VMware Aria Operations Reviews

The performance analytics, when we are troubleshooting performance issues. It's good to have insight into special metrics like CPU ready time, latency, network utilization. Otherwise, you're kind of like shooting in the dark, guessing what the problem could be.

From a conservative aspect, we can use the data to, for example, for purchase decisions. If someone asks for something and they are not using it, we're taking it back. So from a full-cost perspective or a show-back perspective, we are able to use that data and to say to application teams, "You are spec'd out, way over-provisioned." We're not seeing that so, for the business we are able to reduce cost by purchasing hardware because that data is showing us what needs to be and where it should be. So if application X is over-provisioned but application Y needs the utilization, we can shift those resources.

My number one request personally would be self-healing. So if there is an issue with the appliance, we should alerted and it should be clear as day. When you log in you get all these dashboards, everything looks really cool. But those dashboards don't do us any good if the health of the appliance is not 100%. So, if there are health issues with it, or it's not collecting data, it should self-heal. Or if the data is filling up on the disk, we need to know that and be able to click a button and say, "Do something about it," or "Give us step by step instructions on what to do to add a disk."

I think they could also work on the infrastructure a little bit.

It's highly customizable but it's hard to learn it. You have to be in there every day to really get the best use out of it. The nature of our organization is that my team kind is in charge of it but it really shouldn't be my team. It should be a monitoring performance type of team or operations team that owns it so that they can put the time in and create the proper dashboards. At the end of the day, they are going to be looking at those dashboards, not us.

So the ease of use: If you're not a vROps guy from the beginning, it's a high learning curve. It comes out of the box with all these settings, that is where training comes in. I know they offer courses for that. But I think the solution should be more natural in getting to know it.

I have some worries stability. Initially it was slow, so we ended up adding resources to it because the environment grows. That solved it. I'm not a big fan of the master data model that it has, so when we have failures, it's not always clear if the collectors are up.

You have to keep an eye on the actual appliances. If you're scaling higher, you're going to have to add add resources to the appliances themselves. Otherwise they slow down.

Their VMware technical support is always pretty good. In our specific case, we had a special issue that they couldn't resolve. Overall I would say it is good, when you get a hold of them.

We just open a ticket up on the web, we set the severity, and then they will work with us from there. They make it really easy to open them. I'll do my best to troubleshoot, but I only have so much time in the day. At the end of the day, I'm just going to open a support case and they'll help me directly.

We pay for support so, the business wants us to use it, take advantage. They look at how many support cases we open. Otherwise they might say, "Hey, you guys don't open up support cases. We're paying."

No. We just had the foresight to know we needed a solution like this because server sprawl is very concerning to me, personally. I don't want to have a whole bunch of hosts out there that I don't really need, because the bigger you get the harder it is to maintain it.

At the time, the other one was Turbonomic, but they are a little higher-end. We had to "sell" it to the business. vROps is not cheap either. We convinced the organization that it is in their best interest. And they followed suit.

There are different things to look for when choosing a vendor. From an engineering standpoint, it's the administration. From an organizational standpoint, it could be cost. So it has to come in between those and it has to be a stable product as well. Those three factors.

As engineers, we're the decision influencers but at the end of the day we are not cutting the check for the organization. So, we have to do our job to sell it to the organization if we think it should be recommended. They have to have total buy-in.

I think the decision depends on your server infrastructure. If you're hyper converged, your solution may already have those analytics built in to it. So first check if your infrastructure or server provider already has that. A Nutanix may have that. If you are a traditional shop with blade or rack and you know you don't have it then there's really no competition besides Turbonomic.

We've been using it mostly with capacity management and, especially, with decommissioning workloads that weren't necessarily used properly or sized properly when built. Thus, we've been able to decommission probably 600 servers over the last two years that either had been used for a short time and nobody ever told us that we could decommission them or were never used in the first place after being built.

Efficiency has been the big thing. Being able to cut down those unused workloads has freed up capacity and prevented us from having to purchase more hardware which we don't actually need.

Price could be cheaper. I would like it to be able to project into vCenter the information that we're seeing inside of vROps. It'd be nice if we didn't always have to go into the vROps webpage in order to see the more in-depth info. Obviously pushing that into vCenter comes with performance issues with the vCenter web, so I understand why it's not always been there but it would be nice.

Pretty good. We've had a couple of issues with management plugins causing some small outages with the vROps appliance, but other than that, it's been pretty stable for us.

I haven't had any problems with it.

I haven't used it for vROps.

