VMware Aria Operations Reviews

We use it for capacity planning, troubleshooting, and monitoring of our environment.

The benefits of the solution are stability, uptime, and awareness of what's going on in our environment. By being aware of issues, potentially even before they happen - for example, we'll see trends and metrics that can tell us that there might be a problem coming in this environment; maybe it's 30 days down the road - lets us get in front of them before they're actual issues or cause an outage or impact to the actual business unit.

We're definitely seeing quicker time to resolution on problems. It's yet to be determined what kind of cost savings we're getting from capacity usage. I know that there are some features that are in the product that probably we're not leveraging yet, but they're there and I know that's something we're probably going to be able to leverage soon.

The most valuable feature is the ability to get a view of our entire environment in a single pane of glass. We're a very large company, so going from one interface to another to troubleshoot an issue, or even just to get capacity information, is time-consuming and not efficient. Being able to go to one place and get that information is very helpful.

With the latest version, it's definitely user-friendly. It has come a long way. Originally, I don't think it was, but here with the latest update, probably the last two updates, they've made it more and more user-friendly. They've streamlined it, made it more efficient, and made it more simple.

Any product is going to have room for improvement. As long as they keep innovating and listening to us, I think that's going to help.

One of the big areas that would help us in the future is to focus on using vROps more as a tool to help us respond to these CVEs and security vulnerabilities that are coming in today's world. We're getting CVEs upon CVEs about security vulnerabilities, whether it's a process, or architecture, or VMware bug. It would be nice to be able to have those come into vROps and help us track them across our environment. Once a vulnerability is established, we as a company have to address that vulnerability as fast as possible. It would be nice if we could integrate that into a vROps dashboard, which sees every host and every VM in the environment. If it was able to flag areas: "Hey, these are left to be remediated, these aren't," those kinds of thing would be helpful.

From a scalability perspective, the nice thing about vROps is it's more of a horizontal scale model. As our workloads increase, as our vCenters and different environments grow, vROps is easy to scale to consume that capacity by just adding another node. That can help. It keeps it from getting bogged down from not having enough resources. We can easily add a node in, it takes the additional load, and keeps up with our growth.

We're a BCS (business critical support) customer with VMware, so we already have a higher level of support. The BCS experience is great. They've been helping us with vROps if we have issues or troubles. No complaints there, it has been really good.

We had a lot of homegrown solutions and different products. We have Splunk, we're using Tableau, different reporting services that were based on gathering our own data, power CLI scripts, going out and individually running things against vCenters, pulling them back in, and then dumping them into something centrally that we could view for capacity. But it really was point-in-time, it wasn't real-time, it wasn't something that could even be predictive for us. We would look at it and say, "Well, that looked different last month so let me go look and see why," and then it was a lot more time-consuming to go about that method. It was more of a manual method.

vROps is a tool that gathers that data every five minutes, or whatever the time duration is that you have set for collections. We're more up to the minute, more quick to respond. I think it's a smarter product than homegrown stuff. That's why we moved away from the homegrown stuff.

When looking to select a vendor, they need to be innovative. They really need to not just answer the need but go above and beyond it. And then cost is a big factor as well.

The initial setup was very straightforward. To pull in an OVA, it was very easy to consume it. It was very easy to scale. There wasn't really much trickiness to setting it up. Do your homework, read through documentation, understand how the product is used with the different types of nodes and how they work. But it was very straightforward.

Cost is an issue on vROps. The Standard edition, for an organization our size, is just not useful at all. However, I like the price point of vROps Standard. But as a company, the Advanced is the minimum version that we can use, because we need the customization, we need a lot of the features that Advanced brings. But the price is substantially higher than Standard. 

