VMware Aria Operations Reviews

Our customers use the solution to monitor the health of the cloud platform and ensure everything is okay.

Heat maps are valuable. The alerting feature has been the most beneficial in managing virtualized environments.

The solution must provide better training options to help us make the most of the tool. The learning curve is fairly high. It's a deceptively easy product when we first look at it, but it has tremendous depth. There's a lot to it.

I have been using the solution for five years.

The tool is stable.

The tool is scalable. We use a lot of different installations of the product. Our customers are small, medium, and large enterprises.

The support is good. We often wonder whether the support team will meet the SLAs. I'm very reluctant to make all of our support issues P1. VMware is reasonably good at fixing problems. They probably don't have enough qualified engineers in Aria Operations’ support. When you get them on the phone, they are very knowledgeable.

Positive

We used Turbonomic. We do not use it anymore because it isn’t as useful. It didn't have all the features that we needed in an MSP solution.

The solution is easy to deploy. We have a lot of configuration, so it takes a lot longer. However, the basic installation takes 20 to 30 minutes. One engineer is more than enough to deploy the tool. It is reasonably easy to maintain the product.

The return on investment is reasonable. However, the features we would most want from an MSP perspective are those we can't afford because we can't pass on the costs to the customers. We will have an issue if we need more hosts and storage. Our customers cannot afford it.

Reducing the cost would be the most beneficial. The product is too expensive to implement. We can't afford the extra features because it's simply too expensive.

We are cloud providers. We use the solution as a part of our support for the customers. We should be able to model our requirements and purchase in advance. Modeling would be very useful if our platform is growing. If a customer has a particular amount of CPU, storage, and memory requirements, we'd like to model it and get ahead of the storage availability and CPU memory availability issues. We could also model the upgrades when there is a need for maintenance. Such modeling is very useful to an MSP. Overall, I rate the product an eight out of ten.

Primarily, we use VMware Aria Operations for monitoring VMware and the cloud. We also need to report on physical servers.

We are not currently using the solution to the extent of what it can do. But we are moving in that direction. We are in the process of getting an integration to our ServiceNow instance, which will replace a lot of small tools used for monitoring.

The ease of installation and configuration is the most valuable feature, especially for VMware and the cloud. The solution is almost one click, and we get our workload.

Adding some intelligence to VMware Aria Operations, such as event correlation, and some level of AI apps will improve the solution, similar to what we see with the more advanced monitoring solutions that we don't currently have.

I have been using the solution for almost four years.

The initial setup is straightforward.

I give the solution an eight out of ten.

We use this product for monitoring, resource management, and troubleshooting of our virtualized environments. We have been using Heavy Hitter VM dashboards for oversized and undersized VMs. We use vROps to find the contention in the CPU, RAM, and storage. We evaluate the IOPS and throughput of our storage connectivity with our storage back-end. We receive some alerts about some misconfigurations. Mostly, we are using vROps for two main purposes: monitoring and resource management.

In my current organization, we have two nodes; a master node and an HA node. So, we have two nodes of vROps working in vCenter.

We had an incident where a service owner reported to us that there was a slowness. The services on that VM were not running smoothly and clients were having problems. We moved to vROps and used it to understand the contention and congestion in the CPU, RAM, and storage usage. In the end, based on the metrics that were provided by vROps and the datastore at the VM level, we understood that there was a latency in the usage. Based on the recommendations that vROps gave us at that time, we moved our VM into a much faster datastore and were able to solve that problem.

We have been using vROps for the DRS of our clusters. We send metrics that allow analysis provided by vROps to vCenter to better manage and schedule the DRS operations. So, it has really helped us in that particular field.

It has helped us to better manage our resources. Especially right now as we are in the nick of resources, it has really helped us to find oversized VMs and better manage the resources.

I love the resource management and ability to find oversized and undersized VMs. 

The dashboards are really good. They give you a glimpse of what is really going on in your virtualized environment. The ability to create customized dashboards based on your needs is also great. 

