VMware Aria Operations Reviews

Because we're only using the foundation version, it's really nice to be able to have the one spot to look at all the details over the last six hours, troubleshooting, tagging on the performance statistics together.

We typically dive into it for troubleshooting when our customers complain of performance issues. It really helps by showing a little bit better-detailed report of how high latency is, storage and networking.

Because we're using the free version, it's nice that we can show our management team that, hey, it is a useful feature, so maybe we need to invest in a better monitoring tool for these solutions.

t also helps some of my newer technicians understand how the different components of a vSphere infrastructure actually work, or tied together a little bit.

I'd like a little bit more usability out of the foundation level, because our customers say it's really small. So it's hard to justify going up to that next level.

One of the biggest areas with room for improvement is more automated reports, so I don't have to send technicians in to get them.

I haven't had any stability issues at all.

Our problem is we're a management solution provider for multiple customers. All our sites are very distributed and have their own vCenters. So the problem is that I have no single console to view all of our environments in a singular spot. Each site gets their own vROps or vCOPS. Then we have to go into each one and review it as needed.

We do not really use technical support. We don't have a lot of need to go to technical support for the monitoring solution.

Initial setup was really straightforward because we just use the virtual appliance deployment.

We use this solution because I need a way to show my customers what we're doing in order to justify what they're paying for support.

I haven't had a chance yet to look at any other vendors, so far.

With the foundation version being included with vSphere software, it doesn't hurt to have it in there. So usually at least deploy that because then, if you upgrade, all that data comes with it.

If I was using the standard version with all the additional features, I might have rated it a little bit higher.

The most valuable feature of the product is the visibility into the infrastructure and user experience of the customer's network. It shows detailed metrics that are otherwise very difficult to collect on your own. You can pull up the latency between your storage arrays, your CPU, contention that you would have between there, and RAM utilization based on host, based on VM, and based on application cluster.

It allows them to remedy problems much quicker in their environments, get that continuous health and improvement; a continuous improvement process.

We have used it to identify problems that avoids outages or shortens outage time, and for performance and capacity management.

I would like to see a rewrite of the database; a rewrite of the underlying supporting infrastructure.

It should be able to capture historical in-guest metrics for VDI. Currently, it has a limited set of data that it can keep over time, which is challenging when trying to support an organization long-term.

I’m not as comfortable with regard to stability. Some of the limitations of the database concern me. It is able to accept third-party data, but limits the amount it can take, in order to keep performance up. VMware actually limits their partners on what data they want them to send, as well as limit some of the information the partners collect because it'll overrun the schema. There are some architectural changes that must be made that will take time and resources.

Again, I have concerns regarding the underlying database architecture.
I have not experienced slowness.

Personally, I have not used technical support. Our customers do though.

We were previously using multiple tools, so this product collapsed a lot of tools into a singular platform to view all the information.

We also use LogicMonitor, and there are a couple of others out there that we're using right now.

Validate your environment in terms of how large you plan to grow, and ensure that the environment is going to give you what you need.

The most valuable feature is probably the analysis, the capacity remaining, what is going on inside of the clusters and with the virtual machines, so you can see the capacity planning. You can tell if something needs CPU, you can tell if it needs memory, and whether it's based on actual demand. I personally like that feature very much. I'm responsible for making sure we have capacity.

It's definitely improved the way that we buy hardware, for sure. Before, you just see a cluster look strange; we didn't know. The differences between allocation and demand has really helped us be much more efficient in the way we buy hardware and how we run our clusters.

vROps has definitely helped us avoid outages, in the sense of not overloading our clusters, and running them into the ground. We just really started setting up the alerting and going through that. We found we had some data stores that kept running out of space, and no one was really keeping an eye on that. We had the native VMware monitoring, but that was just going to some person's mailbox. We set that up. That's been pretty good so far. Mostly, I feel like we're just scratching the surface of what this tool does.

It has also been a huge help with capacity management and with performance management. We've just implemented some of the automation. We have things set up so that if a VM is screaming for CPU capacity, or memory capacity, it is automatically added in. That, so far, has been great. We're still testing it out, but it's going to be great, I think.

