VMware Aria Operations Reviews

VMware Aria Operations is a new platform that provides visibility into different areas of the infrastructure, reduces or eliminates downtime, and makes customers more proactive. It gives customers the insights they need to be proactive rather than not active, and it helps them plan for capacity needs, ensuring that they are doing their best to avoid over-provisioning or experiencing contention. It also has a self-service option so that end users can be more independent from the infrastructure team and monitor their needs.

Avoiding problems in the monitoring area is our strength. We use real-time monitoring models and real-time monitoring to do this. We also provide other capabilities, such as seeing changes in the environment.

The VMware Aria Operations solution is a very technical product and is not for everyone. As a top-of-the-chain VMware tool, it is only normal that it has a learning curve. While the UI has been improved, it may still be difficult for some users. The solution has a lot of functionality and can monitor all areas of infrastructure, such as storage and network.

I have been using VMware Aria Operations as a partner for seven years.

I rate the solution’s stability a ten out of ten.

I rate the solution’s scalability a ten out of ten.

The documentation is perfect.

Positive

The initial setup is easy. The setup time depends on the scale, but it can be as short as a few hours. Once the valet solution is deployed, you must link it to the infrastructure. This process takes a few hours, as the key must pull data from all the infrastructure components. In most cases, the valet solution will remove the entire infrastructure into CRM within a few hours or less.

I rate the initial setup an eight out of ten. 

Most small users don't adopt VMware Aria Operations until it's necessary. Small businesses are looking for it, too. We need more monitoring and insights, so we're analyzing solutions to help us out here.

I rate the solution’s pricing a five out of ten.

VMware Aria Operations has many hands-on plug-ins that can help you monitor all the elements in your infrastructure, such as storage, networks, and more, beyond VMware infrastructure itself.

Overall, I rate the solution a nine out of ten.

I work for a Post Office service and we use this solution to monitor business core assets which help to deliver packages. There are many applications we need to monitor as part of our service and to see their availability. We also use it to analyze and to forecast. Finally, we use it for business reports for sharing the status of memory, CPU, and data storage. The solution is very big in terms of how many variables you can extract.

There are many clusters that are displayed, each solution and its specific application. For example, for our front-end website I can specifically monitor the resources, the memory, the storage it consumes. I can extract this information to create a report for a specific cluster.

Each group of employees has access to reports about specific clusters. You choose the information to add to the forecast from various KPIs. It helps the company understand capacity and to see the information it needs to see regarding the future.

In the country where we operate, we have something called a PDI, a development and innovation program or plan, for looking toward the future and delivering new applications. vROps gave me the information I needed to build a new PDI. It gave me excellent data for that.

Every four years, we have a plan to replace hardware. In our last replacement, vROps helped me to reduce the hardware we needed because we could optimize our solution. We have also saved on power and other data center costs. In that area it has saved us 30 percent.

It has also helped to decrease our overall downtime a lot, because I can see the distribution of memory and the CPUs. I can see if there are issues with storage or the network or CPU. It helps me to plan so that the system is more available.

We have integrated vROps with vRealize Log Insight. With this we can correlate logs between vROps and the ESXi. I have shared this dashboard with a group of people. They can see this information day by day and look for issues and problems in the production area. We can see the relationship between the tracing and the logs from the ESXi and the server, in the same dashboard. We can see what actions are needed to solve problems. That is a very important capability for our company.

For me, the most valuable feature of vROps is its reporting. We use the reports to send information to certain groups within our company to help forecast the use of resources.

It provides a focus on the VMs. At a glance, it shows the applications inside of each VM. The next step would be to use the plug-in, the APM.

The ITIL is very important for helping resolve capacity issues. It helps deliver a lot of information about issues faster.

I've been using vROps for six or seven years.

The solution is very stable. I don't have any problems keeping it running. The maintenance is easy and it's easy to upgrade.

When it comes to maintenance, usually there is a ticket, and the person within our company who is responsible will analyze it. It may be a new upgrade, a new feature, a patch. A person is assigned to it to decide if it's necessary to upgrade or apply the patch. Once it's approved we set aside time to take care of it, but it's generally not difficult.

The scalability is excellent, no problem. In the time we have used it, our environment has grown. We can add more servers, more data. Scaling it is easy.

We have two sites and together there are 276 servers. But thanks to the use of vROps, with each new purchase I buy fewer servers. When we started with it we had more than 300 servers. Now we purchase fewer of them.

