VMware Aria Operations Reviews

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.

It gives complete visibility in the form of cache nodes and the health of all our virtual machines, clusters at all levels. And it gives deeper insight into a particular element of the health of the company, each of the virtual machines, storage. It gives a single point of reference to have a complete view and monitoring of the infrastructure layer, at all levels.

You can categorize what kind of alerts you want to get into, what is the performance of a typical virtual machine.

It gives us complete insights.

It gives proactive alerts and it can really be useful when it comes to capacity planning. It easily monitors utilization, it helps optimize infrastructure as well, based on the capacity and the real-time utilization. It's a complete product that provides multiple benefits to the organization.

One of the expectations would be to have third-party integrations, plug-ins like with Lumidor.

Also, alerting any potential violations in performance monitoring.

Version by version it comes out with a lot of enhancements.

When it comes to scalability, I think we haven't reached that threshold.

They are knowledgeable.

No, not at all.

When selecting a vendor it's important to look at the product roadmap; the underlying platform is VMware anyway. They go hand in hand when it comes to monitoring the infrastructure.

I would definitely suggest evaluating vROps. It's particularly valuable for anybody who is on the VMware platform.

The ability to gain insight into what your computing and storage resources are doing. More towards:

• Forecasting
• Time left until you get to capacity
• Capacity planning
• Hardware life cycling, etc.

When you have that capability so you don't have to stick your finger in the air and try to figure out how much capacity you have left based on some best guess. Takes the guess work out of it. Creates a uniform process.

A lot of around having parts of dashboards that need to be refreshed, then you don't refresh the entire dashboard. There's a lot of stuff around usability and reporting.

Their reporting library needs to improve.

Read the documentation first before trying to deploy solution.

The stability of solution's good. There've been some improvements in the last couple of versions, but it's been overall pretty stable.

Scalability is good. We don't have a very large environment, but a large environment around 5,000 VMs and it scales pretty good.

As far as making sure that the environment is operational, they are good. But, a lot of it has to do with customer porting and getting useful data out of it. Every company's different as to what they want to pull out of vROps. So, I guess in 6.6, which we just upgraded to right before I came here, they've done a lot more in the way of having a greater database of reports available. So, that's good. I haven't really dived in too far into it yet.

We have not used a different solution before.

I did the implementation of it and did it on my own. It was pretty straight forward.

We didn't really look at anyone else.

We decided on it just because vROps really ties into vCenter. There really wasn't any additional consideration for anybody else.

The foundation of our virtual infrastructure is VMware.

You have to look at your current solution, then see if it provides you with what you want it to provide you. As long as VMware is staying on top of development and addressing customer's concerns, and it's doing what you want it to do. It doesn't make a lot of sense to go to another solution.

My big thing is, with VMware, if they have a native product that handles a function, that's the first place you should look as opposed to a third-party. When you have third-party vendors sprawl, it leads into a lot of unnecessary complications in your environment.

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 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. 

The ability to look into our environment to see what is going on is the most valuable feature. The ability of the dashboard to drill down and see all the way down to the process as to what is going on, In case if we have troubles.

We're just rolling it out now, so it hasn't really done much for us.

We have implemented it, probably, a month or two ago.

We work in a fairly big office. It cut out on us once, so we had to remove the connector and redeploy it. But, we didn't lose any data, so that was good.

I didn't choose this solution, it was pre-chosen for me. We're not investing in a new solution.

Whilst selecting a vendor, we look at how helpful their service help desks are. I've had experiences where they only do break/fix, so that's of no value to me. So, if we're trying to deploy another solution then I look for factors such as completeness of their solution and timeliness of their updates.

We have our own team which is quite knowledgeable. So, I'll be probably upgrading to the latest version soon.

This solution seems to be good. I've used vCOPS in the past, so it's certainly better than that.

Before investing in this product, you should talk to a lot of people and get a demo.

It integrates extremely well with the rest of our products. It ties in with everything that we need to do. It ensures everything that we need to see.

We are solely a VMware house.

It's freed up a lot of our time because we don't have to manually build all of the information that it ensures. For example, with scalability, there are parts in the world which we are going to hold, and there parts of the world which we going to call and it provides you all that information. Therefore, I know exactly where I need to add X, and where I need to take away Y, etc.

Support.

Consolidate features: It's got so many features. I don't think that I want another one in there. It makes it just too hard to use if they added anything else into the solution.

It's a fairly stable product. Other than setup difficulties we've never had any issues with it when it's running its operation.

We don't really scale it at all, because we operate a public cloud. We are a cloud service provider. We have got five or six different deployments all over the world. They all operate individually, so we don't really scale one much.

It's not very good, because it's such a difficult product. I think some of their guys don't even know how use a lot of it because they have to hold a week training for us, so they must have to go through one, two, or three months worth of training just to even know how to use it.

The last technical support couldn't handle our questions any better. I never got really an answer for our last questions and raised it to our Account Manager to get one of the ACs to do it and that was two months ago. I'm still waiting on the answers to the questions.

Another guy and I pretty much set up the solution over here in North America. We have other guys in the UK who set it up there.

The install is extremely easy. The VMware products are designed pretty well to do installs. The actual configuration to ensure you show what you need to show; that's where the difficulties lie.

If you are looking to implement this solution, definitely go to your training course. It's a week long, that's how difficult it is! They've got vSphere, which is VMware's core product and that's a week course. This is just a tiny section compared to that and it's also a week. It just shows you how complex the solution is. You have to do the training. You just have to.

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor:

• From my perspective as a tech guy, it's always about support. You need good support from the people that you get it from. It needs to meet all of your functionality.
• You've got your functionality requirements. You need to make sure it meets all of those.
• From the business side of it, price is always a thing. You have to get it signed off by the big boss, but because we are a VMware Partner, it's included in our licensing fees. We don't have to pay a penny for it.

For me, it's the dashboard. When you first go into the application, just getting that quick overview of what's going on and being able to take action without having to dig in and look at things.

For myself, it saves me a lot of time. I'm busy doing several different things so having that quick view into the environment saves a lot of time in my day. It also of streamlines the process so I can drill down and see exactly what's going on. Helps us resolve problems before they occur or more quickly resolve problems.

For what I use it for I can't think of any improvements needed. Except, perhaps, it's a little slow to load when you go in to it. It could be a little bit quicker to drill into.

Stability is great. Never had a problem with it.

Scalability is great as well. Haven't had any issues.

I haven't used it.

No.

But we knew we needed it because we needed to get a better picture of our environment and what was going on, to troubleshoot. We don't have the staff to do it so we try to utilize technology where we can to save on having to hire additional staff.

It was really easy to set up.I set it up myself.

Pricing is good for us. We're non-profit so we get a break on that.

I really look for support, it is extremely important to me. So if there is an issue, how soon are they going to respond? Also, local partners, that's important too. So a strong partner with a strong organization behind them.

Also, look for what's important to you. For us it was the single pane of glass, not another bolt-on vendor to try to have a view into it. It is nice having everything all live right there inside the center.

In terms of preparing for implementation, I didn't think it was too difficult. I don't know if there's a lot of preparation you need to. Maybe just some clean up work on the front end. It's more after it's implemented that you have things to do.