What needs improvement with VMware Aria Operations?

It could be more proactive. Even though it's not originally designed as a monitoring tool, it could be adapted to provide monitoring functionalities.

If, on a particular VM, we have more computing resources, then we can monitor IT operations for a particular fifteen days. With the tool, we can reduce the computing resources on particular VMs, and it is the type of monitoring we have done using the tool. It would be good if the tool gives more monitoring features like the ones offered by the other monitoring solutions, especially in areas like dashboards. Using critical alerts on the email also gives the same information on the dashboard for particular data to L1 team members so that they can continuously monitor particular VMs with VMware Aria Operations, but if the host goes down, it just goes down. If the host goes down, such information is not sent to the user via email. We have just been notified about such incidents via VMware vCenter, but when we are off duty, the issues should be sent via email to us.

The only area of concern when using the integration features is when we want to forward the logs from VMware vRealize Log Insight to Apache Kafka. Apache Kafka is an enterprise solution for data management. We cannot forward the logs to Apache because we cannot find the right solution. Currently, whatever our company raises goes to GSE. The technical support person has to start from scratch, so he doesn't have the knowledge on the HSBC side. There are a lot of issues. There is probably a need to sort the account management layer only. Account management strategy is an area of concern where improvements are needed.

There are some challenges with the tool right now after Broadcom's acquisition. The major challenges associated with the product stem from the fact that after Broadcom's acquisition of VMware, all partners are no longer VMware partners. One has to reapply for Broadcom's partnership, which is a very time-consuming process. Broadcom seems to be confused since it does not have the exact partner strategies that a product needs to have in place. Broadcom does not provide a good pricing mechanism, and it also has some other issues in areas like distribution. Previously, VMware used to use Aptec, an Ingram Micro company. Broadcom has some issues with Aptec, so currently, it does not have a deal with Aptec, and everything is messed up. Broadcom does not have a proper distribution mechanism, so we have delays in getting codes and all that. After so many reminders, once we get the codes, things are still very time-consuming, and the prices are still not good. My colleagues who work with VMware products were opening support cases on VMware's portal, which has now become Broadcom's portal, which does not have enough information like VMware's portal. Although Broadcom has been trying to integrate all of it with its own portal while also attempting the existing VMware portal with the Broadcom portal, the migration does not seem to be successful. Broadcom has missed out on a lot of data, which means that previous service tickets that were generated under VMware won't have any records. You cannot use a learning mechanism from existing information, which makes it a time-consuming process. We have to go back to the existing information from VMware to figure out what the solution is for a problem. With the acquisition of Vmware by Broadcom, we have to do all things from scratch, and all such things are very painful, and customers, partners, and our company feel troubled. Everyone is trying to see how to get rid of the vendor. We are just trying to find an alternate product. The pricing mechanism is not available here. There are some distribution issues, and there is not enough information on the portal. The migration process from VMware to Broadcom actually messes up a lot of data. I believe that the scalability area of the product has scope for improvement, and I say this based on the feedback received from my team.

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.

The solution’s pricing could be improved.

The first area of improvement is cost. VMware licensing is always a bit costly. It has never been an open-source tool or something like that. So there are costs associated with that. Another thing is that you somehow need to have high-end people to perform the integrations with vROps as well. It's not as easy as it seems to deploy and integrate it with the different systems you want to monitor. It is user-friendly, but everything needs some specific skill sets. For example, if you go for even vRealize Automation, it comes as a bundle. So vROps is just one part of vRealize Automation suite. So, we need to know the product before we can start deploying it or start using it. We need to have people who have experience with specific tools before we can use them in our day-to-day operations. So, for me, based on my experience, costing is one thing, and then there are the integration challenges that our company faces. And along with that, it does take up a bit of resources as well. It is resource-intensive.

After the automation, the code changes are implemented as well as CPU changes in VMs, which require a reboot. Enhancing automation features without interruption would be beneficial.

The product's support services need improvement.

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.

They should make the report-generating feature user-friendly and customizable. Also, they should add automation features to store or delete the files in the database.