It's always been a challenge to try to go in to my leadership and say, "Here's what I want." I've always got to go back and super-justify it and it's not an easy win. Whereas, if the pricing were closer to the Standard model, or maybe even a little bit above that, it's an easier conversation with leadership. But because it really feels like more than double the price, I'm not sure the value, double the money, is there, as an easy-sell to my leadership.

vROps is a ten out of ten. It's a really good product, I'm excited about it, I like using it. It's also one of those products that I like engaging with on a daily basis. It's easy to use, it's kind of fun and insightful to look at all your different environments and be able to get the answers you need. Honestly, it makes my leadership happy when they see the stuff that I generate out of it. That's always a plus too.

We use this product for monitoring, to verify what is and isn't broken within the cloud environment.

The monitoring and verification functionalities were the most useful features.

I was pleasantly surprised that vROps has a plugin for Kubernetes, so it works quite well with that, which was useful for one of our customers.   

The solution also works very well with VMware, but not so well with Hyper-V, and compatibility with KVM was very poor. It also didn't have certain abilities that we liked, like being able to run in a bare-metal environment. 

Monitoring is useful but if the solution can't automate or function without my input, it's a waste of my time. That's where I found out there are some issues with this product, there are elements that are not as intuitive as they could or should be. 
My problem is that I think it stays static too long, it doesn't continue to look at the changes.
I would like to see better remediation, automation, and better connection with specific security pieces. I'm not talking about firewalls. Firewalls are beginning to lose favor in a lot of the environments that I deal with. I need products that give me a zero-trust architecture, and this solution still doesn't provide that. 

We have been using the solution for a little over six years. 

We didn't really have any issues with the stability once we got used to the way changes are rolled out. We had to add security, as the security of the solution isn't sufficient for our needs. 

I think it scales fairly well. We were able to run it around the world which helped tremendously.

The quality of the customer support varied. Sometimes we would get junior staff and our own team knew more about the solution than them. Then we would get escalated and connected with someone who really knew what they were talking about, and they were very good.

The initial setup has gotten a lot better over time. The last one we did, we were able to talk to Google, Azure, and AWS altogether.
Cloud foundation software helped a lot during setup with remediation, prevention, and troubleshooting. It had not always been that way.

I would say vROps gives us 30% faster throughput, faster return on investment or better return on investment, so I consider it a good investment. It's at least 30% if not more, so I'm positive about that.

I would give the solution a three out of five, with one being cheap and five being expensive. There are some elements of the pricing that are good, and some areas where I feel like I'm being charged for something the product can't provide yet.

I would rate this solution a seven out of ten.

If you're going to go full VMware, then the compatibility is there. If you're going to have multiple, different versions of systems, then you could run into some issues. There are other products out there depending on the size of your environment.
We were at the top. We were originally using AWS, which I still don't like because they charge you for everything. I used the multi-cloud and that caused some issues. We carry out a lot of testing, so we look at how well the solution performs with Google, Azure, and AWS. It seems to work better in AWS than most other providers, the problem was that I was trying to make it work with so many different versions.

We provide solutions related to VMware, Docker, and Kubernetes for banking data centers. 

We use this product to monitor virtualization infrastructure and different resources that we use in our project. We implement vROps into data centers that are working together to develop vROps solutions with different interfaces. One of them is Dell EMC Adapter which is added to vROps to monitor and collect various logs related to Dell EMC storage. We also add another plugin to monitor HP.

We host around 1,200 to 1,300 virtual machines. Our data centers have more than 50 physical servers.

Before using vROps, we used SolarWinds and ManageEngine, as well as Cisco NCM, to monitor different resources in our infrastructure. But we established a new project for customers and unified all the monitoring solutions in just one platform, vROps. vROps helps us to predict many issues and problems that we may face in the future. It helps us to optimize many configurations because we have good visibility into resource usage.

Because we can predict many issues and problems, we can solve them and provide options for our customers to change configurations and optimize their environments. We are able to fix problems in advance. That helps us to decrease the amount of downtime in a given month. After using vROps, in the second year we were able to offer our customers a new SLA at 99.97 percent. That has proven to be a great benefit for our company.

It is very efficient. By using vROps we have fixed many problems. In terms of the efficiency in operations, monitoring team members are very satisfied because they have dashboards to monitor specific resources and details.