For me, the technical support is the biggest problem. I've been working with them since 2016 and in the first years their response was faster than it is today. That is a problem. Also, I need to put together and send them a lot of information. And then I wait one day, two days. The support has been getting worse over the last few years. They need to improve it. Two days for them to respond is a big problem for me.

I realized we needed a solution to monitor our VMs. So six or seven years ago we decided to buy a solution to monitor, forecast, and give us unique dashboards with information on issues such as capacity, and to monitor applications, etc.

The setup is a simple process. In our company we have a system, BMC, which makes it possible to deliver information and to integrate BMC and vROps, using the SDT and VMware. This process, the integration between BMC and VMware took two years. 

We did the implementation ourselves with an internal team.

At the higher levels in my company, such as the CIO, they looked at what the solution delivers and they felt the ROI was faster with this solution.

When we last did a comparison of solutions, the pricing was equal or similar.

Because we are a government company there are compliance requirements. Any purchase has to go through a public process. We have to publish the information in the market. We looked at BMC and CA, and we looked at CA recently.

We tested and did a proof of concept for each of the solutions, not a big test but a simple process; enough to see how they operate. For me, the big difference was that vROps is a VMware solution and is integrated with other products such as vRealize Log Insight and vRealize Automation, and of course, vCenter. And the unique dashboard was also a great addition to our operations.

In the future I'd like to use the plug-in and the APM. In the future, using the APM, things will be better. Nowadays, applications have under-utilization of hardware.

I'm happy with the solution. There are many options for using it because of the features vROps has.

Our primary use case is capacity planning. We do historical metrics gathering to determine if we need to rearrange our hardware resources, expand or contract them.

I like that it's integrated with the vRA. It is helping us, as we're rolling out automation, to do intelligent placement of new servers, based on the vROps metrics that are being created.

They've come up with more canned dashboards, which is great.

Also, it does have hooks into it. I like that it's integrated with the other suite of tools. That's a big plus for the tool. It's well-integrated with Log Insight. We use that integration quite a bit.

There are several additional features I'd like to see. 

For one, the metrics. It collects tons of metrics, but it's very unclear what exactly a metric is. There'll be something like a "CPU Usage" and "Usage of the CPU". What's the difference between those two metrics? It turns out there is a difference, but they should make it intuitive so I can say, “I just want to go find this out in the tool.” You can't really do that because you've ended up spending a lot of time creating a report against a metric which wasn't the metric that you thought it was. So I would like to see, when I have the metrics in any of the screens, when I hover over one, that it pop up at least a sentence, if not a paragraph, saying what the metric is and not just that it's the measurement of the CPU. It should say how it's collecting that metric and what the importance is of that metric. That would be very helpful. 

Also, there are some metrics that are not included in the canned set. They call them super metrics in the tool, where you create your own metric. But the super metrics are not really reliable. It might be because we didn't create them correctly, although we did have help from VMware. They also don't translate into newer versions like a canned metric would. One of them is a vCPU to pCPU ratio. That's one that is missing, which should be very simple for them to collect.

So the help on the metrics is super important because there are so many.

It's a little bit too extensible. I love having that freedom to create. But I, and maybe three other people, understand the math enough to be able to use it. Everybody else says, “But where do I click to get that report?"

The other thing is, when we first bought it, our vision was to use role-based access, give application teams access to view a dashboard for their stuff. We found out that the vROps tool can't handle more than about 20 concurrent sessions. For a company our size, we have some 3000 applications. If all these application teams want to have a dashboard up, that somebody is monitoring all day - we had to say nobody gets that because then everybody wants it. That was another thing that we were buying the tool for that we can't do.

On a specific version, it has been stable. But the whole point of the tool is historical data and, twice now, we have lost all of our historical data, as we've tried to move to the next version of the tool. That really removes a lot of the functionality that we purchased the tool for.

The tool itself is not as scalable as we'd like it to be. We have seven or more data centers and we have collectors deployed throughout the whole environment, but we have capacity and performance issues with the tool. We'd like to expand the product so that we would have more capacity, but it has limitations.

We're a large customer and we have people onsite holding our hand saying, “Sorry. My bad." I think we could have better technical support on this product. We have great technical support on other fronts.

The initial setup was pretty straightforward.

Pricing is starting to get unmanageable. It used to be a better pricing deal. They were selling us the suite and we were taking advantage of most everything in that suite. 

Something that we're concerned about was in the general session this morning, here at VMworld 2018. They announced the Premier. It's going to be interesting. 

