VMware Aria Operations Reviews

Our primary use case of this solution is for monitoring our VMware infrastructure, vCloud Director, and NSX Manager. 

vRealize has products created especially for virtualized infrastructure by VMware. Its main features are great.

I don't find this solution to be intuitive and user-friendly. It's a large and difficult product to learn. We need to search for more information.

I would like to see them add customizable dashboards and customized views. 

I find this solution to be stable. 

It's very scalable. It's fast and fast is easy.

The initial setup was complex. 

I would rate this solution a nine. 

We use it for monitoring and troubleshooting the performance and stability of our VMware.

If we get reports of applications that are running slowly, we are able to drill into the VM and all the statistics, and see where the bottlenecks are or what the issues are.

The solution has helped reduce the time to troubleshoot issues. It gives us greater insight into all capacity utilization, which helps us plan better.

For us, the most valuable feature is the insight into real-time performance.

At times we find the solution to be intuitive and user-friendly. It's getting better. Version 6 was terrible but 7 is a lot better. There is still room for improvement. It needs to be a bit more intuitive.

I would like to see more integration between vRealize Operations, Log Insight, and Network Insight. It would be nice if they worked a bit better together.

So far, stability is fine.

As for scalability, we've already added an extra node and it was a nice and simple, click, click, done. The scalability is good so far.

We have not had to use technical support yet.

We didn't have a solution that gave us in-depth performance stats or capacity planning in the VMware stack. We were a VMware customer, so it made sense to go with a VMware product. Compared to other products the feature set, use cases, and costs of vROps are fine. It's the integration points that led us to go with VMware, there's better, tighter integration using vROps.

The initial setup was straightforward. It took us half a day.

We used a consultant for the deployment. We used Assist Inc, and they were brilliant.

In terms of ROI, we're getting there. However, it's only been live for a couple months.

We've looked at other solutions before, but we've never found one that does what VROps does. We've looked at Veeam ONE and VMTurbo, but I don't think they're around anymore. That's part of the problem: There were vendors that did the monitoring and they've all crashed and burned. VROps wouldn't do that.

My advice would be, do a hands-on lab. Get to grips with it before you deploy it.

I rate it at eight out of ten. It's a great product. It integrates well with the VMware stack. It covers all the VMware technologies. I just need it to be more intuitive, so that's why it's an eight and not a nine or a ten.

We use it for a general health check of the environment: What is broken and what is not performing right. 

We can do a lot more with it, and we want to, but we haven't gotten as deep into it as we want to.

It allows us to engineer our infrastructure more efficiently, because vROps will tell us capacity-wise if we are overbuilt, so we can scale back. We have learned to right-size our stuff much better since we have been using vROps.

The dashboards are great. You can quickly see things at a glance without having to dig through a lot of data.

It allows us better visibility into our virtual infrastructure than we could get through vCenter or other tools by providing us a lot of metrics. vROps is good at spotting problems.

Some of the more advanced stuff takes a bit of time to dig into it. It takes a little longer to setup if you want really detailed stuff. They could make the learning curve smoother.

Stability has been good. We haven't had any downtime.

We haven't scaled ours out beyond a single appliance, but I know it can scale out farther.

The technical support is good and responsive.

The initial setup is straightforward. I was able to do it with little to no initial reading.

It has reduced the time to troubleshoot, because we would have to go to ten different places otherwise to get all the data that it gives you in one single picture. 

Start small. Don't try to put too much stuff in it at one time. This way you won't have information overload when you start receiving data back from it.

I was able to start using it quickly the first time.

I have been working with VMware for forever. It has been a good experience.

Most important information when selecting a vendor: 

• Be responsive.
• Provide good support.
• Have a solid product.

We are using it to monitor our virtualized environment, to take care, ahead of time, of any problems that develop, before they become major crises. It's a complement to our existing monitoring solutions.

We've managed to save quite a lot of resources because we haven't had to deal with the issues of over-provisioned VMs, which was a constant problem. People would always ask for very large VMs to hedge their bets. That's been its biggest assistance. We've been able to say to people, "Hey, the last two weeks your thing hasn't done anything. It doesn't need to be this big." We have been able to notch it down, save some space.

It has definitely helped provide cost savings through high-capacity utilization. We've been able to streamline a lot of our products and we're also getting ahead of problems before they really start becoming major issues.

Mostly it's pre-warning. We get to know ahead of time when systems are starting to have problems. We can pay attention to the alerts and know right away that there's an issue developing at some point.

We also use it to monitor poorly configured VMs: over-configured, under-configured.

It's reasonably intuitive and user-friendly. But because it's a very powerful product, there are a lot of details involved. There's no way to make that simple, as far as I'm concerned.

Rock-solid. No problems at all.

So far, so good on scalability. We're medium-sized so it's okay.

We only had to use technical support once, when we were doing the initial set-up, and that worked out. It was great.

We had been using an external monitoring solution called Zenoss. It worked great. We still use it, but we weren't getting good insights into the depths of VMware. vROps, for what it does is absolutely fantastic. It's good because it comes straight from VMware. We're not messing around with some third-party product. They know their stuff, obviously.

When selecting a vendor, what's important for me is stability, that the vendor has been around for a little while, and that they've got good, solid tech support.

