VMware Aria Operations Reviews

Capacity management.

We were able to downsize workloads and our hardware.

It really helps with stability. Overall, it is a stable product.

It's been great, but we have a small department.

Very good.

It was very easy. They installed it using the vROps Wizard.

I think it's a good product.

Most important criteria when selecting a new vendor:

• Overall support for the product
• Response to support tickets
• Product features
• New feature roll-outs

Doing the rightsizing of the VMs themselves, telling me whether to add more memory or take away some.

Rightsizing reduces expenses.

In terms of rightsizing the VMs, I'd like to actually see vROps do that for me but currently it doesn't. I'd like to be able to schedule it for a certain time and date.

Seems to be pretty stable.

We haven't had any issues with it.

I've used technical support, and it's great.

We weren't previously using anything else. We went with vROps after our TAM and our SE suggested it would be good for our environment.

I was not involved in it.

No.

When considering vendors, the most important issue is support.

Also, be patient. It collects a lot of information

Being able to monitor teams underneath the enterprise.

• Being able to monitor things like CPU usage, memory, and storage.
• Being able to set up alerts which will be forwarded to your whole team. This can tell you what's going on, and which VM it's happening on.
• It allows you to forward the issue out to whichever team owns the VM.

I'd like to see more integration with other applications.

It's good on VMware products. It's tough to incorporate it into other things, like our logging. We use things like Splunk and other applications. It's pointless to log into vROps to get a portion of what you're looking for, then have to go into other solutions.

It just doesn't work well with other solutions.

It's very stable. We have not had issues.

No, we have not any issues.

We have not used it, though we do have a direct contact at VM's technical support if we ever need to contact them. We feel contacting if we needed to and that are knowledgeable.

I was not involved in the initial setup. It was seven or eight years ago.

Upgrading the solution has been simple, though.

We have guys who work for VMware in our building (in-house). We only reach out to them for upgrades. If we ever have any issues, we'll go to them, but we usually don't run into vROps issues.

I would recommend the product. I would tell anyone looking to purchase the product to utilize it as much as possible.

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor:

• Technical support would be our number one reason. If anything does go wrong, it's nice to have a someone who's helping you out.
• Onsite staff is definitely the best.
• It has to be able to work with other applications. It definitely has to be a standalone because most of our machines aren't connected to the internet.

The most valuable thing it has is the depth of historical data. You can dig in really deep. If there was a problem at any point in time in the past, we can use it to get an idea where it might have come from.

Unfortunately, it hasn't done a whole lot in that regard. It's taken a lot of setup time to kind of keep it in tune. So, for us, it hasn't given us quite the data we were hoping for. We came from LogicMonitor. We got the data a lot faster and easier from there.

More globalized templates would be much better. Templates for different applications, for example, "this is a web server, so these are the things you're gonna want to monitor on the web server." You would just build from a template and it would apply nicely. The product should already come with 50-100; templates for a desktop, for an active directory server, and other generic server templates, so that you can just apply what you're probably going to want to monitor on any given server.

Also, it doesn't answer any question without you asking it first. I want it to say when it sees something out of whack. It should bring that up higher into the stack and let 99% of the stuff sit out and be ignored.

Stability wise, it's been good. I can't think of any crashes we've had with it yet. It's had some issues connecting to Horizon View, and keeping the connections alive, but other than that it's been good.

We don't have enough scale for it to matter.

I don't think we've used it on that product.

We needed some way to be able to see performance issues, particularly in the VDI environment. We had played around with using LogicMonitor, and we switched because it was cheaper.

Also important for us when considering a vendor is that it's a "set-and-forget" system. Just something that tells us when there's a problem and doesn't bother us when there's not.

It's pretty complex. There's a lot of tweaking to get it to either report on something, or not report on something. There isn't a good set of templates built into the system to really make it go fast. You can install it quickly, you can get it logging quickly, but then it's just a glorified log system.

Try to get it to actually install and run.

For vRealize Operations, we use it a lot for capacity planning and our VDI environment.

It improves our ability to provision and acquire hardware when we run out of capacity for our VDI environment.

More data, at least in the VMware, for their Blast Extreme protocol that they use now.

Stability of vROps is good. We have no issues with it.