The Troubleshooting Workbench, which is for deeper troubleshooting and understanding of your virtualized environment, is really good. We have been using it to monitor vSAN.

The forecast feature of vROps is really good. By understanding the forecast, we can possibly mitigate some challenges and the threat of running out of resources, then having downtime or a disaster. 

VMware has added more default dashboards, which are really good, intuitive, and informational.

We have been able to find the density in multiple layers, e.g., the storage layer and the computational layer. The resource management of finding those bottlenecks as well as oversized and undersized VMs has helped us with managing resources better and improving the overall performance of our data center.

The problem with vROps is that I personally didn't find a lot of knowledge base resources on the Internet. This is a very comprehensive and complicated product. In order to be able to use it, I expected them to have more resources and documents on the VMware website. Or, as an example, they have books available for other products, like vCenter and vSphere. We don't have that level of information available for vROps. It would be great to have a better, deeper, and more comprehensive knowledge base for vROps or even have some resources for learning.

vROps has a hypervisor level of monitoring going on in our data center. We are using other products, like SolarWinds, to have a service and OS-level of monitoring. Because we are using two solutions simultaneously for different levels of monitoring, it would be really nice in the future to have a service monitoring or OS-level of monitoring in vROps, e.g., adding the support online for monitoring services, like Linux services, Linux Databases, and Linux servers as well as Microsoft Exchange Server, Microsoft Active Directory, or other Microsoft services, since we use them a lot. It would definitely help us in the future if vROps implemented this feature.

We have integrated vRealize Log Insight with vROps. We received logs from vRealize for the VMs and ESXi hosts inside the dashboard of vROps, and it was good. However, there was a problem with that. It worked at first for two or three months. Then, I think there was a problem with the certificate of vRealize Log Insight. We haven't had a lot of time to troubleshoot this problem.

I have been using vROps for a year.

There is a team of multiple people at my company working with vROps.

In the nine months that we have been using it at my current company, we haven't faced any sort of problems in regard to crashes, the integrity of the data, or dashboards not showing. We don't have any problems like that. It is really stable.

We don't have any plans to scale this out. If there is a new feature or service implemented in vROps for future versions that VMware will publish, we might jump onto that. Right now, we don't have any plans to extend and increase the scalability of our vROps solution.

We have a team of five people who work with vROps. We have almost 1,500 VMs as well as 70 to 80 physical/ESXi servers. 

A user would have read-only access.

A colleague and I do the maintenance for vROps, e.g., troubleshooting, customizing it, or building a dashboard.

We have not used the technical support because we haven't faced complicated or problematic kinds of issues. We have been using the online documentation, which has helped us a lot.

My current company was using Veeam ONE. After implementing vROps, the company decided not to use Veeam ONE anymore because vROps was more extensive and comprehensive when it comes to monitoring.

The initial setup was straightforward at my previous company. We downloaded the OVF, then implemented the integration with vCenter and other products, such as vRealize Log Insight, and that was really straightforward. 

I personally didn't face any problems. The tricky part is there are two ways of implementing vROps. The first way is using vCenter. There is a part of vCenter where you can specify, "I want to implement this in vROps." If you go that way, it will be a little different than implementing the OVF yourself, then going through the wizard and using the VMware documentation.

Once, when I had a problem with vCenter, I went to vCenter, and I said, "Okay, I want to implement vROps." The problem was that vCenter and vROps were not integrating. The usernames and passwords were not synced, so I couldn't log into vROps. However, that was the only problem. Later on, I switched to implementing the OVF directly. In that way, the problem was solved. Generally, the implementation was straightforward and the VMware documentation, for this part, was good.

It took an hour or two to implement one node and integrate it with vCenter. It was just a simple implementation for vROps without customizations. 

Our implementation strategy: We wanted to test this feature. At first, we wanted to make sure that we needed this product. We then went into a testing and researching phase. We implemented it because we found it really useful. Then, we began customizing it, making sure that the dashboards and everything else worked best for us.

I did the implementation at my previous company. I personally went through the implementation step, then I used VMware and other resources on the Internet to implement the service.

