VMware Aria Operations Reviews

• Reports
• Dashboards
• Email notifications
• Health, risks, efficiency badges
• Troubleshooting capabilities
• Auto rotation feature of dashboards for NOC displays

• With the use of dashboards, we can provide Business Units and customers a certain level of self-control over their virtual environments.
• Access can be restricted to only objects relevant for certain users/administrators.
• With the combination of email notifications of health issues and upcoming risks, administrators and engineers can respond in a preventive way instead of reacting after issues.
• The network administrators and engineers can monitor all NSX components with this product.
• The storage administrators and engineers can monitor physical storage components with this product.

Improvement can be achieved in reports automation when creating custom environments and dashboards.

It would be very useful and time saving if this could be included in the process of creating dashboards to generate a report based on the created dashboard. Also it would be handy if it would be possible to export all snapshot images in one click action.

We have been using the system for about 18 months now. We have just upgraded to 6.2 this month.

We have not yet encountered any stability issues.

Unfortunately, we encountered a limitation in version 6.2. In this version it is not possible to import data from another Operations Manager instance already running. The workaround is to first import on version 6.0 and then upgrade that instance to 6.2.

Technical support is good. Inside the vRealize Operations Manager in each section there is a direct link to the document center of VMWare containing technical documentation, and tutorials for that particular section.

We did use other solutions and still do. Especially certain hardware equipment needs to be monitored in an other way or is not yet supported in vRealize Operations Manager.
The reasons we chose this product are:

• Licensing model is the best choice for the way we provide services to our customers.
• Our virtualization platform is VMWare and we are implementing more components (currently LogInsight) to complete our Software Defined Datacenter.
• vRealize Operations Manager can easily integrate with all these components.

I would advise to make a design before starting actual setup.
A few examples of design considerations:

• More than one vCenter to monitor.
• Need for high availability.
• Need to migrate historical data from previous version.

The initial setup is very straightforward and relatively easy. Depending on design you can have certain choices during installation to fit your needs.

There are different versions and licensing models available.
I would advise to read this pdf: https://www.vmware.com/content.

We also considered Veeam One. Our choice for the VMWare SDDC is the best product for us.

Before purchasing this product, I would advise to install the 60-day trial (http://www.vmware.com/try-vmware.html) in a test environment and see if this is a fit for the organization as well as the administrators and engineers. In my opinion the way vRealize operations manager operates (and will be used) is different to most traditional monitoring solutions.

The most valuable features of VMware vRealize Operations (vROps) are capacity and performance management.

VMware vRealize Operations (vROps) can improve the Layer 3 hypervisor VM infrastructure because we do not manage other applications. We need a package, which is too expensive. We would like to manage native VMware applications, VMware native components, hypervisor, and storage, such as vSAN.

I have been using VMware vRealize Operations (vROps) for approximately two years.

The stability of VMware vRealize Operations (vROps) could improve. It can help us to build a dashboard report on a job, but it seems very slow to produce or deliver the dashboards. We are tunning it to make it go fast.

The support provided by VMware vRealize Operations (vROps) is average.

The initial setup of VMware vRealize Operations (vROps) was very minimal.

We are experts and we install VMware vRealize Operations (vROps) on a host, and we import an appliance, such as OVA, and we deploy it.

We have a team of four people that does the maintenance and support of the solution.

I would advise others that VMware vRealize Operations (vROps) is a good tool to manage VMware application components, for sending storage on RPMs. For example, if we have a basic hypervisor or storage based on VMware files, such as VMFS. It is a great tool for that.

I rate VMware vRealize Operations (vROps) a nine out of ten.

There is a newer version available which will have better features.

Our primary use case of this solution is that it helps us to monitor and troubleshoot our VMware environment.

This product has improved my organization because it has helped us with monitoring and troubleshooting our VMware environment.

The most valuable features would be that it helps you drill down the problems to the bottleneck of where it is which saves us time. We have to give time back to business and we cannot spend hours trying to figure out what happened.

I definitely find this solution to be intuitive and user-friendly. It's integrated with vCenter, so I think it is a good product.

This solution solves our problems. But every time I think it's perfect I come here and they add something new. 

It is stable.

We are from Portugal, so we are small environments, mostly SMB companies, but yes I think it will adapt to any kind of infrastructure.

Technical support is good, once you pass the first level. They know the product like no one else, so they always solve everything. 

We had some monitoring tools, PRTG and some of the stuff from SolarWinds, but it is integrated with everything from VMware. Everything is virtual so, I think it is the way to go.

The initial setup was very easy. We do not have a huge environment, we have eight ESX hosts, so it was pretty straightforward. It was easy to do.

Normally we have a partner or a VMware reseller that helps us implement the solutions.

We have seen ROI because the time we take to solve problems has decreased a lot, so that is the way we give back to the company in the investment.