They keep improving and updating their apps over time. In each new version, we get lots of good features; thus, I don't have any concerns. They should include an integration feature through which we can connect to different vendors by installing a small plugin.

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.

We would like to see an improved licensing model to be set up for this solution. The current model charges per CPU, as opposed to being product-based, which would allow us to monitor our complete virtual infrastructure under a single license.

The deployment of the solution can be improved by making it less complex. The licensing cost is high and needs to be reduced.

Administration and growth can be improved. For instance, if we're a large organization, the metrics continue to get collected in this environment and continually fill up, so we need to expand the cluster. Hence, more resources are always required.

In the next release, vROps should add integration with Apache OpenStack.

In terms of what could be improved or added to VMware vRealize Operations (vROps), from my experience, it needs more work in the ITSM space because my company never used it as an IT service management tool.

I'd like to be able to access some demo sessions to enable a deeper understanding of the product to help our clients because it's quite a complex solution.

Monitoring is useful but if the solution can't automate or function without my input, it's a waste of my time. That's where I found out there are some issues with this product, there are elements that are not as intuitive as they could or should be. My problem is that I think it stays static too long, it doesn't continue to look at the changes. I would like to see better remediation, automation, and better connection with specific security pieces. I'm not talking about firewalls. Firewalls are beginning to lose favor in a lot of the environments that I deal with. I need products that give me a zero-trust architecture, and this solution still doesn't provide that.

If this tool can integrate with other products, for example, those that monitor the network devices or any other storage devices, it will be very beneficial.

There are some problems with integration, particularly with Slack, though these have been improved in the latest release.

The solution could improve by having more APIs, customized alerts, and documentation. In the next release, there should be better integration with microservices.

I want vROps to have wider compatibility with older hardware. In this country, many companies have older hardware, so sometimes we can't support all the newest features. Often the old hardware manages and hosts mission-critical applications, but we have trouble migrating to newer hardware that supports the latest features.

VMware vRealize Operations (vROps) should improve instant monitoring. Currently, the monitoring is on an interval of five to ten minutes, if I want to know what is happening now I cannot.

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.

They need to improve the capacity and infrastructure planning side of things. Also, I would like to see them integrate more stuff, with more detailed monitoring and different cloud providers.

vROps is user-friendly, but configuration is a little bit hard. It is also hard if you want to customize it for your data center, especially without VMware training. The user interface should be improved so that a new user can easily configure it for his own use.

The older versions are not user-friendly. If you have an operations center, you can put a big monitor with its dashboards so you can see what is going on in your platforms. However, there is no real-time. It takes about five minutes to refresh info. It is a good option if you need to see the entire landscape of the solution, e.g., the CPU, memory, and disks. For example, if you have plugins for VxRail, and there is a problem, will you be notified? They could mix in parts of VMware Skyline into vROps to make it more efficient. In a previous version, you could click on a cluster to see a lot of information about efficiency, e.g., when you will run out of memory, CPU usage, and RAM in percentages. In newer versions, you see this information in megahertz and kilobytes, not percentage. I don't like this change so much. If you need to present information to your boss or Director of IT, the information would be better with a percentage. Now, you have only a big number and don't know the percentage of use that you are getting from the VMs. I don't know why they changed it, but I liked the percentage version more than getting the numbers for megahertz of memory. Also, kilobytes of memory is a very large number. For a simple view, gigabytes or terabytes is better. With the What-If Analysis, if you put some information in, and then add another workload, it is not possible to view the two workloads in the What-If Analysis. For example, if you have a customer who wants to up your sizing by 30% more, and then you have another customer tool which needs sizing, how can you leverage resources? If you add these two customers, then your sizing might be 70%, but you only have 30% of your resources free. I would like to see more information about public cloud plugins with Amazon, Google Cloud, and Azure. This is really important in the future. Companies are moving to public clouds to maintain their workloads since they don't have downtime, which makes for very stable platforms. In the future, they could add a central administrator for vROps. For example, if you have a large environment from multiple countries, then you need to look at the landscape for performance and forecasting.

