VMware Aria Operations Reviews

The alerting is probably the most valuable feature of the product. If issues come up, we can tell right away to look in the system, dive a little deeper and see if there's a real problem and if so, we can fix it before there's an outage.

I definitely think some of the adapters could be enhanced.

When building out metrics, it would be better to have a more granular approach to that. Sometimes the metrics are all or nothing, and it would be better if you could adjust those to make it fit your particular needs better. On occasion, we can't even use some of the metrics because of the way our environment is set up; I can't turn it off for this pool and then have it on for this pool. It will give errors and then those errors don't mean anything. If you give errors that don't mean anything, then people stop listening to them and then bad things could happen. I would definitely like finer control of some of the metrics and how they work.

I have been using it for about a year and a half now.

It is a stable product most of the time. Occasionally, the adapters will go down and I'll have to reboot them, but that's maybe once every few months.

We haven’t needed to scale it yet. We have about six nodes and it's been pretty solid.

Technical support depends on the product. The people that work on the vROps side are definitely a lot more knowledgeable than some of the other support people I've worked with. Anytime I put a ticket in for vROps, it usually gets solved a lot quicker than a ticket for vSphere, Horizon or something like that. They've done a good job training their employees on the vROps part.

We switched from another solution to vROps because we weren't really happy with the first product.

vROps was attractive because it was part of our licensing deal so we figured if we don't have to pay for it, why not use it? Also, it does integrate a lot better with both vSphere and Horizon. We're big Horizon customers, so that was one of the big driving forces.

When I choose a vendor to work with, my criteria are that the product needs to be stable and easy to manage, but still be able to customize it to fit our environment; then, definitely, regular feature updates and bug fixes.

Initial setup was pretty straightforward. The Horizon adapter had some interesting licensing part to it. You just had to follow the white paper but it was a little tricky at first. Once I got the hang of it, it was no big deal.

My advice would depend on what you're trying to do with it. Our main goal was more of a monitoring solution, but obviously it does well in analytics, so I would ask what you're trying to do for it and then I could probably go into some of the details on what features would benefit you and if that was something you found useful, then yeah, great.

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.

Real time analytics and reporting plus integration with Log Insight and vRealize Configuration Manager.

I’m a consultant who delivers this product as well as numerous other VMware products. For the organizations I have deployed it for, and on projects where it has been deployed, it has certainly aided in operating expenditure, better management and reporting of current and future metrics and values.

The solution is growing and starting to have more custom dashboards into existing reporting systems which will make it fit better into organisations who have existing solutions that they need to integrate with in an interim manner or permanently.

Three years.

No, it’s an OVA and is now only one machine so it’s very simple to deploy.

No issues encountered.

Only on a very large scale and this is continually being expanded with new releases of vRealize Operations.

Hard to say I am normally part of that customer service.

If someone needed to contact VMware Global support which I have done on behalf of clients before I can say they are very capable.

Some customers use SCOM as this monitors the OS's on the VMs being monitored by vRealize Operations.

Straightforward, as stated before it is one appliance you deploy.

I am normally doing this as either my current company Xtravirt or as VMware PSO.

Customers normally save on operating expenses due to monitoring and future planning being made easier as well as savings due to reporting of wasted resources that they can claim back or at least plan better in the future for deployments.

I’m not an end user but customers normally evaluate others like SCOM.

Do it as it’s a brilliant product.

We use vROps to monitor and manage our environment. We sell VMware as a cloud to private cloud and to big companies who don't choose to install VMware on their site.

The most valuable feature is the ability to monitor our compute and that it tells us when we must buy new storage or a new host. It finds out what the issue is with big VMs.

It is user-friendly. All VMware products are. 

Stability is good. I don't have any problems with this product and upgrades are very easy because it's just click two buttons and next, next, next, finish.

We can choose the license which is stable and scale out when our company's bigger than vROps.

When you are at your lowest, support is pretty bad. They ask you dumb questions but when you come to second and upper service desk, it is much easier and much better to talk to and resolve the issue.

We weren't previously using another solution. We use Zabbix for monitoring our environment. Zabbix gave us some monitoring issues, but vROps gives us something more, something predictable.

The initial setup was easy to set up. I didn't have any problems with this product.

I would recommend this product from VMware. If you need some analytical tools, I would recommend this product.

I would rate this solution a seven. I don't give tens because something could always be better. 

The analytics and operations management are our primary use cases of this solution. It's been performing well. 

The ability to analyze optimizations, the performance, and balance have all helped my organization. 