We have tested some other solutions and they are not as integrated and as easy to manage. I would advise someone looking into this solution that one vendor is always a better option than three or four.

I would rate this solution a nine because normally I wouldn't give a ten. We do not have any problems with the product. It solves our problems. We now know if something is on the console and if there really is a problem. Before this, we had a lot of false positives. It digs into the problems and then at the end it just drops it. 

We use it to see the actual workloads of the VMs.

The benefits we see from it are the ability to quickly get reports for our bosses, determining the use of the environment, and that it lets us see the remaining capacity. For example, in some clusters where the resources are tight, it's giving us a good idea of what resources we really have left.

The most valuable feature is determining if more resources are needed, at the hypervisor level, based on the workload of the virtual machines that we have in our environment.

The descriptions are not quite as user-friendly as I would like but, for the most, it's part pretty user-friendly.

They could also improve on the badging nomenclature they have for batches in the system, for determining the health of a certain aspect of the system.

It's very stable.

It seems to be very scalable. I haven't scaled it, but we have people, contractors, who work for us who handle that.

We went with this solution because it was part of the user license that we have. It is part of the package deal for the Enterprise solution, so it was in existence before I joined the team.

In general, when selecting a vendor, the most important criterion is stability. If you don't have stability you've got big problems.

I couldn't necessarily say what our ROI is monetarily, but again, it goes back to finding information for reports that our bosses are asking for. For me, the ROI is in finding out what capacity is remaining in the clusters, the ESXi hosts.

I rate vROps at nine out of ten. To get to a ten it goes back to better explaining the badge labeling for batches.

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.

The primary use case of vROps is to balance our infrastructure, both from a predictive and reactive standpoint, for outage and maintenance.

The solution has allowed us to become more predictive, versus reactive, in terms of our infrastructure management.

It has helped to reduce the time needed to troubleshoot issues, improved quality of service to users, and provided cost savings through higher capacity. The primary benefit we're getting is from an operational standpoint. It has helped us to operationalize our processes and procedures. It has also helped us to stay ahead of our capacity planning so that we become more predictive, versus reactive. And then, the analysis features available with it allow us to do very high-level, enhanced root-cause analysis on events and issues that arise.

One of the most valuable features is the trending analysis of our environment to make capacity-planning decisions, in addition to providing real-time analysis of events.

I find it to also be intuitive and user-friendly. The layout, from a GUI standpoint, is somewhat logical. There are definitely some improvements made in the latest version, but I have not worked with the latest version yet. Overall, we find it relatively straightforward to work with.

One thing we'd like to see, although I think they already have done so, is moving away from Flash.

In terms of additional features, we'd like to see more integration with management packs, because one of the challenges we have is, depending on our third-party, we'll have to go outside of VMware to purchase management packs. If VMware increased the native management packs library, that would obviously help save us money and not have to rely on third-party solutions.

When it comes to stability, we haven't had any issues.

For the most part, the solution is within our initial requirements, although our requirements are changing and evolving. One definite item we would like is the capability to expand the license count per solution. That would help us to ensure we have a single pane of glass for the entire company, versus having various solutions for different environments within the company.

We are BCS (business critical support) customers and, for the most part, they have been able to help us when we do have issues, and escalate as needed. The only concern that we do have, at times, is the availability of that support. There have been times where, when we've needed support, we've had to, unfortunately, wait for that support, for an available engineer. But it's improving, and we'll continue using it.

It became apparent we needed to switch when our tickets-to-resolve timeline was significantly higher. We weren't meeting SLAs as we needed to. With the introduction of this solution, we were able to meet the demand, rather than just meet SLAs. Through the trending analysis that we can do, it allowed us to quickly and easily right-size the capacity from a cluster.

In addition, when issues did arise, it helped us to quickly identify what those problems actually were. The main advantage was time. We got a lot of time back that we could then use to innovate and optimize our environment.

I initially deployed the solution for our company. It's relatively straightforward. There's a lot of good online documentation and there's YouTube.

Our ROI is time. It has reduced the amount of time it takes to troubleshoot an issue.

We looked at a couple of VMware's competitors. One of them was VMTurbo (now called Turbonomic). The main reason we went with vROps was the ease of integration, ease of use, and the support behind it. The community behind vRealize is relatively large and that just made the decision that much simpler for us.

Also, from a cost standpoint, we were able to negotiate with VMware. And, with VMware, the deployment process was a lot simpler for us, and the training-learning curve for vRealize versus the other solution tended to be the easier, so that was also a factor.

We've been using it for approximately two years now. We originally upgraded from vCOps to vROps. We have also expanded our platform to include vRealize Log Insight which further helped us to understand and perform RCAs as needed, when events occur.

Get involved in the community. Get involved in performing hands-on labs. And, quite frankly, deploy it. Create use cases, create your test cases, and validate them.