I was involved in the initial setup. Originally, it was pretty rough. We first put it in about four years ago and it wasn't terribly intuitive at the time. Updates, especially recently, have been pretty straightforward.

In-house.

We invested in a new solution because we have issues with people asking for things and not necessarily using them, or people getting distracted by other problems that come down from upper management. The push towards cleaning up some of that mess was a big part of it. It also gave us the ability to get more in-depth into how workloads were performing and being able to identify where we were having issues before the app consumers and users were seeing major issues. This was something we really wanted to push towards.

If someone is researching this solution: Get an expert in. It is such a big solution that if you walk into it not knowing what you're doing and don't have anybody to lead you along, this is what will happen:

1. You're going to look at it.
2. You're going to buy it.
3. You're going to install it.
4. You're going to look around and see so much information.
5. You're going to have no idea what to do with it.

Know what you want to do with it and make sure it's going to fit that. If you get the chance, talk to other companies that use it or use similar products. Just kind of get an idea of how well it works for them and what pitfalls to avoid with it.

The capacity planning is probably the biggest thing that I use and then I guess the monitoring alerting system and performance troubleshooting. Those are the top three.

It helps with troubleshooting the performance of different systems when customers complain or they say there's an issue. It helps us to narrow down and drill into seeing what's the root cause of the issue. It kind of gets in a good vicinity of that.

It has not helped us save on storage at all, and it has not helped us avoid outages, yet.

It's helped me plan capacity so that I'm always ahead of the curve. I'm actually deploying out systems and not delaying projects, because I have the insight of what resources that I'm short on or what resources I'm not short on. It's helped in that way. For capacity, that's been the biggest thing.

There are a lot more improvements that need to be done with the product. They've advanced from the last version, but there are many more things that should be there, and they're not. And they seem to be working on it, but until they get those things done, and I guess reduce the complexity of getting the system actually set up. As far as the initial setup, it is extremely easy, but then to configure and tailor it for your environment is very complex. Until they streamline that, I couldn't rate it any higher.

Until this week, it was very stable, but in the last week and a half, we've had some issues and we have a ticket open with VMware now to troubleshoot why there's an issue with it. And it's just random, that's the complaint I have about it. There's no way to actually troubleshoot or have insight when the product starts to go bad, when the system itself goes bad. Outside that, when it works, it works very well. But when it stops working, it's just all of a sudden. It's abrupt and there's no indication of why.

I'm not extremely large yet, and it has scaled fairly well. I've heard of other customers having to deploy many instances of it because of the global reach of their environment, or sometimes just the size of it. For me, I'd say it scales very well.

VMware actually had to make some changes because of us, because when we deployed it, we found some bugs in it. I worked with the product developers and engineers that developed the product to help resolve that, get the proper sizing, and get it to where it's scaled out to support our environment.

Technical support has been very good. When I escalated up, they got me in touch with the people who actually write it and develop it directly, so I'm on with them at 1:00 or 2:00 in the morning on a Friday night/Saturday morning and so, they are very good. They're very helpful, they did the best to get in and find out what my issues were and get it resolved.

I've been using vROps since before VMware bought them. I knew of Integron before, when EMC bought them, and then transferred it over to VMware. I have used VMTurbo, but I like vROps much better. vROps has more in-depth analytics and things in it, and the capacity portion of it is much better. There's only one or two things that VMTurbo might do just as well as vROps but, overall, I like to have all of my solutions in one single pane of glass, and that's what vROps provides me.

I did the initial build. The setup was extremely easy, I feel. The original documentation about sizing was incorrect. That's why the system failed after I got it set up initially. Outside of that, the setup was extremely easy.

Support is going to be the number one criteria when selecting a vendor like VMware for me because on day two, after I get it set up and the vendor is gone, I want to know what type of support I'm going to have going forward when issues arise and when it's in real-world activity.

If someone asks me for advice, I'll say, Do your homework for one, engage their TAM, their technical team, to help them size it properly and make sure that for what they're going to use it, they're actually scaling it and setting up a way to accomplish that. Also, get involved with the community, go online. There are so many other resources out there: VMware employees that actually have blogs, and plugins. They just make your life much easier.

For me, since I have a background in the network engineering discipline, the most valuable feature is probably the content modules that come along with the software program, in regards to the Juniper and the SolarWinds plugins for it.

It gives us added visibility on our environment on a real-time basis.

I'd probably like to see a little bit more detail when you go through the drill-down menus, in regards to stats, and maybe the way the data is arranged could be a little bit more cosmetically appealing.

Also, compared to other software that I've used, it could be a little bit more streamlined in regards to the user interface, and the granularity of the data it provides could be increased a little bit more.