It provides my team the awareness to see what's going on with the nodes and the clusters. It will then either rebalance them or allow the automation to rebalance them for us.

The alerts and awareness would be the most valuable features for us. 

I have found this solution to be user-friendly and intuitive. I also like the integration point and that it's a single pane of glass.

It's very stable. 

Scalability is good. I've used it in previous versions and I'm looking forward to using it in the current version, 6.7. I think it's phenomenal. I look forward to the product growing even further. I understand version 7.0 is coming out soon.

I haven't had to use technical support for this version but I have had to use them in the past with other versions. There have been some challenges with them. It's hard to get through to the right person and resolving issues in previous versions was hard. 

The initial setup was straightforward. 

Our primary use case is to see what's going on with the complete infrastructure and to be able to see if there are any issues. Although it's not in real-time, we still use it effectively. We can see what the state of our environment is.

It has improved our organization by saving us time that it takes to look things up. We have everything on one dashboard.

It has helped reduce the time it takes to troubleshoot. We're using the vRealize Operation Manager, and when there's an alarm we can have a look, drill down, and see exactly what the issue is. They will usually have a suggestion from a knowledge-based article that will suggest how we should handle the issue. It saves quite a lot of time. Rather than having to go and have a look on Google or somewhere, we can find a solution in the Operations Manager. 

I like that we can see what amount of the CPU has been used and what's been handed out. We can see how we can bring the virtual machines in line with what actually has been used which has saved us cost.

It is user-friendly although there's always room for improvement. In the beginning, it was about figuring out where you can find what, but once you know it, it becomes easier to navigate. 

Stability is good. I haven't had to restart it at any point. 

It's scalable. We can add a new host and they immediately become available. 

Their technical support is excellent. 

We chose this solution because we are using VMware, and the rest of the suite, so it was just a logical decision to go with Operations Manager.

The initial setup was a bit complex but not really complex. If you take the time to look through the documentation you can figure it out. 

We deployed in-house. We just had to look at the documentation. We tried it in our test environment, found that it was doing what we expected it to do and we deployed it in production.

Our ROI is that I can spend less time looking at issues, it's all there in the dashboard. I can see them immediately, I don't need to go into vCenter and go through all the different data stores. I can just have a look at the dashboard, see if there are issues, see where the issues are, and save time.

I would rate this solution a ten. I was looking for a solution that would help me do my work and this does exactly that. 

I would tell someone looking into this solution to go for it. 

The primary use case of this solution is to monitor the user experience of our VI in finance and troubleshooting.

It helps us make occasional reports and with that information, we can react proactively. It has also helped us reduce the time it takes to troubleshoot issues. 

We like that we get reporting on our sizing reports. 

I would like to see them develop real-time capacity meters.

We did not find this solution to be intuitive or user-friendly. It's complex and overwhelming. It takes time to learn how to work it, which metric is in real time, and what information it's giving per day.

We found the stability to be good.

Scalability is good. 

We've had to use technical support and we've found it to be fine. We have a team in our company so we can ask all of our questions to our technical account manager. 

We knew it was time to switch to a different solution because the engineers were complaining. We knew we could not see everything on the platform. 

The initial setup was straightforward. In our company, we have a service provider and iOS platform, and they built the application.

We integrated in-house. 

We get fewer complaints. 

I would tell somebody looking into vROps or a similar solution to get someone with in-depth knowledge to help you with finding your use case. It's very important to set your expectations, know what your KPIs are. This will help you better navigate the solution.

I rated this solution a seven because it's complex and not intuitive. It has a long learning process. It can be frustrating trying to get the correct information from it. 

• Capacity management
• Performance management
• Troubleshooting

It helps us reduce resources by indicating that we don't need that much CPU or memory in use. This gets the density of our VMs much higher on our systems.

It helped troubleshooting issues with storms of software data that cost a lot of IO. We could look back regarding why it happen and easily pinpoint it by going through all the reports and data. We would then follow up with the responsible owners of those VMs.

In training data, it predicted that we could reconfigure systems or buy more capacity, when needed.

The most valuable features are capacity management, proactive reports, etc. 

It is intuitive and user-friendly. It is easy to follow and the reporting engine is easy to use.

I would like some training or sessions around self-healing and automation. So, if a problem occurs, we can automatically take action on a problem which is occurring.

At the beginning, the stability was not that good. The latest versions are much better.

The scalability is okay. We have had no problems with it.

The technical support was pretty good when we called once. They can solve issues in no time.

I don't think there were many problems setting it up.

We implemented it ourselves.

If you're using VMware, use the native products that they have because they are great.