It hasn’t helped us save that much on storage. We eat storage like nobody's business. Storage is one reason why I recently attended VMworld. I wanted to look a lot into the virtual SAN features.

I would like it to be a little bit easier to do some things to make dashboards, or it might just be my ignorance of the product. I feel like I know a lot, but there's so much more. I would like more wizards to be able to do some of the simpler things, and to try and make it speed up. I'm looking forward to it. We're going to start installing some of the plug-ins and doing some other monitoring. I would like this tool to take over all of our monitoring. We have SiteScope, we have Nagios; we have all of these things.

Another thing I would like is the ability to see inside Linux guest OS without Attunity or something like that, or the ingenuity that you need to have with that.

The stability's good. I find it to be a little chuggish sometimes; it can be very slow. Other than that, we've never had a problem with it being unstable or going down. It just gets really slow sometimes.

We haven't really tried to scale yet. We might not be using it in the best way. We have a bunch of vCenters; so a bunch of different vROps instances. Instead of scaling out, we tend to build new data centers, but so far, it seems like it's a powerful tool.

We don't use technical support for it. We use our TAM at times to tell us how to do things, because you really need a college degree to run vROps. So far, we haven't had to open any support at all for vROps, specifically. Lots for VMware, but not vROps.

We were just using the native tools that come with VMware; basically, the reports in there. We looked at some other solutions. Honestly, vROps used to be something else, and I found that to be a crappy monitoring tool, but when we started implementing this, when they came out with the modern day version of vROps, it was just great. I think it came in one of our deals, so we implemented it. We said, “Oh hey, this is awesome.”

Setting up the infrastructure behind it was a little bit challenging, trying to figure out what we needed for horsepower. It wasn't overly complex to set up. Again, we had a TAM at the time, and he was great. He just worked with us through the whole thing. The implementation of it went really well.

There was another vendor on our short list, but I don't remember their name. I had someone come in and do a demo of some kind of VMware monitoring tool.

When selecting a vendor like VMware, my most important criteria is going to be, how good is the support? Obviously, cost comes into play. We strongly consider what the Gartner Group says; where the vendor appears in the Magic Quadrant; where they are in the market.

Definitely take a look at it. Go to training, for sure.

I find it to be a very powerful tool. There's a lot of information. I like the way that it's set up. I like the little videos that are inside, so when you're trying to figure out what you're doing. It's very easy to try and navigate. There's a lot to learn, but I feel like it's not overwhelming. You can take a piece at a time, and build on it. It's a great tool so far.

The most valuable feature I see is how it dynamically figures out the environment. It's not using straight baselines. You can configure the baselines, of course, but you can automatically sample the network over time and figure out the environment, figure out what's wrong, bad, etc.

There is something I haven't seen yet or maybe I just don't know a way of doing it. We can do some automation deploying DOVF, but it'll be even nicer if we can do automation for getting initially configured. I deploy a lot, so ways for me to automate deployment would be helpful.

Some of our clients use VM tags a lot, and another major improvement would be if we could dynamically create groups and policies in vROps that match the VM tags. If we could say something like, "Auto-import these 10 tags. Auto-create the groups of these 10 tags," that'd be amazing, because right now it's about five or six steps to create a tag for each one. It would be great if it could create a group for every single tag automatically for tag collection – I forget the correct term.

I’ve been using it for about a year and a half.

Probably the only downtime I've seen is when it runs out of hard drive space. When I worked at a previous company, we had a really large environment and we routinely ran our disk space. We got the alerts but didn't always get to them in time by the time it ran out of space.

Previously we had four large nodes and a non-HA scenario; we were capturing around 20 vCenters and close to 10,000 VM's, so it definitely scales. It's gotten even more scalable now.

I haven't had to call support for vROps before. I have called support for other issues with VMWare, and it's been hit or miss.

Initial setup was very straightforward, very easy. I wish all the other VMWare products scaled out and were deployed and configured as easy.

