VMware Aria Operations Reviews

In many cases, I have worked with vCenter within our virtualization environment. Some problems result in vCenter becoming corrupted, making it unusable. Consequently, I resort to utilizing it as a standalone server for each issue. This is the primary problem I've faced over the past two years, and for every problem that arises, I manage to resolve it. I've observed that using each server independently is the standard practice, and I occasionally utilize it for various purposes.

I have found the backup extremely useful in my use cases.               

In this vCenter, my wish is to establish a backup system that doesn't require VIN. It involves creating a backup ticket directly from the vCenter for the virtual machines and performing the backup task for each server, ensuring redundancy without the need for additional software. This would be a preferable solution if all of this could be accomplished within vCenter itself.

I have been using VMware Aria Operations for the last two years.

I would rate the stability a seven out of ten.

I would rate it seven out of ten. Based on my experience, there have been occasional issues with vCenter. One of the recurring problems involves vCenter going offline, and when that happens, I'm unable to resolve it, necessitating the installation and reintegration into the system. This has been an ongoing challenge throughout its entire lifespan. However, when it comes to accessing the servers individually, there's a different issue. While using the solution, there are frequent occurrences where, when I make changes to a machine, such as adjusting RAM or other resources, I sometimes encounter a situation where the data doesn't load properly, resulting in a yellow screen. To rectify this, I have to refresh the page and then make the necessary changes to the machine. While this can be somewhat frustrating, it's not overly difficult for me to manage, and I've learned to handle it without considering it a significant problem.

I haven't taken any formal courses on vCenter, yet I've managed to install and troubleshoot them successfully. I've relied heavily on online resources, and the wealth of information available on the Internet has proven to be a valuable asset. I haven't sought support from any specific company. However, it's possible that in the future, I might encounter a problem that I can't resolve on my own, even with online resources. At that point, reaching out to a company for assistance might be necessary.

It is not difficult but sometimes requires extensive reading and knowledge to install it. It's not a complex task, but I need to fully comprehend everything in order to install it. Sometimes network-related issues can complicate matters, and having a strong background in network infrastructure, including switches and routing, is crucial for successful execution. If there's a preference, I'd appreciate guidance on which one to install. Also, it would be convenient if I didn't have to create everything from scratch on the switch. Some elements may need to be set up physically, and then I can connect them to two switches for network installation, requiring a three-step installation process. The deployment is scheduled for two months to complete the installation and server replacement. This timeframe should encompass all aspects of the solution.

It's not particularly challenging, but it's important to remain close to the users, ensuring that the data is functioning correctly. We need to verify its operation for a week. Out of ten servers, everything is working fine. Then, I'll proceed to another server, following a similar approach, to ensure it is safely set up. We won't be dealing with desktop servers; it's more about efficient and timely execution.  

I would rate it six out of ten.

There's a smaller category that stands out due to its affordability, especially for recent versions, which I rate as four or five in terms of value. However, if you're looking for a vCenter with older, more advanced features, it comes at a significantly higher cost, and I would rate it around ten. They provide us with a choice between a recent version and one integrated, and I lean towards the former.

I would rate it overall an eight out of ten. 

We provide solutions related to VMware, Docker, and Kubernetes for banking data centers. 

We use this product to monitor virtualization infrastructure and different resources that we use in our project. We implement vROps into data centers that are working together to develop vROps solutions with different interfaces. One of them is Dell EMC Adapter which is added to vROps to monitor and collect various logs related to Dell EMC storage. We also add another plugin to monitor HP.

We host around 1,200 to 1,300 virtual machines. Our data centers have more than 50 physical servers.

Before using vROps, we used SolarWinds and ManageEngine, as well as Cisco NCM, to monitor different resources in our infrastructure. But we established a new project for customers and unified all the monitoring solutions in just one platform, vROps. vROps helps us to predict many issues and problems that we may face in the future. It helps us to optimize many configurations because we have good visibility into resource usage.

Because we can predict many issues and problems, we can solve them and provide options for our customers to change configurations and optimize their environments. We are able to fix problems in advance. That helps us to decrease the amount of downtime in a given month. After using vROps, in the second year we were able to offer our customers a new SLA at 99.97 percent. That has proven to be a great benefit for our company.

It is very efficient. By using vROps we have fixed many problems. In terms of the efficiency in operations, monitoring team members are very satisfied because they have dashboards to monitor specific resources and details.

Once we started using vROps, we were able to change out servers and replace them with new versions because we could detect different problems related to the old resources we were using in our environment. With Cisco NCM, you can't detect these problems. Using vROps enables us to detect problems related to the hardware and the issues that arise from hardware error.

