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.

It gives you a better understanding of your VM environment. 

The sizing of VMs, whether they are properly-sized and/or that they are central plain glass to see your environment.  

It's like plain glass. It helps you get to the problem quicker than you would without it. 

We've only been using it for three to four months.

We haven't scaled it enough in our environment.

We didn't have another product we were really using.

We heard about vROps through word-of-mouth.

I was involved in the initial setup. It was straightforward.

Not really. We've wanted this for a couple of years and we just didn't have the budget for it.

For anyone looking at vROps, "Do it."

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor: Vendor relationship. The VM work has got to be absolutely rock solid for us along with the stability. We have to feel comfortable running the enterprise on it. 

Realizing the capacity trends feature gives us the time to predict the requirements in terms of the resource availability as well as the trends. You can plan your capacity requirements well in advance. It will also help you to budget for the future quarters or future years. It has been a nice tool for us, mainly in terms of the application/performance troubleshooting and the server resources.

Definitely, it has helped us a lot in terms of being proactive. Without vROps, we would have been in a situation where we know that there is an issue, but don't know where to go from there. So, I think it has helped us a lot.

Whenever we knew there were issues, we did a capacity analysis and a capacity trend for every quarter of the year. This helped us to understand the issues proactively.

Probably, there needs to be some sort of improvement in terms of the costing. Also, if they can integrate the VMware's IT Business Management (ITBM) module with vROps that could help us a better.

When you are being very proactive, it definitely helps you to stabilize your environment. So, I think, the stability is good.

Referring back to being proactive, it helps us to scale up the resources much prior to us actually facing any issue or much prior to meeting any dead ends. It is a scalable tool.

We actually installed a vRealize as part of a discussion we were exposed to vROps. That is when we started analyzing, did a PoC and then we replaced our existing management tool with vROps.

I will definitely be referring this solution to others.

You should weigh the pros and cons; I am sure that VMware will provide PoCs as and when required.

The monitoring.

Easy to identify the bottlenecks.

We would like it to connect to other third-party products. We monitor some Cisco switches, and we are also looking for some storage. At the moment we only use it for EMC.

Sometimes it's very difficult to browse between different components. I'm looking at the latency and it's difficult to figure out which data store was related to that latency. That was one problem I figured out, so linking different components would be helpful.

I would also like to see more automation.

Very good. It was very stable. No problem at all.

We don't scale too fast.

We've barely used it. Once or twice, but for general questions. Nothing about problems. I would give it an eight or nine out of 10. We were able to reach the right person.

Sys IQ and another I can't remember at the moment. We switched when I realized I was spending too much time on troubleshooting.

I'm looking at the features, I'm not looking too much at the name of the company.

Pretty simple.

We deployed it for ourselves in our datacenter, but also for our customers.

vROps would be my advice because it's simple to use, you have a panel to very quickly identify trouble, eventual problems; and it's easy to troubleshoot.

Make sure you have a good understanding of the infrastructure. Define the product you need to monitor.

The ability to project our workload and determine what kind of hardware needs we have into the future.

For example, we recently made a large purchase of servers and blades, and the solution told us exactly how many we needed to get through in X amount of time.

It has made it much easier to approve purchases.

We are upgrading the solution now, so we would like the alerting piece to be a little bit easier in the next version.

Some of the metrics of their recordings are a little confusing and hard to figure out (what exactly what they're telling you).

We started our PoC with the solution a year ago (June) and went live with it in September 2016.

It's very stable.

Right now, it scales up well beyond where we're at and where I think we would ever be.

Whenever I need help, I contact my local SE (sales engineer). He is very knowledgeable. When he can't answer me, he gets other guys who can assist.

At the time, we did not have anything besides vCenter, so we were looking for a new solution because we really didn't have anything which could tell us what our workloads were doing to our hosts or provide us with anything else we really needed to know.

I was involved in the initial setup. It was very easy. I had assistance from our SE and our sales rep on a call, and we set it up as a PoC. Then, we just roll out that PoC and licensed it after.

VMware and VMturbo.