I have worked with this product at two companies. At the first one, I used to implement it, then I moved to another company. In that company, we had vROps implemented and installed. We are using it for monitoring and resource management purposes. In the first company, I implemented it, and in the second company, I have just been a user.

We have definitely seen ROI by removing unnecessary servers and VMs. By having vROps as an assistant when it comes to monitoring and managing resources, it has helped us a lot with cost savings and managing expenses.

On multiple occasions, we were having slow performance, performance issues, or resource management issues. vROps has really helped us to understand the problems or issues much faster. It has improved our performance for finding these type of problems and mitigating them by about 50%,

The solution's capacity allocation and management has helped us save on hardware costs by 25% to 50%. We have also saved on power and other data centers by 15% to 20%.

By using vROps, we have found resources and VMs that were not damaged and in use. We have been able to reclaim those resources. When it comes to licensing, it has helped us save about 15%.

If you have a large-scale enterprise environment with hundreds of servers and thousands of VMs, it will definitely help you a lot when managing your resources.

I have been told that the company tried SolarWinds Virtualization Manager. While they tried SolarWinds, the winner was vROps in the end because the level of integration, comprehensiveness, and extensive data provided by vROps was much better than SolarWinds and Veeam ONE.

At first, vROps might be really intimidating due to the amount of information that you get. from vROps. You might say, "Okay, this is so huge, big, and complicated." However, after using vROps for a couple of weeks, you will understand the value of this product much better. I think a lot of people might jump into the UI, then its level of complication and complexity, they would say, "SolarWinds or Veeam ONE is a better solution because it is really simple." I would say to them, "Challenge yourself with it. Involve and engage yourself to work with the UI. After a couple of weeks, you will understand that vROps is definitely the best choice when it comes to monitoring VMware solutions."

If you have an enterprise-level environment or work in a large-scale data center, I would definitely recommend using vROps. It helps a lot with resource management as well as understanding the congestion and bottlenecks of virtualized environments. It is the number one solution for monitoring virtualized environments, especially if you are using VMware.

Generally, it is a very comprehensive, good product.

The user-friendliness of the UI is really good. It is better every year. I haven't used a previous version of vROps. I have only used version 8. I saw some screenshots of the UI before, and this version is much better. 

With the integration with vRealize Log Insight, we were able to view logs in one dashboard. So, we were not going back and forth to vRealize Log Insight. It improved the performance and efficiency of personnel, like myself, to better troubleshoot problems.

Right now, we don't have any performance issues, especially with the help of vROps. We have more of a lack of resources for future projects.

In the future, we might use the vendor’s Tanzu solution along with vROps for Kubernetes monitoring or management.

I would give vROps a nine out of 10.

We initially rolled vROps out for environment health and for the ability to look at the abilities to stabilize the environment. We've actually been able to take advantage of it also with resource reclamation which was a big selling point for leadership. 

The sandbox is a good example of how this product has improved my organization. We had our development team asking for more resources. With vROps, we were able to go in and show them specifically that they weren't consuming these resources. We needed to be able to take these back but during peak times the resources can be given back automatically by the system, in a proactive manner without causing any kind of downtime or any kind of an issue with loss of work.

The resource reclamation is the most valuable feature. We've had issues with our sandbox environment, and reclaiming these resources. Since, it's become a major selling factor in expanding the environment and expanding the client base for vROps.

I have found this solution to be intuitive and user-friendly. Every version that has come out has been better than the last. I am extremely happy with the product.

So far, we've managed to build what we were missing, and that's what one of the nice features with our product. The flexibility with it that was missing in previous versions, is now the ability to go in and define the base variables of our environment so that we can tweak it as we need to, take back what we need to, and give what we need to. 

With our environment right now, stability is the one sticking point. There hasn't been a great deal of handholding in between the different versions, so we've run into problems with there being what I would call "more than just the average change between versions" and it's caused a loss of data for us in the past. 

This solution is most definitely scalable. We've already gone back to the drawing board and specifically designed it from the ground up to be scalable with the size of our environment moving forward.