Lately, the chargeback site has improved, but it could be simpler. You need to create your own dashboards. It should be simple to get a virtual machine and break down the compute and storage costs. It is not real-time. It takes samples every five minutes. Therefore, we are not using it for real-time purposes.

The solution can improve by offering more flexible integration with other platforms or products, such as Hyper-V or Azure. Not everyone uses VMware. It would be beneficial to have a more open-source concept for integration, creating more visibility across multiple clouds. Sometimes, from a normal user's perspective, I feel like I want to get to the main dashboard faster because there are a lot of options to get to the final step. To get to our main dashboard on Windows machines, you need to click about 10 times and change a lot of options. It would be better if they could organize it to be only three to five steps.

The workload placement can be improved. It can be more diversified because it does not provide many options with respect to segregating the workload. The what-if analysis section is not very advanced and there is a lot of room for improvement. For example, it should include a wider spectrum when we talk about the data center cost assessments and the data center workload assessments. It should be able to consider a use case and predict what the capacity will be after a specified period of time.

Technical support is normally good but there is sometimes a delay in their response.

I would like to have more documentation, in the form of knowledge bases, that better explain the technology, related products, and what the capabilities are. Having an installation guide that assists with installation and integration would be helpful.

When it comes to policies, they need to fine tune things to make it easier. It is a bit difficult setting up policies.

We integrated vROps with vRealize Log Insight, but it was not helpful to me. It was not giving me any good data. Another area where there is room for improvement is an area which I've not looked at: cloud management and how efficiently it can do it. Also, while it is able to do VMware management very effectively, if you have any other hypervisor solution, I don't know how effectively it would work. It should scale to other infrastructure also.

For the initial setup, there should be some sort of auto discovery of the environment. That should be enabled. It has the ability to discover a main node, but it could still be made easier, to reduce the initial configuration and setup time.

Three or four years back, regarding business case data, when looking at migrating to public cloud, we had to feed in the pricing of all the public clouds manually. I don't know whether that information is now available automatically, but that would help. Similarly, if it could help with calculating on-prem costs, based on their experience, it would help customers determine whether to remain on-prem or move to the cloud.

There is room for improvement when it comes to the integration with Active Directory. Sometimes I need to log in to the application using my Active Directory account, instead of using the regular admin for vRealize Operations. If I want to deploy this tool to more users, I need that.

If I could integrate with vCenter with vROps, then I could execute more things by managing vSphere from within vROps. That would be great.

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

The database services in the tool as backup services are friendly and can be deployed in the release to production. However, in the new features, I would like to include more online documentation that can help service generate early alerts. A service provider must be generated and coupled to new technologies, as a service provider we have advanced and generated as the advancement of technology, with the help of Nutanix we have learned to identify several tools and compare them. l can help service administrators generate early alerts, for a service provider should be generated and coupled to new technologies. As a service provider we have advanced and generated with the advancement of technology, with the help of Nutanix we have learned to identify several tools and compare

Certificate Management should be simplified for non-technical staff members. There is a need for revamping the reporting and improvement on Dashboard to include statistics, which can be used by Finance people on capacity management. There is a need for improving integration with other hybrid virtual environments.

This product, of course, has room for improvement. A feature that I would like to see is one that allows you to deploy clusters within multiple geo-locations. At this point, this is not supported and I think it would be really nice to have clusters across two data centers in scenarios when you have storage vSAN.

I would like to see them get a holistic view of the organization, not just focusing on the server and the state that it's running on but to widen that out from the end user all the way through. It's a key critical part but actually, it needs to bring outside of that, then to the networking elements and the inter-dependencies that are in hospital solutions.

I wouldn't say that this solution is user-friendly. You need to know a lot of tricks to know how to use it. It's quite buggy and quite slow when it comes to loading. They should improve on the speed, first of all, because it is slow to load and then you can't use it at all and you need to keep refreshing the browser. They can also improve the GUI, like the placement, some buttons here and there. In short, they should make it simple.

The speed of the user interface and the upgrade process of the components are features that I would like to see included in the next release.