The reasons I rate vROps at eight out of 10 are because there are always areas for improvement. In addition, the limited amount of management packs natively available through vROps is a huge factor. As you can imagine, as with most companies, we do use a gambit of other solutions and other hardware, and the ability to use vROps as a single pane of glass would allow us to have one solution for all, and make for easier integration.

The key for us is visibility into the infrastructure, both at the application layer and with performance of historical trends. Thus, the ability to drop in and see when an application has changed, what's gone wrong, and getting them to focus on a quick remediation.

Quick remediation of problems.

They could improve their consistency in execution.

I would like to see these additional features in the next release:

• Deeper dive analytics
• Better licensing models.

No issues. It's been good.

No issues so far.

We have contacted technical support in the past. They are very good. We do have a TAM resource on-site, which definitely gives us an in when we are having problems.

We weren't using anything previously for virtualization. We invested in this solution because we needed to stay ahead of our competition and landscape. It was the obvious choice for consolidating our datacenters and simplifying the infrastructure.

It seemed fairly straightforward, but I have very complex engineers.

IBM, PureSoftware, and Dell EMC.

Advice for anyone looking at VM solutions:

• Stay abreast of the changing technology, because it is moving fast. Simple is better for time to market.
• Do some PoCs and train your engineers.
• Research total cost of ownership, deployment time, and the complexity of their applications.

Our most important criteria when selecting a vendor:

• Reliability
• Peer reviews
• Technical support
• Their willingness to work with us.

The tool really gives our VM admins the ability to dig deep into the VMs and really get a feel for what's going on. That's really a gap that we had prior to this product. Application teams would claim performance issues, etc. Our team really didn't have the tools to get in and do that deep-dive analysis without logging onto host and doing some very deep, technical commands. Very few people were able to do that type of analysis and this tool has really allowed us to open that up to more of our team, to be able to get a quick idea of what's going on with a VM.

It gives us quicker time to resolution. If we're in an outage situation, our teams can quickly get in there and identify whether it is a storage issue, a network issue, or a compute issue. It gives them the ability to discover that pretty quickly and then, when there is an issue, we can go back and do root-cause analysis. It gives them that ability to dig deep in and not just see it was a network issue, but get more specifics and hopefully get to an actual resolution because of that long-term fix.

It's a very powerful tool. It gives us the ability to get a lot of visibility that we just did not have before. The capacity management side of it is very big for us as well. Just being able to understand you know are we getting the most out of our infrastructure or not.

The biggest gap that we have today is that it doesn't integrate with our ticketing system. We get alerts out of the system in an email but those aren't actionable alerts. We actually did another professional service engagement with VMware to try and tailor those alerts some. We have been able to do that, but it's still an email alert, where we'd really like for that to be a ticket, so that somebody can be responsible for taking action on that.

There's also some gaps with the ability to aggregate the data and show it at a higher level. You have to dig deep into the specific VM to get the information you want. Not just anybody can do that. We've been able to open it up to more people on the team, but it's still not a completely intuitive tool that they can just pick up and use.

It seems to be a stable tool. We did have some issues early on with getting the kind of configuration correct. We've actually had to rebuild it, I believe two times, because of some bad configuration to start out with and, I guess, some databases getting too large. Outside of that, the tool has been pretty stable for us. For the most part, it's pretty reliable.

It seems scalable as well. It does a really good job of looking at the entire environment and aggregating all that data together. Going back to the scale and the database issues that we have had, I think that had to do with the amount of data that we were collecting on the number of VMs we were collecting. Now that we've got that fine-tuned a little better, it does seem to be pretty scalable in meeting our needs in that aspect.

We have used technical support. I don't know that I have a very solid answer regarding it, though. That would be more of our technical guys that were in there, day-to-day, dealing with it. I do know that we've had issues we've been able to resolve, but how easy that was, I'm not all that sure.

We really weren't using anything different. We were just using the vCenter functionality, really knew there was a gap there, and looked at the tools on the market at the time. We went with this tool because it really did give us that ability to dig deep into the VMs and get that technical deep dive. With some of the other tools, it was more of trusting the algorithms to tune the VMs correctly. We really wanted a little more control than that; that's why we went with this tool.

We use professional services to do the setup; that definitely helped us there. We did have configuration issues. There were some things that maybe weren't apparent at the time we went through the install. Over time, support realized there were some issues and made some different recommendations. I'll say using professional services definitely gave us a good foundation that we at least were doing things according to best practice at that time.

VMTurbo was the main one that we looked at.

The most important criteria when I’m selecting a vendor like VMware is the relationship. We have a good relationship with VMware. Also, whether it is a proven product, and then obviously cost is always at the top of the list.

I recommend vROps. I recommend professional services engagement, as well, especially for the tuning of the alerts, because it comes out of the box with just a lot of information. It takes a bit to get through that and kind of narrow it down. Your team either needs to really understand and be able to spend the time to do that, or get somebody to help you that's been through that experience before.