Technical support has also been a pain point for us. We've had mixed support issues in the past with vROps on stability issues with downtime. Overall, it's gotten better but there still could be some improvement on the GSS side with that.

Having too many monitoring tools is a typical IT problem and the advantage with this solution was that this was giving us the ability not only to check the health of the environment and give operations team a heads up dashboard in order to see the health of the environment, but also have the options for resource reclamation which was a major selling point.

One of the issues that we've had in between the versions is that the set up for it has gotten a little bit more difficult. It doesn't always tell you right away that you'll need to do something different with this version versus a past version which has become an issue. It's now something that we're aware of. From what I've been hearing today, the new setup should be relatively simple in comparison.

We implemented this completely from the ground up, all the way back to one of the older versions. We've used it for the last several years, going through and learning each new version of the product. 

We've had a demonstrable increase in value directly related to the actions of the product.

We also looked at VMTurbo and there were a few other ones for resource reclamation but as soon as we found out that vROps in the newer versions was able to be a little bit more robust, it was the clear selling point.

I would rate this solution an eight. 

We are branching into NSX. This solution was purchased with NSX to give us more insight into our environment. We're looking to do a lot more microsegmentation and figure out what the workflows are or what the data flow is between applications and between hardware so that we can minimize bottlenecks, get a better idea of performance issues, and be able to really lock down what we're doing for security. We're also looking to make sure that our microsegmentation is set up correctly and that we don't have data leakage in places that we don't want.

The most valuable feature would be the ability to plug into the data feeds that we have and pull information from physical hardware as well as the virtual layer. The best feature is the visualization of what's going on, so we can take a very quick look and see if there are any issues that stand out.

In terms of being intuitive and user-friendly, this solution is getting better. When we first installed it they had upgraded a few times, and just the overall layout is better and easier to manage. It's easy to learn, so once you get in there and start looking around, it is fairly intuitive to figure out what you want to do.

As they're able to add in more vendors for hardware to be able to pull information from different firewalls, switches, or other vendors, I would like to see where we can get more of a complete view of what's going on in the network. That would make this solution better.

It's a virtual appliance and it's been rock solid since we installed it. We've had no issues with stability.

We don't have a huge network and a huge environment, so I don't see us having to grow it too much in the future. If we do, I don't think it will be a problem.

Technical support has been good so far. All of our VMware support has been really good and it's easy to get our questions answered. We have a technical account manager as well through VMware which helps. If we need first line support for things and additional help, he will get answers for us faster. It's been great.

We weren't previously using another solution. Other than just general NetFlow products, nothing really shows the visualization of the network flow like what we're seeing with Network Insight.

The initial setup was fairly straightforward. There were instructions for it that were easy to follow. There's video tutorials and things like that online, so it was fairly easy to set up. We didn't need any support to get it installed.

We haven't really seen ROI yet. We haven't been using it that long and we're still building out our NSX environment. The visualization of what we're doing and what it provides is a good place to go and see so we don't have to use multiple tools. It consolidates multiple things into one so that makes my staff and the network team's job easier.

I have seen the demos and what it can provide is fantastic. It more than makes it worth it to use the product. I would rate it between a nine to ten.

Our primary use case is to make sure we're getting the best value out of our on-prem hardware in terms of matching against vendor specifications to actual operation and performance.

This solution has improved my organization because we have it mainly based on our production units. We'll have about 400 guests running through it, across around 40 nodes and it just helps us to lower balance, see where the pinch points are and really keep us 24/7.

The most valuable feature is the insight into how our infrastructure is actually working and the kind of performance that when users say there is an issue, it gives some insight into finding out what's going wrong with it. It's because we have it mainly based on our production units.

I absolutely think this solution is intuitive and user-friendly. My team spun it up, we've got it through our ELA agreement and it was up and working in a matter of hours.

I would like to see them get a holistic view of the organization, not just focusing on the server and the state that it's running on but to widen that out from the end user all the way through. It's a key critical part but actually, it needs to bring outside of that, then to the networking elements and the inter-dependencies that are in hospital solutions.