I don't find this solution to be intuitive and user-friendly. It's a large and difficult product to learn. We need to search for more information. I would like to see them add customizable dashboards and customized views.

As they're able to add in more vendors for hardware to be able to pull information from different firewalls, switches, or other vendors, I would like to see where we can get more of a complete view of what's going on in the network. That would make this solution better.

I would like to see improvement from the application layer. They have add-ons for SQL and Exchange. It would be nice to see some additional application support being developed further down the line.

They can change the interface for the 6.7 vSphere that would make it more simple and more friendly. I think changing the interface of the operations manager would be good. It's friendly to use right now but it would simplify it more.

The integration points can use improvement. We currently use a lot of third-party management packs to get insights for SQL, HP, or Dell EMC. If we could have more integration built in as a standard feature that would make it slightly better.

I know that they talk a lot about AI and a sort of forecasting ahead of time. It's a good application, but it has to wait for a certain period of time to actually do an analysis. If it would give you that ahead of time, or even forecasting, it would be really improved.

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

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.

At times we find the solution to be intuitive and user-friendly. It's getting better. Version 6 was terrible but 7 is a lot better. There is still room for improvement. It needs to be a bit more intuitive. I would like to see more integration between vRealize Operations, Log Insight, and Network Insight. It would be nice if they worked a bit better together.

I would like some training or sessions around self-healing and automation. So, if a problem occurs, we can automatically take action on a problem which is occurring.

It would be nice if it could tell me more about my hardware, if there were any updates on the network that should be deployed, if some firmware needs to be deployed on the server, etc.

In vCenter 6.7, there are themes. I would like to see that add to vRealize Operations as well. It is very nice.

We don't find this solution to be user-friendly. If you want to use integrated features then it is quite easy, but if you want to use it for a specific metrics model or monitor then it starts becoming more complicated. If you want to create different networks then it's quite complex.

I would like to see them implement multi-tenancy on the product itself and the option to manage it in one team. At the moment some of the objects are only available to one user and I'd like for it to be available to the whole team.

It is sometimes quite hard to use. If I need details, there is a huge amount of information that I need to review. It isn't a three-click solution. We would like better integration with other systems (e.g., Zabbix). We would also like to increase our network monitoring in one place.

It's user friendly, but a bit complex, so you need to spend time with it.

We would like better integration with the cloud because we use a multi-vendor cloud. We use AWS, which is fine, but we also use Azure and Google. We would like better plugins to those other two providers.

We do not find this solution to be user-friendly. There's still a lot of work that needs to be done and a lot of work has to go into getting the graphs right. It's not a "plug and play" type of thing. You really have to put in a lot of work. You always have to be aware of what's going on within the machines. It needs to be improved from end-to-end. I would like to see more visibility into the machine's working and an easier way to find out what the workings are. There are agents but they're tricky. I would like to see something more agent-less. I have rated this solution an eight because it's at an excellent level but it's still lacking on the end-to-end side. It has gotten better, visually, but it's still not quite there. It's clunky looking and they could have done a lot better with the interface.

We are looking to optimize all the parts. For example, vCenter can be fully deployed automatically, which is not the case with vROps. We can click some next buttons to integrate vCenter and would like these type of features for vROps, if possible.

We had some problems with updating it. The two times that we upgraded vRealize Operations Manager, we lost all our data.

I would like to have external add-ons and third-party support added to the solution. It was not intuitive and user-friendly in the versions leading up to 6.5. After version 6.5, it improved and has been user-friendly. It has issues that require manual handling, such as the server allows metrics. However, this is difficult to set up.

We would like to have monitoring for containers.

It can be more intuitive and user-friendly. We would like some artificial intelligence behind it to predict, instead of what we do now which is configuring vROps is to show what you have. We would like easier customer reporting, because to do customer reports, we have to do a lot of programming.

I would like the product to be more interoperable with other solutions: more hybrids.

I would like to see them develop real-time capacity meters. We did not find this solution to be intuitive or user-friendly. It's complex and overwhelming. It takes time to learn how to work it, which metric is in real time, and what information it's giving per day.

