VMware Aria Operations Reviews

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I think there's always room to grow.

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

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

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

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

I personally have not yet used technical support.

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

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

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

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

Right now, we’re primarily just using it for monitoring. However, based on a VMworld session I attended, we’re looking at using it for enhancing our efficiency and to guarantee performance; make sure we can use vROps recommendations to relocate workloads based on utilization and so on. That session was interesting because they talked about cross cluster, being able to automate cross-cluster motions. That future ability is pretty good. For the most part, right now, we’re using vROps for just monitoring. We’re just monitoring vCenter right now, but we’re looking at adding all of our hardware UCS.

We’re expanding, but currently, we’re just using vCenter monitoring right now. Even that’s advantageous; just to have that dashboard. We need to do a lot of work to get where we want to go, but the tool is huge. I’m looking forward to that. Not a ton of value yet, but I can see it on the fairly near horizon.

I’m not our monitoring guy. We have a monitoring team and they’re responsible for that piece. I’m responsible for the cloud architecture. I’ve been a little unplugged from that because we’ve just moved multiple data centers. We’ve had a busy year and just implemented vRA and things like that. I need to get my hands a little dirtier this fall and try and get that moving along.

We’d recently done a business transformation. We’re in healthcare. We deliver software-as-a-service for the province of Saskatchewan. Recently, we’ve expanded our business to infrastructure-as-a-service and platform-as-a-service, those kinds of things, and we’re starting to look at consolidation of 15 distinct health regions in the province, all with their own data centers and IT shops. Our, at least my VP’s, vision was to consolidate at least from an infrastructure perspective down to two data centers in the province from thirty.

One of things with that is being able to give your customers some insight into how that environment is behaving; how the machines within their tenancy are behaving. We needed some sort of analytics to be able to show them everything is running fine. They’ll know anyways if it’s not, but when you get up to certain levels, they just want to see some nice graphs or charts or whatever to show that their they’re getting value for their investment.

It’s that piece, just monitoring that multi-tenant environment, that is the primary driver, but I’ve got lots of extra uses for it as we go.

I’d like to see the ability to monitor more stuff we’re actually looking at vROps to pull in data from. I guess there is already a lot of stuff it can capture, but I’m actually pushing to use vROps as our managers’ manager. I’d like to pull data from SCOM, Windows, SQL, Oracle and all those kinds of things, and use vROps as our primary dashboard, as our MOM, basically.

I’m looking for broader support, and also like we talked about in the VMworld session, the ability to use the analytics within vROps to actually trigger events to possibly alleviate performance issues before without requiring manual intervention. Obviously, the further we go along this SDDC journey, the more important it is to automate and not have your guys doing it. vROps could suggest this server is starved for storage. It already knows that. Why do I need to have somebody go in and look and try and find a spot, when vROps already knows, has the analytics to probably find a better spot for it than the tech would, right?

The automation piece will be big for us. Then getting into the cross site, cross cluster discussion is neat because I didn’t even know they were looking at that. There is kind of a future state. It’s already got me rethinking how we build our clusters. We might have some more flexibility with how we build clusters because traditionally; we’ve built clusters around planning for DRS to handle some of that workload movement. Within a cluster, we’ve had to do a fair amount of, I don't know, due diligence to make sure that we had the right workloads in the right spots. DRS being able to look into that cross site, cross cluster is a cool feature. I’m looking forward to that.

I have been using for just several months, six months maybe.

It has been stable so far. We actually have two instances. I have to try and figure out how we’re going to consolidate that. We have an instance for our cloud and then an instance for EUC, for the end-user compute side. I’d like to amalgamate that into one. I’ve got to ask some questions to figure out what the right architecture for that is.

I hope that it is scalable. I haven’t looked too far into it. We’re not a massive shop. In state, we’re about two to three thousand server VMs and probably about 14,000 desktops. It’s large enough. I don’t think I’m too worried about scale. Most of the VMware products we have scale really well. I’m assuming vROps falls inline with that.

Technical support is good so far. Again, we’re just grazing the surface, so we haven’t had much call to leverage support. As with any vendor, it’s the luck of the draw who you get the first tier of support. You just have to know how to escalate correctly. For some of our operational stuff, it’s a journey to get them to learn. Sometimes, you get a resource that maybe doesn’t know to escalate it in time. That’s the case for any vendor; Cisco, BMC, whatever. They might sit on it, and not really know how to solve it, but they also don't want to escalate every ticket in their queue, so you have to force their hand. Sometimes, we don’t do that. When my guys would complain about support, I tell them, Well, it’s kind of a bit on you. If you pressure the vendor to escalate it, then they typically do. Then you get that tier-two, tier-three kind of resource.

I have spoken to Blue Medora about monitoring UCS, SQL, Windows, using Hyperic or whatever they call it now, and those kinds of things.

I recommend it. I think it’s a good choice. I know there are other tools out there. Those people are knocking on my door all the time. I don't know. I’ve had lots of pushback from different IT shops in the province saying, “Well, why do we need to use this tool or that tool? You shouldn't use VMware’s tool because they might be lying to you, or whatever, for monitoring or those kinds of things.”