We were already heavily into VMware. We looked at other operations and the projection planning and we went with VMware. The projection planning and budgeting wallets are a major piece and there are only once a year. The VM Operations Manager gave us more the rest of the year than the other solution did.

It's a very good product. You can't go wrong.

The UI is great, and it's fairly intuitive to use.

It gives us the ability to look into problems which are happening within the environment. This helps us to mitigate those problems more quickly. Then, if we see an alert from vCenter, and have to go and search for stuff, we have the ability to see where the issue is coming from, also what other systems or other components could be affected.

It's sped up the ability to track all this stuff as well as mitigated the issues that have come up during an importation. After an importation, if someone changes stuff; we see that stuff in there.

I'd like to see more ease of creating dashboards. It seems that creating dashboards is more difficult than it probably could be; more of a wizard type of feel for creating dashboards for every single department.

In our environment, we have people who we don't want to see everything. We want them to see what they need to see, not everything else. It seems harder to create that. It's not like a GUI, where you can say, "I want this stuff in here, and this is what I want them to see."

When you see everything, you end up having way too much information. It's overload if you don't know what you're looking for. It would be helpful to be able to give management just enough for them to look at, or the SAN people, and not have to see every little thing.

We have had problems, but I think it was more from the original implementation, not necessarily the product itself. We found that people are adding a lot of plugins that we weren't using. They were taking a whole list of plugins and popping them into place, even though they weren't being used, which then sucked the life out of the product and made it, at some point, unusable. We removed the ones that we didn't need, and left the other ones in there, and it seems to work fine. It's doing everything we need it to do. It's alerting us to problems, and it's helping us fix those problems pretty regularly.

It seems to scale pretty well for us. Other places I've worked, they had problems with scalability only because of the way they implemented it originally. For us, it seems to be working just fine for that purpose.

The first version we had in the environment, the problem was we seemed to have kept it longer than it should have, and it seemed that the technicians didn't have the knowledge about the old stuff. But after we upgraded, they seemed to be able to help us with any problems we had.

We were using things like Syslog and other products. They really didn't give you the direct information, "This is what the problem is," or "This is having a problem and these are the things that it could be affecting the product." Down the chain, it could be affecting the host, or it could be affecting the VMs. This is what vROps really gives you, the ability to see and to drill into what's going on in with all the components. Syslog and other components like that, they just told you the symptom, "This is happening," but not necessarily what else could the problem.

I'm not sure which ones they looked at because that was before my time, but they did look at a lot of vendors. I believe one of them was WhatsUp Gold, but that was more of just a product the system pinged. It went down because you can no longer ping it, so that wasn't really good for us.

We were trying to follow the validated design, which is part of VMware, and we needed some way of monitoring, which is one of the biggest problems.

We can't allow vCenter to do all the monitoring, to alert us. It doesn't give us enough information. There are a lot of products out there, and we just figured we'd use what they have in place, because it integrates much better than some of the others. I don't know about now, but originally the other ones didn't really integrate as well, with all the components including NSX and vSphere (and all the components underneath that), so that's why we decided to go with this.

The important things to look for are name recognition, reliability, and support. It's important that the support people have the knowledge to support the environment. Documentation and education, because you don't want to always be calling support for every little thing.

Test it out, put the demo in, or create a proof of concept.

Expanded insight into the actual workload in the environment, so we can plan and coordinate resources accordingly.

It gave us a broader insight into what was really going on, in a more manageable fashion.

The next release is already looking pretty good. We're one behind, 6.5; 6.6 is already out. They're already addressing it: continued enhancements regarding usability, user interface.

Stability is good.

Scalability is good.

Very good. I've only used them once, though, just to expand the database. But I reached the right person, and they were knowledgeable.

Fairly straightforward, straightforward as any anything.

In-house.

We were always looking to be better at what we do, so it was this or outside third-party products. We had a decent rapport with VMware already, and didn't feel like we needed to look outside to other solutions.

It's an extension of our vSphere environment.

Look for support, accessibility, vendor's direction, and vision supporting the kind of things you need to do on an enterprise basis.

I'd use this product. I would definitely direct people this way.

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.