VMware Aria Operations Reviews

Just being able to go back in real-time, look up the performance metrics and forecast growth, i.e., if you have a large incoming demand are the most valuable features.

This solution makes it easier to do reporting and trends that are especially allocated from a research standpoint, we can narrow it down and reclaim some wasted space.

There should be a better database control, so that we are able to manage it a bit better.

Stability is good.

As long as you plan for the scalability ahead of time, you'll be fine.

We had a need and it was one of those solutions that we entertained; it just worked out. Initially, we were using general vCenter metrics and monitoring, but this is much more in-depth.

As long as the product is solid, that's really what we look for while selecting our vendor.

The setup was a little complex because of our part, i.e., where it's going our network and how our network is set up, so it was a little challenging.

I believe we had an SMA from VMware.

It's already provided by VMware, there are no additional APIs to plug in, so just plan ahead of time, simply plan, plan, plan. You should prepare for the solution's orientation with PoC and testing.

Its centralized management. We have a large environment, and it's very difficult to try to stay proactive in it instead of being reactive.

It give us the real-time capability to see and measure CPU utilization, memory usage, consumption rates, and capacity management.

I would like to see more integration with the login site and different tools. I don't have the understanding of how to take that input and feed it right back into vROps to achieve the right reporting and alert notifications. More tutorials and training would be useful.

I think it's stable. We don't have any issues.

It seems to be scalable. We're medium-size, but I think it's there.

Good. They're very responsive.

No, just the older version. We were already licensed for it because we're a VMware customer. We were too reactive, so we needed to install it to get ahead of our issues and problems.

Pretty straightforward. There were some questions regarding rightsizing when setting it up, but overall it was good.

No.

When looking at vendors, it's important to look at technical support and responsiveness.

The number one, most valuable feature is the simplicity of deployment. It's basically an appliance you deploy. It's easy to go in; you set up your connector to vCenter and it pulls in the information.

I like the predictive analytics, so over time, vROps will learn the environment; learn when you have peaks and valleys.

I like the heat map, unless there's a bug. I ran into an issue before and it relates to where there was a bug, everything was red. The week after I left the deployment, I had to, put out a new release. I had to go and wipe everything and re-install it. That was a pain, but that's what I like the most. It learns the environment. You can see where your sore spots are. Where you have contention. As a former sys admin, that helps a lot.

Going back to the heat map, it gives you more visibility. You go into a vCenter and see, this data store is getting full, or this or that.

It simplifies the troubleshooting when you have a VM that is having problems. You can go into vROps and see, for example, there is high disk latency on this data store. You can see it instantly. The VM will show red and you can see which VM has the problem and where the issue is at.

For previous releases, I would say they needed to streamline the deployment model, which they’ve now done.

I'd like to see them bring custom dashboards into all versions of the product. A lot of times I'm deploying vROps, the base version comes with essentials plus kit and it doesn't allow you to do custom dashboards. You've got to get the higher tier.

Right now, when I install vROps, it has the default: Here's your heat map, here's this, here's that. If they had a way to do custom dashboards, they could create one for the storage guy to go in - okay, here's all the top storage things the vCenter is saying. Or, they could have the sys admins that manage, maybe Linux or Windows, create custom dashboards that show the top five Linux VMs that are having issues or the top five Windows VMs.

That would probably be the biggest improvement they could make.

Since I mainly just install it and go, it's fairly stable. I haven't had any customers report that vROps keeps crashing or that they’re having issues. It seems fairly stable for what I use it for.

I don't have too much insight on that because most of my deployments have been fairly small.

I haven't had to use technical support yet.

Initial setup is super easy. All of the OVA appliances - as far as what I've used - from VMware are easy. What's even easier is - I don't remember which release it was - but it's now a single appliance. Whereas before, there were multiple appliances. It could get somewhat convoluted because you had to get multiple IPs, but they've really streamlined the deployment model with one appliance, one VM to run it.

Make sure you read the release notes.

I would usually try and deploy the very latest version. I ran into issues where there was a bug and the reporting was broken.

We use vROps because it just makes sense. vROps is being included in most bundles that our sales team is selling. It's nice. I like to stay within the same family of products; one throat to choke if something goes wrong.

Complete product is valuable to me, but the best of its features is that it monitors VM from vCenter or ESXI perspective. This means it is collecting data from vCenter/ESXI, and when you virtualize servers it should be monitored from Hyper-V for performance and not from what we are seeing inside the VM (when doing performance diagnostics it should come in last). Another feature is the dynamic threshold, where its’ algorithm defines it over a certain period of time.