As far as stability, it's pretty good.

We haven't had any problem with scaling it.

I personally haven't used technical support. My fellow engineer has, and I don't think he's had many problems dealing with technical support in regards to vROps.

We did not previously use a different solution. We were heavily invested in VMware technologies, so it only made sense for us to go with something that was in line from that particular vendor, VMware, to properly monitor the environment.

There were no other vendors on your shortlist at the time. We weren't looking at anything else, as far as I know.

If they're heavily invested in the vSphere product line, vROps is definitely a product they can't go without.

The most important aspect in regards to selecting a vendor like VMware would basically be the solutions that they provide, whether or not if they actually work, if it can be adopted successfully.

The faults and alerts features are the most valuable features of the product. That helps us a lot if we're looking at any VMs that might be having issues, something we need to address immediately. We like the over-size, under-size reporting too. It'll tell us if one of our servers needs more memory or CPU.

Right now, we're not using it too much as a proactive tool; it's more of a reactive thing, so it helps us pinpoint any faults when a user calls and has issues and helps us try to figure out what might be causing that issue. It helps us. It's like another troubleshooting tool that we can use.

The capacity management is helpful. It helps us. A lot of our developers and apps people will complain and say, "I need a lot more resources." I can show them with the reporting that you're barely touching the server, so that helps us. If we're running out of resources, we could also run reports and see if we need to add more hosts or whatever we need. It does help a little bit.

vROps has not really helped us avoid outages or shorten outage time. We also use other monitoring tools that, for some of the warnings, say the same thing as vROps. It's good that we know that, but not really any big outages of anything such as application or server outages but we have other tools that would tell us that too.

I don't know about room for improvement. Maybe have it be a little bit more user friendly because even though I know where to go to change certain thresholds and everything, my co-workers - who don't really work on it - they just log in, look at the color, is it green or red, and that's about it. It's pretty simple to use right now, but maybe because I haven't had time to look at it. Trying to get all of the features configured right for our company could be easier. I don't know if there is a way, though, because there are a lot of features available on vROps.

My rating would probably be higher if they improved the ease of use. The numbers are really nice; and also the badges. It's great for management, but most of the other VMware tools I have are pretty easy to use. I can try to figure vROps out, but this one seems to be a little bit more complicated. It might just be me because I haven't had too much time to spend on that.

I haven't had any stability issues with it; it's pretty stable for us.

We're not a huge shop. I think we have about 500 VMs, and it handles that fine. It's not like we have to build more machines or collectors or anything like that.

I haven't called technical support for vROps.

We were previously using VKernel for a lot of our over-sizing reporting, too, but the VM tool is a lot better. We worked with a partner and they were showing us how the VMware tool worked. They thought it would work well for us, so we tried it out with the trial and my boss liked it, so that's how we got it.

Initial setup was very easy for installing the whole configuration part. We're not using that because we're basically accepting all of the default numbers and thresholds for the learning. I think if we had more time and resources, we would probably go in and tweak it to make it more customized for our company. That's probably the most difficult part - the configuration - but setting it up was real easy.

The most important criteria while selecting a vendor like VMware would be features, but just as important for me is price and the value we get out of that.

VCOPS is the best product for vSphere and vCloud Director. It helps me to deeply understand what is going on in the VMWare platform and to fix issues before they happen. Every time it tells you things are going to go wrong, and you really can be proactive.

While using it, we have had a few minor virtualization and performance problems that VCOPS has helped us fix. For example, once the SQL server started consuming much more resources than expected and VCOPS told us there was something wrong with that server and when I investigated the issue VCOPS showed us that SQL was the problem. After some research, we had fixed the issue before the SQL server consumed more than 70% resource.

I think the product covers all OS's and virtualization platforms. I would recommend that they need more focus on networking.

I have used it for over five years.

I have deployed it at least 10 times from scratch and upgraded it many times. I have had zero problems!

Once we had problem that caused a two hour outage on the monitoring system. Mostly it is an install and configure once then forget it product.

No, I have had no problems scaling it.

Reaching the correct level of technical support is easy. All you need to do is to call the support line and explain your situation. After that VMware will take care of you.

I have used at least five different monitoring products. When I recommend it to my clients, they have a small hesitance at first. After I implement it to their production environment, they changed their thoughts about VCOPS. At the end of the day, I have always received good feedback.

Anyone can install this product!

Sometimes, I was on the vendor side, and sometimes I installed it in-house.

ROI starts after the initial installation is completed.