If someone was to come and ask for my advice on the product, I’d definitely recommend it, for sure. I'd describe what some of the benefits are, and I would do that with all clients. We'd deploy a trial and say, "Let it scan your network for 30 days, and it's going to come up and show you what's wrong." Whenever I do that, it's always able to find things that the client doesn't know about. They really like that.

When I decide to work with certain vendors, I look at what's the best solution for the target. For example, we're a big Cisco partner, so we do a lot of Cisco business. We don't do very much of their firewall business because Palo Alto has a much better firewall. At the end of the day, we choose what the best product is for the client. Typically, that's the main thing we look at; what's the best product. For how we choose the best product: performance, availability, features.

Personally, I steer clear of any product that uses a Java interface, but that's just my preference.

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 for our many VMware infrastructures. It is mainly for IT operations because we're processing a lot of information. vROps is good for us for reporting and for monitoring hosts and VMs.

The most valuable feature would be the reporting because if the frame or something is not syncing or we have an issue it will report it to us and give us a warning.

I wouldn't say that this solution is user-friendly. You need to know a lot of tricks to know how to use it. It's quite buggy and quite slow when it comes to loading.

They should improve on the speed, first of all, because it is slow to load and then you can't use it at all and you need to keep refreshing the browser. They can also improve the GUI, like the placement, some buttons here and there. In short, they should make it simple.

Stability isn't bad. Not perfect but not bad. 

Their technical support is good. I am happy with them at the moment. 

Overall, the initial setup was straightforward. There are many ways to do this life cycle. We have many different views.

I would rate this solution an eight. It serves its purpose but it has room for improvement. For example, vCenter has Flash version and HTML5. HTML5 is really, really good. It's fast and good. If they can make it simple like this it would be perfect. 

We use it for various operations to monitor and have some visibility over the platform.

All our capacity management and capacity planning processes are based on vROps. Without this tool, we are unable to predict what we need, at what time we need to purchase new hardware, whether we should upgrade, etc.

The reports about usability, the free and available space, and capacity on the platform. These reports are the best that we have.

It can be more intuitive and user-friendly. We would like some artificial intelligence behind it to predict, instead of what we do now which is configuring vROps is to show what you have.

We would like easier customer reporting, because to do customer reports, we have to do a lot of programming.

The stability is superb.

We chose VMware because of its scalability. If you need to grow and scale, there is no solution on the market like vROps.

We have used techncial support several times, but not for errors. We haven't needed support for vROps though, which is a pretty easy and straightforward product. We have been a VMware customer for over ten years, so we have contacted them for other products. 

For many years, we used an outsourced monitoring solution, which was an HPE platform. However, it was basically useless. So, after five years of fighting, they finally gave us the green light to go for something which was built for a virtualization environment.

The initial setup is easy.

We were one of the first in our country to implemented these technologies. From time to time, in special cases, we use our expertise. Currently, we are handling 90 percent internally.

We evaluated several other vendors. However, at the price VMware offered us, there was no reason to chose anyone else.

It speeds up troubleshooting. Overall, we can see what is happening on our platform. On the other hand, the VMware platform is so stable that there is nothing to maintain.

We use it to monitor our VMware infrastructure.

It's very useful in making sure everything stays up and running at optimal performance. It's a matter of not having to continually monitor it by opening VMware and vCenter and looking at it. You can actually set it up to alert you if there's any problem. That's the biggest benefit.

The most valuable feature is the way you can look at your virtual machine and see if it's using too many resources or not enough, and you can add resources to it if you need to, or take some away to save on them.

From an IT department perspective, it does help in reducing the time to troubleshoot issues and in providing cost savings through higher capacity utilization.

It's mostly stable. There are a few glitches with it, but no downtime.

It's scalable.

I feel that I was better able to troubleshoot it myself by using Google than by using the tech support.

Before, we were just using basic VMware with no vCenter. We bought into the whole vSphere, and it came with the vROps.

The setup was fairly straightforward. There's a little bit of a learning curve to use it, but once you get it, it's pretty easy to use.

I wouldn't really call it ROI. It's more just a valuable tool for monitoring. It came with the package we bought for VMware.

I don't really know of any alternative solutions.

It's definitely worth using.