VMware Aria Operations Reviews

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.

Probably, the most valuable feature is being able to see what's going on in my environment.

We use a combination of homegrown scripts and vROps for capacity planning. With the two, we get a really good view of what our environment is doing.

Mostly, it has provided capacity planning benefits; we can see where our strongest usage is and our clusters.

It probably has not helped us save on storage, but probably it has helped us more on the compute side.

Honestly, I wish the reports were a little bit more snazzy, if that makes sense.

Stability is good.

Scalability works great.

I have not used technical support.

Initial setup was straightforward. I actually converted from version 5 to version 6. It worked well.

Before choosing this product, I did not evaluate other options.

Look at the price and the features together.

When we select a vendor like VMware, the most important criteria are completeness of the product and support. This product is fairly complete and it works.

I think for me the most valuable feature is really capacity planning; knowing that I'm using our resources efficiently. We're going through a large hyperconversion project here and we really want to make sure that we are sized appropriately, so that we can build our next solution correctly. You know, save money and utilize hard work the most efficient way.

It has helped speed up performance. It's helped us size our environment appropriately, so that the servers that need the resources can get them. So we're not over-subscribing some and under-subscribing others.

I think we've used it to diagnose some things that might have caused trouble down the road, so it's helped us from there.

We haven't really looked at it from the storage standpoint, we're kind of storage strapped at the moment. As we go into hyperconversion, we're actually really going to start to utilize the tool to come up with a better sizing for that.

It's helped me and the IT department get a better idea of what's going on in the environment. Health checks make sure everything is running the most efficient way possible. It helps us plan for growth, to make sure we're getting the best return for our investment in the underlying hardware.

It’s really stable; haven't had any issues with it.

We're not a gigantic organization so, for us, there's no problem with scalability.

I’ve used technical support some; just to start to get to learn it and get it installed. It's an ongoing learning process for me. It's good. I think it's one of those things you have to take the time and learn it. We're gradually learning it over time.

We decided to invest in this solution because we were so heavily invested in virtualization, and just simply monitoring the virtual machines wasn't enough. We needed a full picture of the environment from the host all the way up through. It gives us a great complete picture.

We did not look at any other vendors at the time. This is the only one we looked at.

I was involved in the initial setup. It was very easy, straightforward to install, get running and start getting data.

I like that it's a single pane of glass with a single vendor, with a supportive VMware. It's really easy; it plugs in easy. There’s less to manage because it's all done through the center.

Support is an important criteria for us when selecting a vendor, as well as stability. That's why we like to partner with VMware, because the support is excellent and the stability is second to none.

A lot of my rating is a reflection of me not knowing the product. As I learn more and more, it becomes more valuable to me. I'd say it's not an everyday staple in our environment now, but it's becoming more and more important.

Being able to pinpoint performance issues, or just general troubleshooting for the environment, and consolidating everything into one central pane of glass.

We can find problems before they start becoming bigger issues. We have all the info in one area. It's already finding all kind of things we need to do to fix the issues.

Maybe more dashboards or an easier configuration of the dashboards,

Recommendation to anyone implementing and deploying this solution: Review the sizing guidelines, then deploy from that using the best practice guides provided.

Stability is good.

The scalability, for what we have, it's pretty good so far.

For vROps, they are usually pretty good. We usually reach the right person and they are knowledgeable.

We were just using vSphere like built-in monitor before vROps.

We got vROps because we didn't have anything to consolidate all the stats, etc.

When we researched a new solution, these were the features most important to us:

• The interface
• Ease of upgrades
• The value that it adds.

We had an existing setup, but we have upgraded it. The latest version upgrades have been pretty straightforward. Some of the earlier upgrades were a bit more involved.

We did the upgrades.

I don't know if we really considered anything else. I think the first choice was vROps.

If you are considering vROps, do some demos of vROps before considering something else, just because the latest versions are pretty good.

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor:

• Support
• Ease of use
• Ease of upgrade setup
• Actual value from the actual product.

As it's the only tool that I've found which I could provide to our NOC team. Because we have our set of tools that we use in system administration, but we do have a NOC team, and the NOC team is not very proficient in the tools we use. Therefore, we had to give them something that is simple enough to use, something they could display on a big screen in their NOC, in order to see alerts in our virtualization infrastructure. vROps was the only tool which we found which was capable at the time to create customized dashboards, and we created the dashboards specifically for our NOC team to find any storage issues and any network latency issues.   

It was also one of the only tools that was available back in 2015 that was able to integrate with our storage area, so it had the management pack. We used to have HP 3PAR at that time, and HP gave us a free management pack to install on our vROps, so not only did we have full visibility into our virtualization infrastructure, we also had the visibility into our 3PAR.

The one thing that I miss the most with vROps is that it's a read-only tool, meaning that you see the issue happening. You can troubleshoot, you can do all kinds of deep-dives into the issue and find out what the root cause is and everything, but in order to get it fixed, whatever it is (doesn't matter what it is), you need to log into another tool in order to fix it. Thus, if you see a latency issue with data store, you can pin point where it happened on your 3PAR, but you need to open the 3PAR management console to get it fixed. Same with a VM. If it tells you that you have a lack of resources, and you need to add 4GBs of RAM to the machine, it doesn't offer to do it for you. You will need to log into vSphere Client and add RAM.