This solution is a hundred percent reliable. I suppose it's only as reliable as our own infrastructure that it sits on but it is absolutely stable. We've had no outages from spinning this up and it's monitoring our upstate daily.

Scalability is a little bit unknown as we move into the cloud technologies because this is all about on-prem. From what I am seeing around the show today it's the next generation if it's got a place to help us with our infrastructure. 

Their technical support is absolutely fantastic. They are either a click away or a phone call away and are really responsive.

We were using the technology and it was just burning up too much physical resource, so having this gives that reassurance factor that we can size things appropriately. Investing was a very straightforward process.

The initial setup was extremely straightforward; download the product, install the product, put a key on it, add the host to it. Absolutely very straightforward.

We are not particularly measuring ROI but in terms of the level of investment that we've made into our infrastructure, we've probably got an extra 12 to 18 months worth out of what we purchased three years ago.

We didn't look into other options. We very much get to where VMware house is part of our strategy, it was just a natural fit into our infrastructure.

I would rate this solution a seven or an eight. We are starting to see the benefits and we are starting to use its recommendations and starting to tweak it down. We still need somebody to look at this data, analyze it, and make decisions. Once some of the automation orchestration goes in, then it will move up again up to a nine or something like that.

Optimization and reclamation.

It's been very successful. Before, we didn't know, as an organization, where some of the VMs or platforms were. Now, it's unified our organization to troubleshoot.

So far, since we upgraded the product, over the course of a quarter, I've reclaimed in our team, over 2,500 CPUs. That's a significant amount of CPUs, and we're still continuing. And using the DRS automation field and other features, we're seeing a lot of success as far as load-balancing, and we can also forecast some of the trends that we have in our organizations with the product.

Regarding the time to troubleshoot issues, on average, a NOC user or operations could spend at least 15 minutes just finding that VM or the issue. The solution is saving an average user, like myself as a consumer, about 40 percent. We have the issue, we have the problem. Before, we were spending an additional 40 percent just trying to find where the issue was.

As far as cost savings go, we're seeing significant growth as an organization, and we're also seeing the cost savings in the reclamation. Right now, we're being challenged regarding our growth, and we have to find capacity, and using the product sufficed a lot to not (have to) purchase other new products.

Gives a glass pane for our organization, it makes it very simple to give operations a simplified go-to product to find a VM, for example.

It's absolutely very intuitive. For example, we have a big environment. A simple case, for example, is, we get a request when there's an issue with a virtual machine, or the organization is (asking), "Where does that machine live? Does it live in which data center?" Now, they just plug it in on the search field and it gives them all the simple information: data center, the host, location.

One way the solution could be improved, in my opinion: management packs, more native management packs with API.

Compared to other versions, this version has by far, in my opinion, exceeded expectations.

Scalability is very simple and very efficient, as a product.

Technical support is always better every year, and so far it's actually all the new features that VMware has for technical support. One of the features is that it's very simple to just plug in your issue and you get a response. But I notice that the response time is more efficient than in previous years.

When I started at the organization, we had other, existing competitors, and we also had vROps, but it wasn't fully scaled-out for our organization. But I saw the value just based on my experience.

vROps was definitely on the top list, then we had VMTurbo (Turbonomic) and there's another product called Runecast. We have higher-tier products like Scalar but it's not really an operation type.

Pick something very simple and very intuitive and very efficient for operations. As an engineer, just basically simplify. It's a simplified product and vROps is the product that I would highly suggest and recommend.

In terms of how the product itself has improved, the first one I've seen is the UI, the dashboard, and the intuitiveness of the product, how it works with the web browser, it's very efficient and fast. That's one of the improvements I've seen.

Right now, I strongly feel the product is a solid eight. I haven't got the exposure to the vROps products, I would give it a ten, but the way I feel right now once I feel that it's a solid ten I'll give it.

