better integration with other systems (e.g., Zabbix). We would also like to increase our network monitoring in one place.

We haven't had problems with the stability. It is okay.

We are so small. We don't need to scale.

We don't directly use technical support. We have suppliers who help us.

When we are looking for new solutions, we usually ask the vendors. We ask them directly and they present their products.

We didn't do the first setup. Everything was integrated for us, and we just use it.

We use an integrator, who is very good. He has helped us outside the standard hours.

The solution has helped to reduce the time to troubleshoot issues.

I can recommend the solution for VDI.

Our use case is the monitoring of our storage system. 

We had Oracle running on VMware and wanted to have some metrics about the performance. Also, we wanted some metrics and benchmark tools for our applications, which are highly critical and latency sensitive, to integrate into dashboards so we can pinpoint issues and how they are related.

When we were having trouble with our Oracle Database, we could pinpoint the root cause that it was disk-related, i.e., disk misconfiguration. Therefore, in vROps, we could see the problem was related to disks.

It is easy to drill down directly to the root cause of a problem. It goes from network to storage and having access to all the metrics. When you run 100 percent virtual, then everything is in one tool.

I would like more application dashboards to be available.

It's very stable. We have never had issues with it.

It's very scalable. We have never had issues with it.

I have never needed to use their technical support.

We were not using another solution previously. We did not consider anything else before, because nothing else could read our entire VMware stack.

It was straightforward; next, next, and we were finished.

It was cost effective, because it fixed our problems.

We did consider some other vendors, but due to the pricing and features of those products, we skipped them quite quickly.

It creates simple dashboards. Let it run for a couple of weeks, then it collect all the data you need and you can start to play with it. It is easy to use.

Its first versions were a bit less user-friendly. However, in its latest versions, everything is done with the wizard. We just follow the wizard, and not much knowledge is needed to start directly with the product.

We use it for analytics and metrics of the system. We've had it installed for about a year but have really been using it just within the last month. We're still discovering the power behind it and what it can do for us.

It has helped to reduce time to troubleshoot issues and improved quality of service. As far as showing us where the problems are, what's useful is that it gives us suggested solutions to fix them, so that's helpful.

The most valuable features are the health tree and the alerts that tell us what's going on from a glance at the dashboard.

It's definitely stable.

It's scalable. We can add the Management Packs which have helped us. For example, we've added UCS Management Packs and that's been helpful.

We used technical support on a problem we were having when we did an upgrade, and when we had an issue with the integration of Log Insight. Technical support was great.

Definitely utilize any training resources you can find so you understand the product's power and what it can do. Trying to figure it out on your own is not so easy.

It's mostly user-friendly and intuitive. They're improving their dashboards which makes it a lot easier. Sometimes, drilling down and trying to find the exact thing you're looking for can prove challenging at first, but it's getting better.

Regarding cost savings through higher capacity utilization, we haven't seen that so much, but we're running pretty lean. It even tells us that now, so we didn't have a lot of capacity over-use.

I think it's a good product. I'm sure there's room for improvement: integration with some of the other things. I can't really say it's the best product that I've ever seen, but it's doing what we need it to do right now.