After one year of using vROps, we integrated it with vRealize Log Insight and vCenter. vROps and vRealize Log Insight are integrated very well. The integration helps us to gather a lot of event details sent by Log Insight to vROps. The integration between these two products helps us to go into the detail of events. It helps us to monitor problems and detect issues. Then, it provides recommendations to take action and solve problems directly.

One of the most attractive features in vROps is collecting information, logs, and events and, after that, providing proactive predictions about usage of resources. vROps also offers recommendations. For example, in the next two months we might face problems with CPU usage. vROps predicted and forecasted these issues in advance. That's a very useful feature.

In terms of user-friendliness, vROps provides a unified dashboard and you can easily create different dashboards to measure different resources. The UI is very friendly. Our team members are very satisfied with working vROps in comparison to different solutions like ManageEngine and SolarWinds. vROps is very unified and integrates with different solutions.

As a result of using vROps we have easily been able to reduce a lot of unused virtual machines in our infrastructure.

There is room for improvement in asset management and resource usage.

Around two years ago, we installed and configured a vROps project. I'm responsible, as a team leader and the VMware engineer, for different technologies on VMware, like vSphere, vROps, VMware vRealize Suite, as well as container infrastructure.

Because we need high-availability for our solutions and to ensure that our customers have monitoring solutions available, we established a cluster in vROps. vROp provides you a clustering installation for high-availability and sustainability. We had two data centers and we created two vROps that are synced together as Active-Active. If one version is down, the second one is active and provides monitoring.

Because of sanctions in my country, we don't have direct support. We use a partner. Although we can solve most of the issues within our team, we do use our partner for specific problems or issues that we can't solve.

If you study the guidelines, the setup process is very clear. We didn't have any specific problem installing and implementing vROps in our projects. If you have experience in the installation of vROps, there are no problems.

The deployment took about one month. We studied and reviewed the features and implemented a pilot environment in our company. In terms of the specific plan that we provide to customers, we implement vROps and start a one-month period where it is in a test environment. The day after that we move vROps into the production environment.

We make use of just one license for vROps and we don't need other licenses for things like SolarWinds and Cisco NCM.

I recommend implementing vROps by first setting up a pilot environment. You need to become a master in vROps to make the best use of its features. If you don't have any experience with a lot of the features provided by vROps, you can't easily use them, and you can't understand the difference between vROps and SolarWinds and other products.

So I would recommend studying it in detail. After that, you can make use of it, because vROps is a bit complex.

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. 

Getting firsthand information in the environment straight to the people that would respond to those actual alerts and events, in real time, versus a phone call or having to play catch up after the events happened. We're being very proactive with the tool up front.

The ability to create custom dashboards for specific application groups and let them do some of the in-house monitoring themselves. Also, the ability to deep dive into their applications where these groups didn't have that visibility before. We've actually reduced our ROI because people are actually more hands-on with the tool whereas before it was just a small select group of people that you would call, "Hey, how's my VM doing or what's going on?"

Now, the user is actually engaged, so it's actually helped us out tenfold.

In terms of using vROps, it's actually educated small groups of VM professionals to everyone who has access to the VM world regarding their responsibilities. From an application perspective, it develops stuff, therefore they can actually see how their application's behaving in the environment versus having to call somebody else and actually see what's going on. Thus, they get a firsthand experience from development rolling right into production.

One of the big challenge with vROps is there so much to learn as a user as you're doing it. It is also getting these dashboards in front of the executive committee, so they can actually see the environment. It's much easier to give a manager a dashboard of his environment, but he drives the events down to his team, "Why are we getting these alerts, what's going on in our environment?"

It's easier for him to do it because he's the boss of that area. Versus the support team, the VMware team, or the vROps team, in this case, driving these issues. I think we need to come up with more intuitive, outta the box dashboards, something I've even talked to about Blue Medora with.

Help us out-of-the-box. Help us get that initial footprint up and running. We'll build from there.

vROps 6.5 is rock solid. We have 6.6 in our development environment. We're gonna look to roll it out next month and all the reviews have been very positive so far.

We did an internal customer survey: The first 100 people that we gave dashboards and access to, plus the customer survey internally came back over 90% positive.The customers that we're giving it to really like it, but they want more. As those requirements come in, we're gonna build on it, and hopefully deploy as we roll along.

We have multiple locations around the world as well as in the United States. Our main data center is in New Jersey, but we have another main data center in Georgia and flight operations in Louisville.

It's really helped us out in terms of managing our environment.