I'm just about ready to send our sales person a text, because we've been VMware shop for a decade and we bought the Enterprise-class license, which was the top-of-the-line, "get everything they have," and we thought we had everything they had. And then they came out with Enterprise Plus. That meant we had to go buy a whole bunch more stuff to convert everything to Enterprise Plus. Well, now they have come out with Premier. They're going to be giving us all sorts of reasons why we need to re-buy everything up to the Premier level. That's getting old with our people with the purses, the supply chain people. That's why they're looking at other options. They just went and bought Turbonomic and they're looking at other options so that we're not so wholly a VMware shop.

From an operations point of view and from an architectural point of view, which is me, it's great to get a whole mess of tools that all integrate together; we've got Lifecycle Manager so that we can make sure they're all at the right versions at the same time. But, on the other hand, you become a one-vendor shop. Nobody likes that. Our leadership is starting to bring in other companies to do various things.

We looked at a couple of other products. We looked at Turbonomic and Veeam. But we have a very large relationship with VMware, so we have a hefty discount. We are also very involved with using Log Insight and with using vRA. So we buy the suite and vROps is free. It would cost us more to buy those other tools individually. Since we have the suite, we have the licenses so it makes sense to use it.

That being said, we did buy Turbonomic about a month ago because operations management says vROps is not working for us for the real-time monitoring and automatically adjusting to the environment. vROps is working for historical work, so are still planning on using it for that. Turbonomic does not have historical, so they work together in a way. But We've had to buy, for a few more million dollars, another product whose function, we thought, vROps was going to do all of.

Depending on your use case, I would caution you to know what it does and what it doesn't do. We bought it with pie-in-the-sky hopes that it would really solve everything.

For this product in particular, it just doesn't seem that it was enterprise-ready for a company of our scale, when we tried to adopt it. It's been going through a lot of changes now. I haven't been as involved in the last year with it but I know that they've moved up another rev in the versioning and, of course, everything gets better with each rev. But it was a rocky start for us.

We're still using it and we still have hopes. We're not going to give it to the application teams, but we might give them a scheduled report that at least gives them a non-instantaneous look at their systems.

For vRealize operations, we are using it to manage our entire virtual operations. 

From the beginning, it has improved everything from a management perspective. It has eased our current operations from what we previously used. 

The solution has helped to reduce time to troubleshoot issues, improved quality of service to users, and provided cost savings through higher capacity of utilization.

From an admin and operations perspective, the solution is intuitive and user-friendly. It has a good view. It's easy for technical experts to present a view of where are we standing to management.

It is good from a starter perspective, but when we go to an advanced level, it needs improvement.

Our hands are tied by using this product. It is not as flexible as it could be. In some cases, we have been working with our TAM and account manager plus the support to provide us flexibility in the way we want to customize. However, that has not been happening so far. As the whole world moves towards open source, we would like to see some open source added to the tool. 

Stability is good.

The technical support is unsatisfactory. Some of the tweaks that we were looking for have not happened even though we requested them multiple times. That is one constraint. vROPs is a good tool, but for big organizations when we run over 20,000 to 30,000 VMs, we would like to customize it in our own way to monitor, operate, and connect operations into Continuous Improvement and Continuous Delivery (CI/CD). This is not happening.

We did not previously use anything else.

It's a good starter. If there is a company who has a small to medium business (or enrollment), it really works. If you have a large organization running 30,000 to 40,000 VMs, your network is very heterogeneous, your company has acquired lot of other companies, and enrollment is very scattered, it might not fit in well with the existing version.

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.

It was helpful in identifying the CPU, memory, and space utilization, which was very much important for us. We needed alerts when the utilization increased a lot, and we were able to inform the customers that we have a particular problem that could be the root cause of the problems that they might face later. They were then able to take some preventative measures in advance, which reduced a lot of problems.

It was very useful for regular monitoring, disk utilization information, and root cause analysis. It was also helpful in identifying why a specific issue is happening or why an error is occurring. 

It enabled us to be more proactive in anticipating and solving problems. We could know beforehand about the machines that might be at risk for high utilization. 

Alerts and monitoring were most valuable. It was also pretty user-friendly and interactive. I was able to generate good reports in PDF and HTML formats, which was really helpful.

The visibility that it provided for our infrastructure was pretty good. The snapshots were also useful.

vROps did a lot of monitoring, but in one case, we had to use Log Insight instead of vROps because vROps was not able to install the agent to enable us to have multi-monitoring. I don't exactly remember the case, but it involved monitoring all applications.