One of the features is capacity planning and it is most useful for me. It helps to correct sizing of VM. It shows which VMs are over-provisioned and undersized. You can then increase you VM density on the ESXI.

I think, one of flaws is in its reporting, in that you can’t search, export or manipulate metrics relating to VM IOPS in a useful way, (version 5.6). VMware has revisited its product VCOPs and launched under the name vRealize Operations Manager, vRO. I still need to explore this product.

One and a half years.

No

It is a pretty stable product, but when it is integrated with a vSphere client sometimes I see internet explorer popups, for this I open vCOPs directly in the web browser.

As of now I haven’t found any issues, mostly I have deployed it for small infrastructures. There are sizing tools available for vCOPs (some excellent posts by Sunny Dua and Prasanjit Sarkar), I recommend that you have a look.

8/10.

8/10, however sometimes you have to figure out where the exact problem is because you know your infrastructure better than technical support as you know what the ins and outs of your infrastructure are and they don't.

I have used Nagios, and ICINGA, but after monitoring through them I strongly feel they are only meant for monitoring physical server.

It is easy, but for best practice go through the VMware official documents.

I implemented it. Initially I did a POC by reading VMware documents and blogs.

It helped me to double my consolidation ratio and increased density of VMs per host.

I looked at VeeamOne, SolarWinds Virtualization Management, and I found that both are the best software to use.

VCOPs is one of the best products from VMware. It uses internal algorithms to calculate data. Let it collect some data over a period, I would suggest at least one week. Then start real monitoring. VCOPs can pull data from storage as well, you will have configure adapter. Another thing Custom dashboard is somewhat hidden, I have seen many people use VCOPs but they are not aware of it.

As in the screenshot this is small tip for beginners, I have pointed out the brackets, they are the dynamic threshold set by vCOPs, anything going above that range, means you have to look into it, also on the box if you see above the Green bar there is a grey color stacked line that is also a dynamic threshold., above that workload is increased.

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 making VMware assessments.

I am a system integrator, so it's not implemented in my organization. I implement it in other customers' organizations.

I can install it in 30 minutes to an hour. In about two hours, I have data to give to my customers. In about a week, I have reports to give to the administration, so we can decide which products that they can farm.

• It is easy to install the product, so we can make it available to our customers. 
• It provides good insights into a client's infrastructure.

I would like the product to be more interoperable with other solutions: more hybrids.

It's a very stable product. I don't have any problems with it.

It is very scalable.

I would rate the technical support for this solution an eight out of ten.

This is my first solution of this type.

The initial setup is very straightforward. It is very intuitive to install.

I am an integrator for this type of solution.

I have reduced the time to troubleshoot for my customers. This solution can be used towards a problem that has been existing in infrastructure for months, and no one know what is. Then, in a matter of minutes, I can find the solution and provide it to my customer.

Install and use it. It is a very good, though it needs a few tweaks.

I use it for full diagnostics and predictive problems for the applications or services that we run.

Over-provisioning helps us a bit, and we have a lot over-provisioned VMs. Thus, we show different teams that this type of resource can help manage their environment.

With over-provisioning, we track it all. This is one of the main benefits as it is a reactive and proactive full diagnostic. We can see if the servers are behaving differently and why: Is it quiet or busy? The system is quite good.

• I like the dashboards. We can view in our service groups before something in our service goes wrong and causes issues.
• It is user-friendly, because you can visually set up dashboards for people, such as traffic light systems. 
• The integration with vCenter is what makes it a superior product. 
• There is no hassle setting it up, as it works straight out-of-the-box.
• It has a nice user interface.
• Its ease of use.

In vCenter 6.7, there are themes. I would like to see that add to vRealize Operations as well. It is very nice.

The stability has been good. It is just an appliance that needs to be installed. Give it an IP address, name it, and it works fine.

The scalability has been fine.

The technical support has been fine.

We had a license already for this product. Therefore, we thought we would use the license rather than buying a new product.

The initial setup was easy. We installed the appliance, gave it an IP address, and assigned the relevant passwords.

We installed it ourselves.

If the VMs were trimmed, then we wouldn't have to buy as much software/hardware, and this means less licenses. While most of it is VMware licenses, which are relatively cheap, there are SQL licenses for Microsoft, and this is where we could start saving a lot of money.

I would recommend to try the solution.

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.