They been good. We have used tech support for vROps because it's relatively new in our environment, and they've been wonderful, very responsive. They have helped get us in and "Fisher-Price" some of this stuff from a technology perspective, so we know exactly where we're going.

We had no tool to give us visibility into the virtual environment. We had the traditional tools from the enterprise management suite of tools, the BMC and IBM tools, but really nothing that catered to the virtual environment. This was our opportunity to actually get something to do a deeper dive and get more visibility into the organization.

The initial setup was out-of-the-box.

It comes up petty clean, but the layers of complexity that we introduced into the environment obviously changed some of those parameters. It's a learning experience, as with any other VM port tool.

There's a couple big players in this address space obviously. One of the major considerations for us was our aggressive timeline which we were looking to deploy, and that our deployment head already reached, not just a New Jersey-Atlanta implementation, but throughout the world as well. So the flexibility to expand across the globe is really an important piece of it.

Flowchart your dashboards first before you do anything technical within the tool itself. It's much easier to take what you have on paper and transpose that off to an actual flowchart or a diagram. It's always easier to clone a dashboard than create one yourself.

It'd be easier if you had a repository of dashboards from a VMware perspective. Whereas, as a user, I can go to that repository and clone one, then customize it for my environment. Clone is your friend.

I use the solution since I am in an industry associated with training where I train the customers on products, like VMware Horizon and VMware vSAN. I also take care of areas like cloud management and automation, along with vRealize Operations Manager (vROps) and VMware Avi Load Balancer.

VMware Aria Operations is a good monitoring tool, as it gives customers a lot of visibility into the VMware environment. It is a good tool for reporting, optimizing, collecting history, and generating good dashboards. Overall, it's a good solution.

Capacity planning and workload optimization are good areas in the tool. Dashboard has good capability.

I don't see any weaknesses in the solution because the customers don't ask for it. I don't think I have seen any customers saying that they didn't find a particular component or they didn't miss out on any component. I think it's a good tool overall. I have seen a lot of improvement, and a lot of metrics are being reported, especially the super metrics that the customer builds. I find it quite handy. Overall, I think I have no complaints. I have not seen many complaints from the customers.

There is always room for improvement in the tool, such as adding more metrics or dashboards and making workflows easy. The tool should have an easy workflow with some guided steps to make it simpler from the customer's perspective.

In the future, I think AI will be the big story in the coming days, so I think that may be embedded as part of the tool or maybe something to open the deeper product in terms of integrations, depending on the ecosystem and how the customers work and how they report. Depending on the vast ecosystem, how the customers have the different applications moving around, and maybe a more application-centric approach model could be some improvements in the tool.

I have been using VMware for ten years. I have four to five years of experience with VMware Aria Operations. My company is a training partner for VMware.

I think users generally do not complain a lot about it, but I don't know because now VMware has been taken over by Broadcom, so I don't know how the support works. I think, generally, the users have some complaints now that support has gone bad over a period of time. Previously, the support was far more efficient.

I have not previously worked with VMware Aria Operations. When it comes to monitoring tools, I have not used any products. Long back, I delivered training for Microsoft System Center Operations Manager.

I have no idea of the tool's pricing, so I absolutely have no idea because I am just in training. I don't deal with anything related to pricing.

I don't know how to use the analytics capabilities. I know the tool does a lot of analysis. It generates a lot of reports, and then I think users primarily use it for capacity planning and performance optimization.

The customers are using it to generate dashboards and intuitively look into the VMware environment, the virtual machines, and they do application monitoring. And I want to do more on the performance optimization also. So at times, they see a lot of wastage on the resources. So these are the challenges that they're trying to address.

In terms of how the tool aids our company's customers with AI-driven decision-making, it is an area that we have not touched as of now lately, but I am not too aware of that side of the story or how the customers would be impacted or would be using that.

I recommend the tool to others.

I absolutely have no control over what companies use the tool because I have customers who generally come in for the training. They either already have the tool or are already in the implementation phase. When it comes to the recommendation side of the story, we don't deal with that angle.

I rate the tool an eight out of ten.

I use VMware Aria Operations for logs in my company. I just use it to manage the logs and to see what is happening in the security logs. VMware vCenter is used to deploy virtual machines.

I specifically use the tool for logging and looking over the various traffic flows happening within VMware. It is easy to track and see what is happening where, and it can easily figure out solutions if there are any problems inside VMware's access management tools.