The initial set-up was relatively straightforward. It was just an appliance to deploy. The setup took a little while to get right, but it wasn't that bad.

With this particular solution, with vRealize Operations, if you have a reasonable-sized on-prem environment, it's definitely worth investing in. If you're going to be just straight cloud, it may not necessarily be as perfect. But I would definitely recommend it.

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.

The performance trending and the capacity trending. They allow us to better predict when we have to grow and scale out.

We're more easily able to budget and schedule that scalability. We're more proactive and less reactive to situations.

Streamline the dashboard and reports. I know currently when we customize those they tend to be a little bit complicated and they're not quite as intuitive as I'd like them to be. What I'd like to have happen is that even my managers be able to go in there and create themselves a report or order themselves a dashboard that they want to see, without having to request that from some of our more senior people. It's a little bit too difficult for them.

Its ease of deployment is pretty good, towards the higher end of the scale. Its ease of use is a little bit lacking, because of that complexity. It's not real intuitive. But its stability has been up at the top end of the scale.

It's been terrific so far. No issues at all.

We haven't had to scale yet. So I can't really comment on that.

We have not used technical support yet.

We had previously used Operations Manager back before it became vRealize. So we had some experience with it. I would say probably the biggest thing that pushed us towards it was that our monitoring platform is Microsoft SCOM and we weren't real happy with that for the VMware side of things. It monitored the individual VMs and the host OSs just fine, but we weren't able to see anything vSphere-related for our capacity or anything like that. So that's where it really found a home.

The most important thing we look for in a vendor would be multiple compatibility with what other things we have. We have a lot things in place so it needs to be compatible, it needs to fit. Complexity's big, because we do a lot with every team. We don't have a lot of technologists that can work with it. So it's got to be fairly simple to use. And probably just the industry acceptability. Like one of our largest measuring sticks is: are other companies in our segment, in oil and gas, using the product?

As for difficulty, it was probably medium. It's much better than the old Operations Manager. I put in one of those as well and it was a lot more complicated. I think the most complicated thing for our deployment was that we had to externalize our platform services controller. It only took us a couple of days though and then it was deployed.

Veeam. It didn't really fit it very well.

I'd definitely recommend giving it a go. It's a good product. It's one of the best I've seen for future trending, looking forward. Maybe not one of the best or the easiest to use for actual looking at real-time statistics. I know it can do it but it's a little bit difficult to get to some of that data. There are a couple of screens that are really nice for throwing up some graphs and things of that sort.

• Being able to troubleshoot specific VMs
• A high-level view for capacity planning
• Getting insight into our VM or environment, to see where it's trending

These features enable the business itself, the directors and managers, to use it.

We also use it to get inside our Cisco UCS environment. Those are the keys. It's been pretty valuable.

It was pretty outdated when I started, so I upgraded it. And we've just been dipping our toes into what it can do for us. But so far it's basically been trending, getting us a forecast of where we're going, and where we need to add resources.

As far as VMware's perspective it's got everything I'd expect. One thing that is not ideal is that I actually have to buy a third-party plug-in for things like NetApp. But that's more on the NetApp and Lumidor side of things. It would be great if there was native integration with vROps, with those storage providers.

Good. I have no issues with it at all. It's been very stable in our environment.

Right now we only have a single node, we haven't scaled a ton.

I haven't been in touch with tech support. My contact at VMware is definitely knowledgeable and can help if need be, absolutely.

Just an older version. vROps wasn't heavily relied upon for trending, for capacity. But I think it will definitely be more so in the future, based on its reports, etc.

I thought it was very easy. Easy to follow instructions. Got it deployed within an hour or two. Not hard at all.

vROps is packaged with our licensing. So that made it a pretty short list. We already had it. We went with it because it's included. We didn't really do a competitive analysis.

Just the fact that it's a VMware product, and that means that product updates are going to coincide with other products. You're not going to fall behind when VMware updates a new hypervisor. Just the fact that it's in cadence with their other releases, that's a big selling point for it.

The top criteria when selecting a vendor would likely be support and reliability. Also, that they're not just trying to sell us a product but, rather, it's something we can actually use and leverage in our day-to-day operations.

We haven't really dipped our toes into what it can do but so far I have been pretty impressed with the analytics we can get out of it. The high-level information we get out of it has been pretty valuable so far. We haven't even gotten into it, so it can do a whole lot more.

Try it out if it's in your licensing and you haven't deployed it. No reason not to.

Wireless Operations Manager allows us to troubleshoot any issues proactively, so that's really good with the solution that we have.

As I noted above, we are able to proactively look at if there would be any potential issues, plus planning on the demand and supply.

I'm a very core systems admin guy, so what I would like to look at, when I see DRS migrations, it would be interesting to see why it really migrated. We have a dozen SATA as of today, but it would be really interesting to see what is the metric that Wireless Operations Manager used to initiate re-motions.

Stability is pretty good.

No. Scalability is good.

I haven't used it for wireless operations. Not yet.

We use vROps. Apart from that we were using couple of other tools but I don't want to give their names.

I wasn't involved.

When choosing a vendor we look at what pain points we have today and then we look if any vendor can kind of satisfy or fulfill all the pain points. vROps was one of them we looked into

I would suggest if you pain points that we had, then go with vROps.