I’m more of the mindset, Why would I buy a Ferrari and put a Ford engine in it? Why am I going to buy a third party? There is definitely a spot for third party. We use lots of third-party applications. Obviously, VMware is going to have the best insight into how their stuff works. Obviously, they’re going to support all the features within there.

With third-party vendors, maybe that solution works great today, but when the new features in the VMware solution come out, there is a lag. You can't use those features because they don’t support it yet because they have to play catch up. On the other hand, obviously, VMware development teams are going to work together and try and coordinate: We have this new feature. Now, you can leverage it, maybe, into a new feature in vROps. Now, we can leverage it in vRA or however that works.

For us, of course, we’re an ELA customer, so we’re licensed for pretty much everything anyway. For us, my preference is always to use the VMware stack unless it’s not the best solution.

Our primary use case of this solution is for the performance monitoring. It's been performing well.

It has helped our organization a great deal in terms of being able to identify and troubleshoot problems. The time it takes to troubleshoot has been reduced. It has also helped with its capacity planning features.

Various metrics that we have for all the particular performance features, like CPU monitoring, memory, storage and so forth are the most valuable features for us. 

I also find this solution to be intuitive and user-friendly. Their feature set is very good. 

I would like to see them add a little bit more functionality and the ability to create more dashboards.

Stability is good. We haven't had any major issues with it. 

Scalability is pretty good. The fact that we can actually use it to expand on other aspects of it by adding additional packs is really good. 

We have rarely needed to use their technical support. They're pretty good. 

I was involved with one out of two of the setups we did. It wasn't very complex. We had a little bit of trouble in the beginning but nothing was significant enough that prevented us from moving forward. 

When selecting a vendor reliability and ease of setup is something that is very important to us and are the reasons why we proceeded with this solution.

I would rate this solution as an eight and a half. I would tell a colleague who is considering this solution that it's worth investing in. 

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 use it for managing all of our hardware, the ESXi operating system, and associated VM technologies. It performs fine.

It allows us to alternate between data centers in a more efficient format. Instead of having a lot of people spend time doing manual tasks, it allows us to have dashboards and instantly show us any issues that we have, rather than trolling through log files.

The ability to have less IT stuff, spending more time looking at log files. vRealize Operations allows us to monitor everything dynamically.

The solution is intuitive and user-friendly, because I train it. I know the product quite well because I teach people how to use it.

We would like better integration with the cloud because we use a multi-vendor cloud. We use AWS, which is fine, but we also use Azure and Google. We would like better plugins to those other two providers.

We haven't had any issues at all with stability. It took a few months to get it working correctly because a lot of information comes in with it. However, we've managed to fine tune it, and now it works perfectly.

We only have a ten-node cluster, because we do a lot of work with the cloud. So, we have ten servers on-premise. So, scalability is fine for us.

The initial setup is extremely straightforward, as I train the product.

People coming on training courses for the vRealize Suite find the setup extremely straightforward after being on the training course.

It has reduced time to troubleshoot issues. With our customized dashboards, we can target issues and attribute them to the correct team. We have customized dashboards for networking storage and compute. Then, based off the reports that we get back, we can quickly pass them off to the relevant team rather than have to go around in circles and have everybody say, "Not us."

We use SCOM as well. What we like about the vRealize Suite of products is the customability of the product. We can do things ourselves rather than having to rely solely on Management Packs.

It won't work out-of-the-box the way you want it to. As with any product, it will require customization with your organization's environment.

• Capacity management
• Performance management
• Troubleshooting

It helps us reduce resources by indicating that we don't need that much CPU or memory in use. This gets the density of our VMs much higher on our systems.

It helped troubleshooting issues with storms of software data that cost a lot of IO. We could look back regarding why it happen and easily pinpoint it by going through all the reports and data. We would then follow up with the responsible owners of those VMs.

In training data, it predicted that we could reconfigure systems or buy more capacity, when needed.

The most valuable features are capacity management, proactive reports, etc. 

It is intuitive and user-friendly. It is easy to follow and the reporting engine is easy to use.

I would like some training or sessions around self-healing and automation. So, if a problem occurs, we can automatically take action on a problem which is occurring.

At the beginning, the stability was not that good. The latest versions are much better.

The scalability is okay. We have had no problems with it.

The technical support was pretty good when we called once. They can solve issues in no time.

I don't think there were many problems setting it up.

We implemented it ourselves.

If you're using VMware, use the native products that they have because they are great.

The ability to monitor our trending and growth in our environment. It gives us an idea of when we're running out of capacity, how quick our growth is occurring, where it's occurring.

Knowing our environment, being able to properly size and prepare for what the future holds.

Maybe to get a little bit more granular with storage and i-apps.

Also, some of the configuration settings are a little bit overwhelming to try and understand all of the implications and ramifications of what they do, so something not quite too intense to configure initially.

We have no problems with it.

So far it's met our environment very well.

So far I've only had to use it one time and they were very helpful. We did have some storage issues with it. They resolved it within probably one or two phone calls, so I was very happy.

We didn't have very good visibility in our environment at all. The standard C# and web client just wasn't giving us the visibility we needed. vROps did that very well.

Very straightforward.

In choosing a vendor, obviously we have to look at their ability to answer all of our questions, make sure that their solution is in fact going to meet our needs and their tech support later on.

It was real simple, and once you get involved with it, it's just a matter of getting some hands on time and playing with it.