Once we started using vROps, we were able to change out servers and replace them with new versions because we could detect different problems related to the old resources we were using in our environment. With Cisco NCM, you can't detect these problems. Using vROps enables us to detect problems related to the hardware and the issues that arise from hardware error.

After one year of using vROps, we integrated it with vRealize Log Insight and vCenter. vROps and vRealize Log Insight are integrated very well. The integration helps us to gather a lot of event details sent by Log Insight to vROps. The integration between these two products helps us to go into the detail of events. It helps us to monitor problems and detect issues. Then, it provides recommendations to take action and solve problems directly.

One of the most attractive features in vROps is collecting information, logs, and events and, after that, providing proactive predictions about usage of resources. vROps also offers recommendations. For example, in the next two months we might face problems with CPU usage. vROps predicted and forecasted these issues in advance. That's a very useful feature.

In terms of user-friendliness, vROps provides a unified dashboard and you can easily create different dashboards to measure different resources. The UI is very friendly. Our team members are very satisfied with working vROps in comparison to different solutions like ManageEngine and SolarWinds. vROps is very unified and integrates with different solutions.

As a result of using vROps we have easily been able to reduce a lot of unused virtual machines in our infrastructure.

There is room for improvement in asset management and resource usage.

Around two years ago, we installed and configured a vROps project. I'm responsible, as a team leader and the VMware engineer, for different technologies on VMware, like vSphere, vROps, VMware vRealize Suite, as well as container infrastructure.

Because we need high-availability for our solutions and to ensure that our customers have monitoring solutions available, we established a cluster in vROps. vROp provides you a clustering installation for high-availability and sustainability. We had two data centers and we created two vROps that are synced together as Active-Active. If one version is down, the second one is active and provides monitoring.

Because of sanctions in my country, we don't have direct support. We use a partner. Although we can solve most of the issues within our team, we do use our partner for specific problems or issues that we can't solve.

If you study the guidelines, the setup process is very clear. We didn't have any specific problem installing and implementing vROps in our projects. If you have experience in the installation of vROps, there are no problems.

The deployment took about one month. We studied and reviewed the features and implemented a pilot environment in our company. In terms of the specific plan that we provide to customers, we implement vROps and start a one-month period where it is in a test environment. The day after that we move vROps into the production environment.

We make use of just one license for vROps and we don't need other licenses for things like SolarWinds and Cisco NCM.

I recommend implementing vROps by first setting up a pilot environment. You need to become a master in vROps to make the best use of its features. If you don't have any experience with a lot of the features provided by vROps, you can't easily use them, and you can't understand the difference between vROps and SolarWinds and other products.

So I would recommend studying it in detail. After that, you can make use of it, because vROps is a bit complex.

Its primary use case has been to give us a proper view of what is happening at an infrastructure level. This is why we opted for the product.

We have more than 137 locations across India. We started using it at a central location where our data center is located and it expanding it to locations. 

There is a lot of manual effort involved when drilling down into problems and determining where they are coming from. With this solution, we are able to see where problems are happening quickly and improve turnaround time, which matters to us.

The dashboard: I like that we receive an overview from it of what is happening in our environment.

The solution is somewhat intuitive and very user-friendly. It has interactive sessions which can then be built into reports.

It is quite stable. If you are putting up an infrastructure, it takes about a week to analyze it, then it starts giving you a results.

It is quite scalable. We have started using it in one location, then sending to another and another. Right now, we have 11 locations.

The technical support is great. 

For example, we opened a case because we were not sure on the best practices on how to put this up this solution, and the tech support helped us.

We did not previously use another solution. This is the first solution that we have used of its kind.

While the initial setup was somewhat straightforward, there is some complexity. Going forward, I would like there to be more clarity in the process. Because to complete the setup process, our team had to open up a case with the technical support, and they had to guide us through the process.

The solution helped us to reduce time to troubleshoot issues, improved our quality of service to our users, and it provides cost savings for high capacity utilization. Our manpower costs have been reduced due to the automation in conjunction with the usage of the dashboard.