I'm quite happy with the path that it's going on, so at the moment, I can't really recommend anything that this solution can improve on. I'm pleased with where it's going and the new features that are coming.

I rated this solution an eight and not a ten because we work to give a multi-tenant product to our customers and vROps doesn't meet our needs.

We would like the return of the additional partner marketplaces, like DataCore. My customers miss the integration to DataCore.

I would like more application dashboards to be available.

Working with vendors more to suck more pieces in via the infrastructure and do that for zero cost, if we could. While not always based on VMware, if we want to add something in like Microsoft SCOM data, we have to go out and buy it, or certain widgets we have to buy. The more pieces we can receive for free and have everything cooked into vCOPS to give us a single pane of glass (for zero or minimal cost), this would benefit us.

If I had to think of one thing that could be improved, I would probably lean towards making it easier to pull dashboards from vRealize Operations into other products (maybe outside of it), like a company-branded dashboard that would display in a NOC.

The biggest room for improvement would be the customizability of the alerting function. The emails that come through are somewhat difficult to tailor along with the information contained within them and how they are laid out.

I would like to see more applications and out-of-the-box solutions for well-known applications, like Oracle or Microsoft Exchange. Certain out-of-the-box solutions for these applications, as well as containers. If I had a container solution deployed on top of a VMware infrastructure, or outside as well, it would be really helpful.

A lot of feedback that we're getting from some of our engineers who are actually using Operations today is that the graphics are very low-key. When it comes to red, yellow, green, yes, "Skittles Theory," but when it actually comes down to what's optimized and what's not optimized, it's very rudimentary. If they could actually make nicer pie charts or graphics involved in it, it would make it a lot easier to read the data on a higher level, rather than actually having to dive down and know specifically what you're looking at.

One way the solution could be improved, in my opinion: management packs, more native management packs with API.

I used to use the old version, and I liked the old version before it was rebranded. The interface was more intuitive, it was more familiar with traditional vSphere client type interfaces. When I deployed the most recent version, I logged in and I was shocked that I didn't know where to go to do what I wanted to do. The whole interface is an information overload, it just bombards me with messages, warnings, and alerts. When I follow through on the majority of these messages, I realize that I'm really just wasting time because they're not real problems. There's a time to live metric that keeps flashing all the time saying things like "Your cluster is only going to have 45 days left before this resource is going to run out." It's not true. It simply doesn't happen. We could run our clusters with these warnings for another two years. I'm not happy with that. I don't want to be warned just because one VM deviates a little bit from what it would be doing on a normal basis. I'll only want to be alerted when that specific VM causes a genuine problem within the physical infrastructure, where it's going to create some sort of bottleneck of performance for a larger number of VMs collectively. There's x amount of bandwidth on a physical network interface card as the traffic flows over it. It's not really ever gonna be a bottleneck until that card itself becomes saturated. I don't want to see an alert about a VM that's running over a network card when the card itself isn't saturated. These are things that bother me about the product: information overload, too many warnings that are false alerts. After a while, when I see these things all the time I don't want to act on anything anymore. I don't want to log into the product because I know that when I log into it I'm going to see too much stuff that's just going to waste my time.

One of the features I would like them to bring in is more application monitoring and more visibly into applications. Instead of the actual hardware and the environment, they need to go one step further and bring in application availability and application performance. I don't really care if the hardware's overloaded, as long as the application is performing correctly. That's all the users care about and that's all I really care about.

I would like to see a full RESTful API for everything, and PowerCLI modules that interact with more of the different features. It doesn't have a complete API set and it's not a complete PowerCLI module yet. I'd love to see that developed more, to be able to interact with other applications and automation.

There is a lot of stuff which is hard to read and understand. I must do a lot of research to understand what is going on with the hardware.

I would like to see more features, especially in the way of Flash to HTML5.

I'd like to see more out-of-the-box dashboards and less customizing of the environment. The interface could be more streamlined. There are still a lot of old dashboards versus the new UI dashboards.