As VMware is moving to Broadcom, I feel the support is becoming really bad. There are some areas VMware needs to look into, specifically regarding the connectivity provided by the tool. My company has been facing the aforementioned problem with Aria Operations, and I think it has been more than two months now, and still VMware hasn't found any patches for it. My company is not able to figure out what exactly the problem is with the tool. I am not sure if there is some problem because of the movements. I think that in terms of where the customer experience lies, I feel I have had a bad experience for two or three months, and it keeps on happening, which is impacting my production. I am not sure if VMware is able to find a solution with the product I use or if there is some other problem. There are some current issues with the support provided by Broadcom, making it an area where improvements are required.

I have been using VMware Aria Operations for three years. I am a customer of the product.

The stability of the product is something that depends on how much work a user has with the tool. If you have a very good experience with the tool, then you can do things in a very good procedure. The tool's initial deployment went well with the support from VMware. VMware's support is really good, but because of Broadcom there are some problems. Initially, the new product's implementation and deployment went well with the support from the solution.

Scalability is easy in VMware Aria Operations. The only things you need to manage are the backups and how much expansion you want with the tool. If you take a product from Microsoft or VMware, both work really well for an initial three or four years. Adding something new would mean taking a different approach, and that would depend upon the company's expansion.

My company uses just one function of the product, which is specific to our environment. There might be some other functionalities in the product that might help with certain enhancements in the area of logs, but we don't have the exact scenarios for which we can use the tool's certain functionalities.

If I specifically talk about VMware's support, then the support offered is very good, especially if I don't consider VMware's integration with Broadcom. I rate the tool's support a nine out of ten. I am not sure if I can comment on Broadcom's support services since it is still in the initial stages.

Positive

VMware vCenter is used to deploy virtual machines.

VMware solutions are easy to install. There are some available steps to install the tool and if we follow the steps, I think it is a good solution to work with for anyone.

The tool doesn't take much time to deploy. I am not sure of the time required to deploy the product because our company uses the solution for a specific function, so I believe that it might also have some other functions. The functions my company uses for logs are very easy to deploy since, just after connecting the solution, it starts getting all the logs.

It is an easy solution to use, and you need to invest in it only one time by looking at your personal usage and expansion plans. Getting a machine and everything within the solutions and bringing in the tool where you have some availability shortage need to be done only once, after which you can expand it instead of buying a fresh machine for A certain period of time, which can be an expensive affair. A product starts from the day you create a machine in the cloud solution. The solution also provides users with some features and facilities that are specific to the licensing models you have from the tool. Considering how much and what type of licenses you have, the cost might be reduced. For expansion purposes, you don't need to think about new tools because you already have the solution you purchased from VMware. With whatever expansion scope is available in the tool, it is easy to expand the solution to a few more servers. If you are going with other solutions for expansion purposes apart from VMware, then there is a cost involved. The tool is easy to use, but from the cost perspective, there might be a huge difference between other tools and VMware. You have to invest less in cloud solutions because you pay as you work with the tool. You can deploy one machine and then deploy another machine tomorrow. With VMware, you need to invest just once, after which expansion options are already available in it.

If we talk about the cloud solutions that are available in the market, I think that instead of collaborating with VMware and Microsoft or with some other solutions, VMware should focus on providing good cloud solutions. VMware should not take advantage of any other products in the market to provide the cloud version of its products since its pricing might change. For people who don't want to move away from VMware, it can be a pricey product. If you compare the prices of VMware and the cloud solutions along with the components that you may use, I feel that it may be costly.

There is no specific maintenance required for the product, and usually you get an advance notice if something like that is required. It is up to the user to schedule the maintenance as per their timeline.

I have not specifically faced any challenges in managing the solution in our virtual environment. Earlier, there were some problems with the tool.

If the product is able to fulfill your requirements, then I would say that VMware is a good product for you.

I rate the tool an eight out of ten.

We use the application for capacity analysis and incident or threat analysis. We can fetch out reports and troubleshoot any incidents using it.

The application's capacity analysis feature gives complete insights into how many computing resources we may need soon. It helps us to procure the hardware accordingly.

The UI interface of the application has been stagnant for a long time. It could be improved to provide a good experience for the users.

We have been using the application for ten years.

After the implementation, I never had any issues with the platform's stability.

It is a scalable platform. It has become more user-friendly and supports a broader environment than previous versions. In my earlier experience, I had installed 4000 to 6000 virtual machines and those many hosts.

Along with the product, I am using Log Insight from VMware. Also, I have used SRM in the past.

I have been using different versions of the tool for a long time. Thus, the initial setup process was relatively easy and error-free. It is deployed both on-premise and on the cloud. It took a couple of hours to configure all the prerequisites.

It is a cloud-friendly application. Compared to other platforms, it is more stable, scalable, and easy to configure and deploy.

I rate it a nine out of ten, leaving one mark for more improvements or enhancements.

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.