As we continue to implement it across multiple environments, it reduces costs as well.

I always recommend this solution.

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor:

• Brand name
• The vendor's skill set
• The technical support.

One of the things I really liked was being able to use the projects feature, which lets me say that I know in August or September or October, I'm going to need to deploy 20 more VMs on a particular cluster. Am I going to have the capacity for that project? I can actually see if that's going to be okay. Then I can sit there and say, if it's not okay, then when would I add hosts? At what point would that make it okay? Basically, what you project out, it provides all that information at great detail. It's pretty good.

I've been at my company for seven months, and there's no monitoring. They have no monitoring. That's going to be the big thing. Dashboards can be set in front of operational people and then we'll actually be able to respond both proactively for issues such as capacity, and reactively for issues such as, we just filled up a drive, as we build it out.

We also use the logging site, which basically does correlation of logs from hosts. All that's integrated together, so if you have a problem, all of a sudden, you're able to see that maybe the fact that this LUN had a problem and this array had this problem. You start realizing that they're all related because of the way it ties them together. Very specifically for us, when you're not getting phone calls because a drive filled up on a VM inside it, That would be the big thing, right there, guaranteed. That's the one that bites them more than anything.

We'll probably not save on storage. Storage is cheap, but we're going to see if we can right-size, because I've heard mentioned a couple times before, right-sizing isn't a technical problem, it's a political/business problem or a management problem. Going back and getting stuff back after you've given it away in a VM is very difficult. That's where I'm hopeful. Probably utilize less anything about storage, but more about CPU and RAM.

We have not used the performance management features yet, but that'll be more about getting VMs balanced correctly across clusters, that sort of thing, but not yet. We typically don't over-provision.

We're planning on using more of it for several different reasons. We want to do lifecycle management of some of our hosts. We need the capacity planning features, and maybe most important - and the first thing that we're going to do - is the end-point management that's now part of it but used to be separate. It used to be Hyperic. We used to have Hyperic as a separate purchased product and now part of it is end-point management. We'll use that as our monitoring platform.

It is a beast to deal with. To understand it, really takes effort. Several of us have been to a week of VMware classes, and that didn't even scratch the surface. There's so much there. I suppose if there was a nice get-started guide, that’d be an improvement.

I heard them talking about this in a VMworld session. They've got wizards that can be rerun, so you can go back and say, "I really want to change what I did before in terms of my general configuration." That's good. It is complex. I just don't know how you make it simpler. I don't know because it's a complex idea.

Ideally, it'd be nice if it was simpler.

We're running 6.2; 6.3 is out and 7, I guess, just came out. The worst case for us has been, a couple times, we've had to restart it. Otherwise, it’s been pretty stable. It's all virtual appliances, so that's nice.

Scalability's pretty good. I don't remember the limits, but basically, you just start adding what they call data analytics nodes, and you just start scaling out horizontally.

We're way under-speced right now. In other words, we need more data analytics and we're reporting on about six million metrics right now, so once we point all the end point management features back to it, we'll have to do something about it. Plus, we have remote collectors.

We're still going through a statement of work and professional services, so we've deployed it and have started to use it, but we're basically re-engaging with VMware, so we haven't really had to contact technical support.

I did not previously use a different solution. We relied on people, the users. We’d see an outage because a user called, and then say, "Let's go fix it." That's exactly how it was being dealt with.

Initial setup is pretty easy.

A lot of the decision to go with product and the vendor went on before or right when I was hired. They were very close to going with Foglight, very close. They basically were ready to sign and VMware showed up and said, "Whoa, you didn't even look at this." During my interviews, I even encouraged using VMware. I said, "Look, it's got some good stuff." I'd used version 5.8 before a little bit at a previous employer, and they basically looked at it again. It's really the thing to go with if you're using vSphere; it's just what you're going to do.

I don't think there's anything that's deserves a perfect rating. There's just not, so I'm a little skeptical of that. I could give it a higher rating after I've had a chance to really use it, but right now, we just have not been able to really engage with VMware. I'm probably rating VMware more than I'm rating the product, so the complexity part kind of hurts right now.