Setup cost is zero because it requires nothing, and the day-to-day cost is also nothing. In order to see what is going on with the system, we invested only in a big screen TV for the Help Desk room.

I always examined the other options and I like to see the Pros and Cons every time. What I see is while other products are improving themselves every day, VMware takes more steps.

Look at the big picture and prioritize your needs and business requirements. Always get technical consultancy and ask the correct questions. Those answers that you will see, will show you that VCOPS is the most suitable product for you.

I've found vROps' predictive actions, monitoring, reporting, and provisioning features to be useful. 

I want vROps to have wider compatibility with older hardware. In this country, many companies have older hardware, so sometimes we can't support all the newest features. Often the old hardware manages and hosts mission-critical applications, but we have trouble migrating to newer hardware that supports the latest features. 

I've been using VMware vROps for eight years.

VMware vROps is highly stable.

If you have the proper licensing, vROps is highly scalable.

I live in Venezuela, and this country is blocked by sanctions, but when we had VMware support, it was excellent. 

If you have the proper knowledge, it's easy to set up vROps. 

I rate VMware vROps eight out of 10. It's a good solution. I love it.

I use it for monitoring and capacity planning.

I work with the solution's dashboards to monitor capacity. There are many functions in the tool and I have worked with a lot of different kinds of data from vROps. It's a great tool to work with.

With vROps, we have had the opportunity to increase our capacity. After vROps was installed on our infrastructure, we were able to view the impact that VM lag could cause in our environment and how we could modify such impact. It has helped us increase performance.

vROps has helped to decrease overall downtime. For example, when we planned capacity for new infrastructure, vROps was used to analyze the new projects that we needed to deploy. In some of those cases, there were many VMs to deploy and we didn't know what impact those VMs might have on the infrastructure, in terms of CPUs and memory. vROps helped us understand the particular impact of the new VMs. It reduced overall downtime by about 30 percent.

Using the solution for capacity allocation and management has also helped us to save on hardware costs, by about 20 percent.

Overall, it's a good platform and it's important to us for maintaining our environment. The challenge in maintaining our environment is made much easier with vROps. The tool provides us with the ability to respond to the causes of problems with VMs or the environment and this is power in our hands. For us, it's a powerful tool when it comes to IT infrastructure.

The monitoring features are great. I have gotten great value out of the data collected by the tool. The monitoring provides us with the ability to respond to the causes of problems with VMs or the environment.

The capacity planning is also very good because it gives me an opportunity to make a reasonable plan for increasing my infrastructure. It fills important functions for both monitoring and capacity planning.

The visibility it provides from apps to infrastructure and across multiple clouds is also great because it's a tool that aggregates a lot of data, both on-premises and in the cloud. It aggregates everything in one tool, which helps you to analyze the performance and the capacity of the infrastructure.

We have integrated vROps with vRealize Log Insight as well. We generally use vRealize Log Insight to identify, through the logs, what is happening with the VM or the infrastructure. The integration with vROps means we can look deep into the cause of a problem. The tools work very well together. vRealize Log Insight provides us with many tools and many ways to solve our problems.

I've been using VMware vRealize Operations for about five years. I have had the opportunity to work with vROps since version 6.57, and I have started working with version 8, which is the latest version. I have installed vROps for two companies.

It provides great stability, when you follow the recommendations.

As for scalability, if you follow the VMware documentation, you can have a great solution.

We have about 500 VMs in our production monitoring. Right now it is on-premises only. We intend to start using cloud, and vROps can be the tool to monitor the cloud environment.

We have had a good experience with the support for the vROps tool, although we haven't had to use support too much.

We did not have a previous solution.

The installation was straightforward. It followed VMware principles that result from working with vCenter and VMs. It's easy to implement.

At a maximum, it takes 20 to 30 minutes to set up, but the configuration can take one or two hours. Building deep reports can take even longer.

The tool is user-friendly, but you need to study to learn about the many features that the tool offers. It is not a tool that you can just start to work with when it comes to capacity planning. You need to study the documentation. But for monitoring, you can start using it right after installation because the data is easy to understand.

Overall, the value is worth the cost because it's a tool that connects with our VMware infrastructure very well. It's a solution that our provider, VMware, developed for VMware itself.

The cost is simply something we need to pay. We can't evaluate the price because we use a VMware environment, so it makes sense to use a VMware monitoring tool. 

We use vROps in our VMware environment, but we have Zabbix to monitor other environments. It's a challenge to consolidate all that into one tool. I don't know if that will be possible, even in some months or years.

I recommend following the vROps documentation and, in some cases, it may be necessary to use a VMware partner.