It wasn't exactly proactive. It was supposed to, but there were a lot of delays. It could also be because of our infrastructure and the way our network was set up. If vROps could be more proactive, that would be nice. It is nice to have the information beforehand, but when there is downtime, it takes a lot of time for us to be able to see an issue in real-time, which becomes a bit challenging. If there is a way to improve the data collection for the whole vCenter that would be nice because data collection takes a lot of time.

I used VMware for around five years, from 2015 till January 2021. Except for vCloud Director, I've used most VMware products such as vSphere client, Log Insight, and vRealize Automation.

It was pretty stable. I didn't find many errors while deploying the application and after the deployment.

Our environment didn't scale much, so I cannot comment on its scalability.

We had four vCenters. One was in Santa Clara, US. One was in Beijing, China. One was in Manheim, Europe, and one was in Singapore. We also had test centers, and we integrated vROps for testing there. We had one in King of Prussia and one in Switzerland. So, majorly, we had four vCenters for the production environment, and these vCenters worked with around 4,000 virtual machines.

I have not used VMware's support for vROps.

This was the first tool that we tried to deploy for monitoring.

I was involved in the initial setup of vROps. It was pretty straightforward. Most of the VMware products are pretty straightforward to install.

In terms of the implementation strategy, we have always followed the documentation provided by VMware.

We tried to evaluate many solutions, such as Prometheus, Dynatrace, Nagios, and PRTG. It was best for us to go with vROps because it is a VMware product, and it integrates best with VMware vCenter.

I would recommend vROps for an Enterprise environment. Based on my experience, it is a great tool to work with. Rather than having a big vCenter and then installing vROps, it is good to have it when you're starting with a vCenter. That's because data collection takes time, and it would become an overhead for vROps. In such a case, you might need a load balancer and multiple vROps. So, I would recommend having a vROps when you start building a vCenter. It will really help in scaling up the environment, and you'll also know if you'll need to replicate vROps or not.

We didn't use it for workload placement because we didn't have the load balancer for that. It didn't help much in decreasing the overall downtime, and it also didn't affect our operations when it comes to overall downtime due to performance issues.

I would rate vROps an eight out of 10.

We use it for capacity planning, troubleshooting, and monitoring of our environment.

The benefits of the solution are stability, uptime, and awareness of what's going on in our environment. By being aware of issues, potentially even before they happen - for example, we'll see trends and metrics that can tell us that there might be a problem coming in this environment; maybe it's 30 days down the road - lets us get in front of them before they're actual issues or cause an outage or impact to the actual business unit.

We're definitely seeing quicker time to resolution on problems. It's yet to be determined what kind of cost savings we're getting from capacity usage. I know that there are some features that are in the product that probably we're not leveraging yet, but they're there and I know that's something we're probably going to be able to leverage soon.

The most valuable feature is the ability to get a view of our entire environment in a single pane of glass. We're a very large company, so going from one interface to another to troubleshoot an issue, or even just to get capacity information, is time-consuming and not efficient. Being able to go to one place and get that information is very helpful.

With the latest version, it's definitely user-friendly. It has come a long way. Originally, I don't think it was, but here with the latest update, probably the last two updates, they've made it more and more user-friendly. They've streamlined it, made it more efficient, and made it more simple.

Any product is going to have room for improvement. As long as they keep innovating and listening to us, I think that's going to help.

One of the big areas that would help us in the future is to focus on using vROps more as a tool to help us respond to these CVEs and security vulnerabilities that are coming in today's world. We're getting CVEs upon CVEs about security vulnerabilities, whether it's a process, or architecture, or VMware bug. It would be nice to be able to have those come into vROps and help us track them across our environment. Once a vulnerability is established, we as a company have to address that vulnerability as fast as possible. It would be nice if we could integrate that into a vROps dashboard, which sees every host and every VM in the environment. If it was able to flag areas: "Hey, these are left to be remediated, these aren't," those kinds of thing would be helpful.

From a scalability perspective, the nice thing about vROps is it's more of a horizontal scale model. As our workloads increase, as our vCenters and different environments grow, vROps is easy to scale to consume that capacity by just adding another node. That can help. It keeps it from getting bogged down from not having enough resources. We can easily add a node in, it takes the additional load, and keeps up with our growth.

We're a BCS (business critical support) customer with VMware, so we already have a higher level of support. The BCS experience is great. They've been helping us with vROps if we have issues or troubles. No complaints there, it has been really good.