I started using it in 2015. Three years ago.

I would say it is stable, but it does require frequent updates. 

In the early days of vROps, back when it was vCenter Operations, we did have some stability issues with it. Every now and then, we had to reboot it for no good reason because no one was able to log in, but I think with version 6, released a year and a half ago, those things disappeared. Still you need to keep it well-maintained. By comparison, if we upgrade our vSphere infrastructure every six months or so, unless there is a critical patch with vROps, we find ourselves updating it every two to three months.

With version 6, we were able to add instances, so it's very scalable. Once you run out of resources, you can either scale up by adding RAM and virtual CPUs to it, or you can just add another instance. It synchronizes automatically. With version 5, this was not available, like horizontal scaling - just going up. 

I don't have a good opinion of VMware support. 

I remember at one point, one of our instances was corrupted, and they tried their best to recover it, but in the end, after digging in its insides for three days (and they really dug), they just told us, "You need to rebuild the instance. We can't recover any of your data. Just spin up a new instance and start collecting data from scratch." 

So we lost all our historical data. It wasn't business-critical, because we were able to export our dashboards and import them into the new instance, so NOC was operational a few days after the incident.

Other than this experience, we have not had the best experience with VMware support.

The pricing: It's expensive.

• It is about being able to keep tabs on your VMware environment as a whole, instead of having to log into your vCenter all day and keeping tabs.
• It's about being able to get alerts for whatever goes wrong with your systems, and what helps in getting around in your vCenter environment.

We have use it to maintain our VMware infrastructure, and for that, it seems to be good.

What we can do is product chain monitoring. We can keep tabs on a certain app which is running. Whatever is wrong just shows up as red, instead of green, then when we know who to talk to. It's an easier way of doing things than logging into vCenter for every little problem, and trying to find out what's wrong.

Maybe a little more flexible in terms of being able to combine monitoring results with results from other products without having to buy stuff from Blue Medora. It used to be that way in the past, but they gave it all to Blue Medora, and they charged everything, "with a fork".

It seems okay. Not much to complain about, since it seems stable enough. We have had a few problems with the stability in the past, when we tried to make it a cluster, but as long as you don't do something like that it works.

The issues we did have were general database corruption issues, and problems getting it to do whatever it was suppose to do. Also, problems getting settings changed, which kept making them stick.

This is not an issue for us yet. We don't have enough VMs to go outside the scaling properties of vROps.

We have used the basic VMware support, and it seems alright.

If you want to monitor something else, besides VMware, use something else. Use it for monitoring VMware, nothing else.

• Performance bottlenecks and the entire IT infrastructure, on the storage side and the virtualization side. That helps us out a lot.

We are partners of a lot of vendors out there. We also do management services. That helps a lot of our end customers resolve any of their bottlenecks on the storage side or virtualization side or the VM specifically. So that helps us out.

At my previous job, not at this location, vROps helped avoid outages and shorten outage times. It clearly projected what the growth pattern looks like on a specific data store. So it really helped us. If we didn't have that report from vROps, the data store would have probably filled up and would probably have gone down; that would have been a lot more impactful. Luckily, vROps did trigger that alert for us. Then, we were able to act on it. It helped us out in avoiding a big outage, I would say.

It does a really good job of capacity management, as well, because we have automatic reports that we trigger every week. We compare it with the previous week. It does a good job of capturing the capacity management metrics.

The performance management features have also helped. We have taken the recommendations from vROps. We have seen performance go up. Definitely, it helped.

I've heard certain improvement ideas from certain customers. There are certain issues with capturing the information on vSphere application metrics. vROps doesn't clearly capture those metrics. That is what I heard. I still have to play with it. I've not gotten a chance to play with that piece of it, but I've heard from customers about it. If at all, if they could improve that on vROps side, that would be helpful.

It's perfectly stable.

It's scalable. We have done a lot of upgrades and we didn't have any issues moving them around onto a different server as well; no issues.

We have used a lot of technical support for vROps. We have had a lot of custom-built tabs for our vROps environment. Technical support was awesome. We are business critical customers. We are on the BCS support. It's awesome.

Initial setup was pretty straightforward. It wasn't a big deal. Just getting it installed, pointing vCenter to it and then monitoring and capturing all the information. It was pretty straightforward. It didn't take us that long.

We have an ELA with VMware, and vROps is part of the ELA.

We were not looking at other vendors to provide a similar solution.

VMware is one of our big partners. That's the reason we go with them.

Just go get it.

I've been using it for a long time. I know the ins and outs about it. I've been happy with it because there's no other solution which can really do end-to-end, that kind of stuff. That's the reason I'm in. This is the only product that's out there that can really do end-to-end monitoring, management, and at the same time, capacity management. That's the simple reason for my perfect rating.