In some respects, the UI is pretty stale. It has been that way from the beginning. Some easier ways to create custom dashboards for management, versus the tech guys, versus administrators, that would be helpful.

The integration with Log Insight is a big thing for us. We're hoping to take point-in-time events that are happening within the environment, feed them into incidents within vROps, and then be able to execute a remediation step, through vRealize Orchestrator and the like. We're looking for that seamless integration.

There are some nagging little things. For example, if you want to automate the resizing of machines, you should be able to schedule it, so it happens at two in the morning instead of right now, because if you do it in the middle of a workday that's a big no-no. Who wants to get up at two in the morning to press that button? Automation should be a bit more intuitive. They got rid of the badges largely. That was good. The customization of reports isn't as great as I would like to see it. There are some canned ones. The other thing is there should be a way so a business unit can actually login to it. They should be able customize the view as a business unit or application owner better than they can today. vROps gives people too much information. It's creating headaches for management by answering too many questions. We need to give the people the the right amount of information. They should be able to look at their own applications and hardware. They would feel a lot more comfortable with VMware if they could do this, because it gives them a little bit of influence and control, even though we're the ones with the keys to the castle.

I'd like to see more of the advanced reporting without having to go to the advanced product and paying the extra price. Canned reports are great, but you shouldn't have to pay for custom reports.

One of the things that we've been limited on is that it only monitors one cluster at a time. We're spread out all across the US. It would be nice to monitor multiple clusters from one instance. That would be the main thing we'd like to see.

It's pretty user-friendly, but it could always be better as far as the interface goes, clicking around, and having to go back to different screens. The navigation could be better.

One thing I mentioned when speaking with the engineers is that we'd like to get more granular reporting. We'd like to see more real-time reporting on the application-process level. Right now, we don't get that. For example, if I have a VM that's spiking up on memory or CPU, I can't really drill down to the application level and say, "Hey, I have IE that's spiking due to the user's streaming of video and that's affecting their entire session." vROps doesn't do that. The engineers tell me there are a couple of other tools that we will be able to utilize. But hopefully, that is something that could be packaged together, contained within vROps, as opposed to having us to go to a third-party.

Between the previous version and this one, they should keep going with the improvements in how intuitive it is, streamline it more, and keep going with that notion. If possible, for the medical industry, I would like to see it work with Epic, being able to focus in on Epic during the installation and have it move right into the Epic role. That would be great.

I would like to see more functionality. I would also like to see better support, because the pack that we use, the Horizon, is an additional pack. It's not currently actually built by VMware, it's built by a separate company. When they merge the two, there will be better support in the future.

I get in to code whatever I need and then get out. So perhaps they could support different coding languages. I know that JavaScript is their primary "cash cow" but I'd like to see c#, personally. I'd like to see different capabilities for adding code.

I would like to see improvements in managing within a single cluster - managing DRS a lot better as far as utilization of each host goes, within a single cluster. That would make it comparable to VMTurbo (Turbonomic). That has that feature where you can also manage it within a single cluster, move workloads around to balance out the hosts.

I would like to see an improvement in the cost features, and by that, I mean the chargeback functions, because my company won't go all the way into vRA for the automation piece. We're looking at different tools for automation. If they could find some way to incorporate that, it's the primary thing that I would look for right now. Also, I would like to find a tool that is a single pane of glass for everything. The endpoint operations agent doesn't really do much when you install it on an endpoint - for example, on a Windows Server or a Linux server. You don't really get any beneficial information at the OS level from VMware tools. That's something that I would like to see.

I am here, at VMworld 2018, to learn about the new release, and I'm encouraged with what I'm seeing. Some of the stuff does make it a little easier on some of the other people who would be looking at it, such as managers. We will be able to build some dashboards that show them what they would like to see, that show the cost savings. We want to see the other stuff, where we're saving our resources more.

One of my biggest complaints is that I wish there was a better, consolidated dashboard on the landing page when you first log in. You have to fine tune it and customize it a bit more than I'd like. I don't know if it's hard for them to determine what people generally want to see on a home dashboard screen, but it could be improved.