We had a lot of homegrown solutions and different products. We have Splunk, we're using Tableau, different reporting services that were based on gathering our own data, power CLI scripts, going out and individually running things against vCenters, pulling them back in, and then dumping them into something centrally that we could view for capacity. But it really was point-in-time, it wasn't real-time, it wasn't something that could even be predictive for us. We would look at it and say, "Well, that looked different last month so let me go look and see why," and then it was a lot more time-consuming to go about that method. It was more of a manual method.

vROps is a tool that gathers that data every five minutes, or whatever the time duration is that you have set for collections. We're more up to the minute, more quick to respond. I think it's a smarter product than homegrown stuff. That's why we moved away from the homegrown stuff.

When looking to select a vendor, they need to be innovative. They really need to not just answer the need but go above and beyond it. And then cost is a big factor as well.

The initial setup was very straightforward. To pull in an OVA, it was very easy to consume it. It was very easy to scale. There wasn't really much trickiness to setting it up. Do your homework, read through documentation, understand how the product is used with the different types of nodes and how they work. But it was very straightforward.

Cost is an issue on vROps. The Standard edition, for an organization our size, is just not useful at all. However, I like the price point of vROps Standard. But as a company, the Advanced is the minimum version that we can use, because we need the customization, we need a lot of the features that Advanced brings. But the price is substantially higher than Standard. 

It's always been a challenge to try to go in to my leadership and say, "Here's what I want." I've always got to go back and super-justify it and it's not an easy win. Whereas, if the pricing were closer to the Standard model, or maybe even a little bit above that, it's an easier conversation with leadership. But because it really feels like more than double the price, I'm not sure the value, double the money, is there, as an easy-sell to my leadership.

vROps is a ten out of ten. It's a really good product, I'm excited about it, I like using it. It's also one of those products that I like engaging with on a daily basis. It's easy to use, it's kind of fun and insightful to look at all your different environments and be able to get the answers you need. Honestly, it makes my leadership happy when they see the stuff that I generate out of it. That's always a plus too.

We use it for monitoring our VMs and our data storage.

It has certainly saved me from problematic phone calls from people like VPs in my company saying, "Hey, this service is down," because we know in advance when we are running low on disk space. It preemptively alerts us and we can go in and fix the issue. That is what I really wanted from it.

We would get calls a lot. We'd have servers that would suddenly start chewing up a ton of resources and storage and then, when they would run out, everything would stop. I would get that phone call at 2 am: "Why is this down?" and I would have to dig through and look. It's gotten rid of that part of it.

It is also helpful how vRealize looks at your data over time, at the performance of the machine over time. It can make assessments of the machine's health, based on that, for example, if there are sudden changes. That's helpful to look at because we've been able to see, on occasion, where machines suddenly start doing things that they weren't doing.

Sadly, we actually found a machine that had been compromised because it started doing a lot more work after hours and at weird hours. Apparently, somebody was using us for Bitcoin farming. It was helpful in that regard. That is another return on investment because I wasn't expecting to be able to do things like that.

It does exactly what I program it to do at this point, which is to tell me if I've got machines running out of disk space or over-utilizing CPU or memory. The monitoring component of it is the most valuable feature.

Intuitive? Probably. User-friendly? It could probably use a little work there. It is something of a beast. There's a lot that it can do but getting in there and getting everything working the way you want it to can be challenging. You have to dedicate more time than I've given to it.

It seems very stable. I haven't had any issues with the server going down. It's been pretty much hands-off. I set it up three years ago when we got it and it's still emailing me today, without any interference on my part. I probably need to go back and upgrade it.

It is pretty scalable. We really haven't gotten into building it out. We have a fairly small operation as far as VMware goes.

We really weren't using anything before. We tinkered around with some third-party products. Then I came to one of the VMworld conferences a few years back, and they were talking about - it was called something else before, like vCOPs, vCenter Operations. I sat through a spiel on that and realized it called out 90 percent of the things that I needed to know about and that I was getting calls on.

The initial installation was very easy, straightforward. Getting it to do the three things that I wanted it to do, in terms of emailing for those specific metrics, that was very easy to do. Beyond that, when I started looking at some other things it can do, it gets very complex very fast. There is a lot more to it.

The ROI certainly is apparent with the downtime being eliminated. As a college, if any of our critical systems go down, students can't register for classes, students can't get in and do things, and that means lost productivity for a lot of people - not just me at 2 am fixing something, or one of my guys fixing it.

We used ManageEngine, but that was more looking at the Windows side of things. I can't remember any of the others we looked at.

I would definitely suggest to colleagues that they use this solution. I would encourage them to take a training class on it so they can get more out of it, get their money's worth.

I rated it an eight out of 10. I like it. I think it could be a 10. There are things I'm not doing in there, so any difference between my score and a 10 is probably my own fault for not utilizing it fully.