We use vROps to manage our on-site private cloud as well as our public cloud out in OVH. It allows us to perform trending and analysis on all of our workloads to make sure that they're running as efficiently as possible.

It has saved us quite a bit of money by making those workloads run more efficiently and it has allowed us to recover a lot of wasted resources.

The most valuable feature is the ability to right-size a workload, based on historical data for that workload.

It also allows us to "sanity-check" the entire infrastructure by getting monthly reports on how everything is performing and where we can make improvements. That's all done automatically, without any administrator involvement.

One issue that I had last year, they've already added. They've put some chargeback functionality into it, which they didn't have before. That was very useful for us.

It's a very complex product. It has gotten better over the years, but they still have some work to do. It still requires a lot of time, and some training, to get accustomed to it.

Moving forward, I would like to see some tighter integration with the vSphere Web Client, just so that I don't have to open multiple windows and jump back and forth. We're currently running vSphere 6.7 and there is a lot tighter integration between vROps and vSphere, but it can always be better.

I have no problems with the stability. It's always been pretty solid.

I haven't really had any need to scale beyond what we've always had. The last two versions of it, we've gone with the integrated, high-availability built into the product, and that was a welcome change for us. It's even better now not having to have any kind of load-balancer in front of it, so it's very nice.

I did add a couple of remote nodes. I think when we first started using it, that wasn't even possible, so it was nice having that capability. That did help us scale. If our company were to grow, probably through acquisition, which we seem to do a lot, it would be very easy for us to scale the solution.

For this product, we have not used technical support in a long time. Probably some four years ago was the last time we used it, which speaks to the stability. We haven't had any problems recently.

When I started with my current company, seven years ago, they were using another solution and it was terrible. It didn't give us any of the planning, the change management, any of that stuff that was built into the vROps. To be honest, vROps didn't even exist back then so they pretty much did what they had to do. 

When vROps was offered, it still took us a while to get familiar enough with it to adopt it and, ever since then, we've been happy with what we've been given. 

In terms of actually selecting a vendor, my opinion on what is important has just changed. Our storage vendor is just getting bought out after a period of uncertainty, so I would have to say longevity, first of all; stability. We need to know that they're going to be around tomorrow. Also, somebody that continuously innovates. I did a press release almost 10 years ago for VMware and one of the statements that I made then still holds true. I said, "VMware gives me things that I didn't know I needed, and now I can't live without." I still think that that's the way to judge whether or not they're still giving me what I think they should.

They're constantly giving me things, features that maybe somebody else is asking for. A lot of times, they are things I had never considered before and then I look at them and I say "I have to have that". If I don't look at your product and say, "I have to have that," then I probably won't buy your product because I hate going to ask for money.

The setup is pretty straightforward now. It used to be much more involved and a not very intuitive deployment at all, but now it's really nice.

There are other providers out there that will give a similar experience to vROps, but we're comfortable with it. We were being pressured to look at these other things because one of our acquisitions used one of them. They wanted us to come to an agreement on what was best and we didn't like what they were using, so we stuck with vROps. Now they're with vROps, and lucky for them.

You'd want the ease of use to be the primary draw to the product. Somebody who is evaluating vROps - when I didn't know anything about it and I was looking at it for the first time - it is very daunting. It's very complex and very confusing and especially, back then, there wasn't really any good training. I would tell a colleague not to try to do it alone. It's worth the effort, but you need to get help, either from your TAM or from somebody else, a colleague of yours who uses the product. Get some guidance because it's a very difficult product to get into and master on your own.

As good as it is, it's not perfect so I would have to rate it a nine out of 10. I would love to see something that I could turn over to a junior administrator who hasn't had my level of involvement with the product and say, "Here you go," and have it be, from a certain perspective, clear enough and intuitive enough for him to at least start getting some information out of it.

Like I said, it's a very complex product and you can get a lot of stuff out of it and I like that, for myself, but it's hard getting other people involved with it when it takes so long to figure out what's going on. I think that the engineers who created it are on the same page as me. As soon as it opens up, I see a wealth of information. But it's very daunting to somebody who is new to the product.