I think you've got to go and look at it first. If it just doesn't look like it's going to do what you want it to, then you can look at other places, but you've got to at least talk to them about it, because it's VMware. It does what it's supposed to do. It's geared for this environment and it can also manage and monitor the physical stuff. For me, that's my suggestion.

I use the solution since I am in an industry associated with training where I train the customers on products, like VMware Horizon and VMware vSAN. I also take care of areas like cloud management and automation, along with vRealize Operations Manager (vROps) and VMware Avi Load Balancer.

VMware Aria Operations is a good monitoring tool, as it gives customers a lot of visibility into the VMware environment. It is a good tool for reporting, optimizing, collecting history, and generating good dashboards. Overall, it's a good solution.

Capacity planning and workload optimization are good areas in the tool. Dashboard has good capability.

I don't see any weaknesses in the solution because the customers don't ask for it. I don't think I have seen any customers saying that they didn't find a particular component or they didn't miss out on any component. I think it's a good tool overall. I have seen a lot of improvement, and a lot of metrics are being reported, especially the super metrics that the customer builds. I find it quite handy. Overall, I think I have no complaints. I have not seen many complaints from the customers.

There is always room for improvement in the tool, such as adding more metrics or dashboards and making workflows easy. The tool should have an easy workflow with some guided steps to make it simpler from the customer's perspective.

In the future, I think AI will be the big story in the coming days, so I think that may be embedded as part of the tool or maybe something to open the deeper product in terms of integrations, depending on the ecosystem and how the customers work and how they report. Depending on the vast ecosystem, how the customers have the different applications moving around, and maybe a more application-centric approach model could be some improvements in the tool.

I have been using VMware for ten years. I have four to five years of experience with VMware Aria Operations. My company is a training partner for VMware.

I think users generally do not complain a lot about it, but I don't know because now VMware has been taken over by Broadcom, so I don't know how the support works. I think, generally, the users have some complaints now that support has gone bad over a period of time. Previously, the support was far more efficient.

I have not previously worked with VMware Aria Operations. When it comes to monitoring tools, I have not used any products. Long back, I delivered training for Microsoft System Center Operations Manager.

I have no idea of the tool's pricing, so I absolutely have no idea because I am just in training. I don't deal with anything related to pricing.

I don't know how to use the analytics capabilities. I know the tool does a lot of analysis. It generates a lot of reports, and then I think users primarily use it for capacity planning and performance optimization.

The customers are using it to generate dashboards and intuitively look into the VMware environment, the virtual machines, and they do application monitoring. And I want to do more on the performance optimization also. So at times, they see a lot of wastage on the resources. So these are the challenges that they're trying to address.

In terms of how the tool aids our company's customers with AI-driven decision-making, it is an area that we have not touched as of now lately, but I am not too aware of that side of the story or how the customers would be impacted or would be using that.

I recommend the tool to others.

I absolutely have no control over what companies use the tool because I have customers who generally come in for the training. They either already have the tool or are already in the implementation phase. When it comes to the recommendation side of the story, we don't deal with that angle.

I rate the tool an eight out of ten.

I use the solution in my company for the virtualization purpose. Basically, the server virtualization is the main purpose. Other purposes are for the cloud part, which is the private cloud. My company has a local telco customer in Pakistan who works on public cloud infrastructure, and they also have VMware Cloud Director product deployed in their environment.

The most valuable feature of the solution revolves around vRealize Operations, which is a good tool. The product is highly reliable, and it is easy to deploy and manage.

There are some challenges with the tool right now after Broadcom's acquisition.

