VMware Aria Operations Reviews

The performance trending and the capacity trending. They allow us to better predict when we have to grow and scale out.

We're more easily able to budget and schedule that scalability. We're more proactive and less reactive to situations.

Streamline the dashboard and reports. I know currently when we customize those they tend to be a little bit complicated and they're not quite as intuitive as I'd like them to be. What I'd like to have happen is that even my managers be able to go in there and create themselves a report or order themselves a dashboard that they want to see, without having to request that from some of our more senior people. It's a little bit too difficult for them.

Its ease of deployment is pretty good, towards the higher end of the scale. Its ease of use is a little bit lacking, because of that complexity. It's not real intuitive. But its stability has been up at the top end of the scale.

It's been terrific so far. No issues at all.

We haven't had to scale yet. So I can't really comment on that.

We have not used technical support yet.

We had previously used Operations Manager back before it became vRealize. So we had some experience with it. I would say probably the biggest thing that pushed us towards it was that our monitoring platform is Microsoft SCOM and we weren't real happy with that for the VMware side of things. It monitored the individual VMs and the host OSs just fine, but we weren't able to see anything vSphere-related for our capacity or anything like that. So that's where it really found a home.

The most important thing we look for in a vendor would be multiple compatibility with what other things we have. We have a lot things in place so it needs to be compatible, it needs to fit. Complexity's big, because we do a lot with every team. We don't have a lot of technologists that can work with it. So it's got to be fairly simple to use. And probably just the industry acceptability. Like one of our largest measuring sticks is: are other companies in our segment, in oil and gas, using the product?

As for difficulty, it was probably medium. It's much better than the old Operations Manager. I put in one of those as well and it was a lot more complicated. I think the most complicated thing for our deployment was that we had to externalize our platform services controller. It only took us a couple of days though and then it was deployed.

Veeam. It didn't really fit it very well.

I'd definitely recommend giving it a go. It's a good product. It's one of the best I've seen for future trending, looking forward. Maybe not one of the best or the easiest to use for actual looking at real-time statistics. I know it can do it but it's a little bit difficult to get to some of that data. There are a couple of screens that are really nice for throwing up some graphs and things of that sort.

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.

I know that it's got some capabilities that we're not using at this time, but the one that comes to mind is the ability for us to see how our VDI environment was performing for some classrooms, so that we knew what kind of resources we needed to allocate better to our VDI pools for our students to get good experience in that classroom.

It's taken the questioning out of what's going on. You're not pointing fingers anymore at software or hardware for no reason. You're actually able to dig into the troubleshooting and see the trends, to see the analysis overtime. You can say, "Well, this is when it started. Before that date, everything seemed fine." Or, "Well, this was when we had more students online, it looks like we need to reallocate some resources." It's taken a lot of the guesswork out. It's allowed us to be more proactive instead of reactive, which is nice.

From a personal perspective, I would like it made clearer what options are available in the suite that the customer is not using. I know that I'm not using all of the capabilities for our environment, so being able to know where I could improve, or gather more data from - easily, in the interface - would be a big help. Without than I just have to go through tech support or read more of the documentation, dig in to get it out. If the system itself actually said, "Here are other options" that were easily visible, that would help people actually use the power of the product.

We haven't had any problems with it. It's been a great product. When we need to go to the portal, the portal's there. If we need to pull the data out, it's there. We haven't had any issues accessing the system, keeping the system up and running, and setting the system up overall was really simple. I'd say it's a rock solid system.

It scaled out really well, the first time that we needed it to. We had vROps in our regular computer infrastructure, and then we needed to scale it out so that we could bring our VDI environment in. We did that very easily. We stood up another collection node, tied that into our VDI system, and then added that into the main cluster, and it was just straightforward and streamlined. It definitely scales out as needed.

We have not had to use tech support for vROps.

It was straightforward. It was easy. It's a powerful product. It gives us a lot of data. It took a little bit of time to get through some of it, to understand what features we needed to turn on, but that's more of a, "How do we tune it for our environment" issue and not a product-setup issue. Once you understand what you needed to do to set up the product, it's fairly straightforward. The documentation's fairly good, but the interface itself is also pretty self-explanatory.

We decided to use it because we're licensed for it. There wasn't a larger discussion around it.

The most important criteria when selecting a vendor are communication, availability, and the ability to really understand your needs as an organization. Can they put aside some of the business talk and really understand your organization and the solutions that you may need? Whether they're able to work with a higher education institution, in our case, was also important. Those are some of the biggest considerations for us.

There's no solution that's absolutely perfect. It's great for a trend analysis and a growth tool, if you want to do growth projections and things like that. Using it for what it's intended for, it's perfect. Does it give you all of the goodies that you might want in a monitoring software? No, but that's not really what it was designed.

If you have the license for it, install it. Put it together, even if it's in a test environment. Let it gather some data for a couple weeks, and then look at what data has been collected, what it says about your environment. You might be surprised by what it's telling you. You might be able to see some things that you can improve on, or it may just reinforce that your environment is tuned really well. Again, if you're licensed for it, I'd say install it and use it.

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.

For me, since I have a background in the network engineering discipline, the most valuable feature is probably the content modules that come along with the software program, in regards to the Juniper and the SolarWinds plugins for it.

It gives us added visibility on our environment on a real-time basis.

I'd probably like to see a little bit more detail when you go through the drill-down menus, in regards to stats, and maybe the way the data is arranged could be a little bit more cosmetically appealing.

Also, compared to other software that I've used, it could be a little bit more streamlined in regards to the user interface, and the granularity of the data it provides could be increased a little bit more.

As far as stability, it's pretty good.

We haven't had any problem with scaling it.

I personally haven't used technical support. My fellow engineer has, and I don't think he's had many problems dealing with technical support in regards to vROps.

We did not previously use a different solution. We were heavily invested in VMware technologies, so it only made sense for us to go with something that was in line from that particular vendor, VMware, to properly monitor the environment.

There were no other vendors on your shortlist at the time. We weren't looking at anything else, as far as I know.

If they're heavily invested in the vSphere product line, vROps is definitely a product they can't go without.

The most important aspect in regards to selecting a vendor like VMware would basically be the solutions that they provide, whether or not if they actually work, if it can be adopted successfully.

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.

I mainly use vROps for dashboards in our main IT screens to monitor the environment and track information.

vROps' best feature is the easy integration with the environment.

In the next release, vROps should add integration with Apache OpenStack.

I've been using vROps for three to four years.

vROps is pretty stable.

vROps' technical support is pretty good.

vROps is easy to set up, deploy, and start using, with no need to spend time doing custom things.

I used an in-house team.

I completely recommend vROps to other users as it will make their lives much easier, and I would rate it nine out of ten.

I've found vROps' predictive actions, monitoring, reporting, and provisioning features to be useful. 

I want vROps to have wider compatibility with older hardware. In this country, many companies have older hardware, so sometimes we can't support all the newest features. Often the old hardware manages and hosts mission-critical applications, but we have trouble migrating to newer hardware that supports the latest features. 

I've been using VMware vROps for eight years.

VMware vROps is highly stable.

If you have the proper licensing, vROps is highly scalable.

I live in Venezuela, and this country is blocked by sanctions, but when we had VMware support, it was excellent. 

If you have the proper knowledge, it's easy to set up vROps. 

I rate VMware vROps eight out of 10. It's a good solution. I love it.