We haven't had a problem with scalability for vROps. No issues.

We haven't used technical support.

We weren't using something previously.

We needed the feature set that vRealize Operations had. It was already included in the horizon licensing that we purchased.

I was involved in the initial setup. Part of the initial purchase was to have VMware come on site to help install vRealize. An in-house team was sent too.

Just VMware.

Have VMware come onsite to help with the install and knowledge transfer. Also, make sure to research all the different features to use with vRealize Operations.

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor: Ease of use in the product you are looking to use.

Dashboards, then the troubleshooting parts of it. For example, the dashboards that troubleshoot issues with VMs.

It can create a list of operational tasks that need to be addressed. This way we can give a list to operational people of what they need to do on a day-to-day basis.

Needs simpler dashboards; executive level dashboards.

Get all of your access roles enabled so that you can use them in both places.

It's a large product, but it's very stable after you get all the pieces and enough low balance involved.

Great. We have six main nodes and a bunch of external nodes (remote connectors).

Good. They know the product very well.

We were previously using eg operational intelligence. We got a new system because we needed more integration and wanted more insight into what's going on in our environment.

It's complex, but as long as you follow all the steps and don't miss anything, it's fine.

When selecting a better alternative, look at scalability and support.

Test it out. Make sure you get the dashboards you want.

Customers and non-technical managers and capacity managers love the reports and recommendations vROps generate. In one console, you can see both your Physical and Virtual Infrastructures merging together.

Using vRO, you can potentially get any user custom enhancements implemented in vRA and beyond.

The vRO (using Functional Programming of Javascript) is a hand-down of the favorite component of this suite. You can create your custom plugins to speak with any third-party application, not forgetting how many enterprise infrastructure product plugins are already available.

In addition, vROps is a brilliant tool for capacity optimization, assessment, and leveraging many benefits of SDDC.

vRLI still needs a lot of improvement to even start comparing with the market leader, Splunk, in terms of data analysis and customized charts/reports generation.

In addition, VMware is still essentially selling the vCAC, which was created by Credit Suisse's DynamicOps.

The CAFE part was created by VMware and it is pretty robust. However, I don't feel the same about the IaaS Windows part. They need to stop using these two loosely coupled components and probably migrate the whole thing to a SUSE-based appliance.

Version 6 of vRO did have its own issues, but the current version is pretty robust. Earlier, the Java client on reload lost flows, and the appliance needed to be started. This is no longer the case.

There are no scalability issues at all.

Customer Service:

Lately, it has been an issue with getting hold of the support team, but they generally are good.

Technical Support:

The juniors are strictly OK, but the escalation leads are brilliant with sound knowledge in troubleshooting.

The most valuable feature is its ability to drill down into the very specifics. We're using it for a VDI environment, so to be able to actually look at the conversation and how it's progressing between the client and the server is really valuable for us.

It's a really big product, so it gets really complicated really quick. Therefore, maybe more simplicity in pre-configured dashboards and some of those kind of things would be nice, especially around VDI. VMware actually does not have a class in the education about vROps with VDI specifically. They just have a vROps class. When you add the VDI environment, it changes thing around, so that'd be another thing.

I have been using it for about a year now.

It has been consistently stable over the last year. We haven't had any problems with it. It's never gone down; never had any glitches. So far, it's been really good.

We're actually looking at deploying it to our production server environment as well, and we run about 24 different hosts. We haven't had any problems with scalability at all.

Technical support is good. We really haven't needed to call on this specific product, but whenever we needed to call, they're always there.

Initial setup is easy. It deploys as an appliance; wasn't hard at all. Configuring the agents was a little complicated, but once we figured that out, it wasn't bad at all.

We looked at several different options and it seemed to be the most complete package.

I definitely recommend vROps. I think it's a complete package, as I’ve mentioned. It integrates well. It gives us a single pane of glass. We can add on different agents for different applications, SQL or whatever we need. It really gives us a lot of insight into what's going on in the environment.

When selecting a vendor, we go on Gartner a lot, and see what quadrant the vendor is in. We're always looking for the best in breed and those kind of things. We also look at somebody that we're going to build a long-term relationship with, and we know that they're going to be stable as a company. Those are probably our biggest factors.