The major challenges associated with the product stem from the fact that after Broadcom's acquisition of VMware, all partners are no longer VMware partners. One has to reapply for Broadcom's partnership, which is a very time-consuming process. Broadcom seems to be confused since it does not have the exact partner strategies that a product needs to have in place. Broadcom does not provide a good pricing mechanism, and it also has some other issues in areas like distribution. Previously, VMware used to use Aptec, an Ingram Micro company. Broadcom has some issues with Aptec, so currently, it does not have a deal with Aptec, and everything is messed up. Broadcom does not have a proper distribution mechanism, so we have delays in getting codes and all that. After so many reminders, once we get the codes, things are still very time-consuming, and the prices are still not good. My colleagues who work with VMware products were opening support cases on VMware's portal, which has now become Broadcom's portal, which does not have enough information like VMware's portal. Although Broadcom has been trying to integrate all of it with its own portal while also attempting the existing VMware portal with the Broadcom portal, the migration does not seem to be successful. Broadcom has missed out on a lot of data, which means that previous service tickets that were generated under VMware won't have any records. You cannot use a learning mechanism from existing information, which makes it a time-consuming process. We have to go back to the existing information from VMware to figure out what the solution is for a problem. With the acquisition of Vmware by Broadcom, we have to do all things from scratch, and all such things are very painful, and customers, partners, and our company feel troubled. Everyone is trying to see how to get rid of the vendor. We are just trying to find an alternate product.

The pricing mechanism is not available here. There are some distribution issues, and there is not enough information on the portal. The migration process from VMware to Broadcom actually messes up a lot of data.

I believe that the scalability area of the product has scope for improvement, and I say this based on the feedback received from my team.

I have been using VMware Aria Operations for ten years or more. My company has a partnership with VMware. My company is a customer of VMware.

Stability-wise, I rate the solution a ten out of ten.

I don't think that the product has any mechanism in the area of analytics.

I rate the tool a ten out of ten.

I rate the technical support a ten out of ten.

Positive

The product's initial setup phase was easy.

The time required to deploy the product is something that varies from one customer's environment to another customer's environment or site. I can say that the product is not a single table that can cure everything.

The solution is easy to maintain.

For a small environment, only one person is required to maintain the product. If the size of the cluster is big, then a few people are required to maintain the product.

I have experienced an ROI from the use of the solution, but the prices are still not much economical.

If one is low price and ten is high price, I rate the product price a ten.

I don't think that the product has any mechanism in the area of analytics.

I rate the tool a ten out of ten.

Our customers use the solution to monitor the health of the cloud platform and ensure everything is okay.

Heat maps are valuable. The alerting feature has been the most beneficial in managing virtualized environments.

The solution must provide better training options to help us make the most of the tool. The learning curve is fairly high. It's a deceptively easy product when we first look at it, but it has tremendous depth. There's a lot to it.

I have been using the solution for five years.

The tool is stable.

The tool is scalable. We use a lot of different installations of the product. Our customers are small, medium, and large enterprises.

The support is good. We often wonder whether the support team will meet the SLAs. I'm very reluctant to make all of our support issues P1. VMware is reasonably good at fixing problems. They probably don't have enough qualified engineers in Aria Operations’ support. When you get them on the phone, they are very knowledgeable.

Positive

We used Turbonomic. We do not use it anymore because it isn’t as useful. It didn't have all the features that we needed in an MSP solution.

The solution is easy to deploy. We have a lot of configuration, so it takes a lot longer. However, the basic installation takes 20 to 30 minutes. One engineer is more than enough to deploy the tool. It is reasonably easy to maintain the product.

The return on investment is reasonable. However, the features we would most want from an MSP perspective are those we can't afford because we can't pass on the costs to the customers. We will have an issue if we need more hosts and storage. Our customers cannot afford it.

Reducing the cost would be the most beneficial. The product is too expensive to implement. We can't afford the extra features because it's simply too expensive.

We are cloud providers. We use the solution as a part of our support for the customers. We should be able to model our requirements and purchase in advance. Modeling would be very useful if our platform is growing. If a customer has a particular amount of CPU, storage, and memory requirements, we'd like to model it and get ahead of the storage availability and CPU memory availability issues. We could also model the upgrades when there is a need for maintenance. Such modeling is very useful to an MSP. Overall, I rate the product an eight out of ten.