We did not find this solution to be intuitive and user-friendly compared to other options. We actually ended up paying for something else to use in conjunction with vRealize. I would like the ability to edit more stuff in the standard version. The way it is now really limits the usability, especially because the dashboards don't fit everybody. Aside for that, creating reports and views needs to be more intuitive. Right now it's too hard without having had a lot of training.

It's reasonably intuitive and user-friendly. But because it's a very powerful product, there are a lot of details involved. There's no way to make that simple, as far as I'm concerned.

One thing I don't like is that all the scales are self-referencing. So when I get a "one," is that one out of ten, one out of a hundred? I don't know. So I can say these servers are performing ten times better than that server but I don't know where the scale goes. Also, the first "20 percent" of it is user-friendly, that quick, "fix this." The first level is easy, but to really dig down and get more information out of it, it gets beyond the scope of time that I have to put into it. A lot of it is that it indicates: "And there is a problem," and not all of those problems are autofix. And that's where I get stuck: "Oh there's a problem." It doesn't always give me the information to go fix it.

I would like to see them update the format of the catalog in a different way. There's no option in a lot of the contents for the virtual machine blueprints to change the view.

Some of the more advanced stuff takes a bit of time to dig into it. It takes a little longer to setup if you want really detailed stuff. They could make the learning curve smoother.

We're on the 6.0 version, so it does lack a little bit of that intuitiveness. You have to have some experience with VMware to get around inside of it. That's one of the reasons that I've loved what I've seen so far with 6.7. We've already downloaded the installation remotely and we're just waiting to get back home so that we can actually do our upgrade. That's the first thing we're doing Monday is upgrading to 6.7.

Regarding the tool itself, in terms of vRealize, there are a lot of different functions. So that is definitely a learning curve within itself. Out of all of the tools that VMware provides, I think vRealize is probably one of the more challenging tools. Also, with VxRail 6.0 that we've been using, and working with vCenter or vSphere 6.5, we have seen bugs that are a challenge to working within the environment. We've seen issues with things within the graphical user interface. There are browser compatibility issues that can make it difficult to manage the system itself. We're still learning whether this an issue related to the browser or an issue related to vCenter.

The main concern would be just to make sure that there's some consistency when third-parties are building their various content packs for it. It seems like it's pretty random in terms of what you're going to get. A vendor is going to provide whatever they provide but it's really hit or miss in terms of how good the quality is. In terms of the things that are monitoring the vSsphere components etc., that's all solid, that's all pretty good.

I'd like to see the streamlining of more wizards, more tasks that are canned. And it would also be good to see some more features around building the Blueprints, just to make it a little easier.

It can be user-friendly once you get the dashboard set up but it can be complicated to get the information you want, the way you want it. When you're running reports or trying to gather trends of data it can be slow. Sometimes the translation of what you're thinking of in your head versus the metrics it's presenting might be a little different. For example, you're thinking "time," but it wants to show "percentage" or something of that nature. Also, if there were an easier way to share dashboards, that would be a big one.

Sometimes what a customer sees as a need for improvement could be incorrect sizing or a result of a specific deployment. So usually, the things we want are a more frequent sampling of the various metrics and the like.

For me, more examples of the configuration of the solution in specific use cases would be better.

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.

It's getting better from what it used to be, but it still has a pretty steep learning curve. It's not super-intuitive when you first log into it. To find a lot of the information you need, you have to dig through multiple categories, subcategories, panes, and dashboards and widgets. They've been making it better by presenting some of the most commonly used ones more in the forefront. But some of the more advanced stuff is still pretty difficult to find. The latest version, it has come a long way and I know the next version coming out looks like it's going further. I think they're making great strides there.

The room for improvement is in the definition of the metrics. There are millions of metrics inside the solution, but there is no documentation from VMware for what those exact metrics are. That is a trouble point at times. We have started to do containers and I would like to see a feature to monitor our container infrastructure. If we can do our monitoring and performance troubleshooting of them through the same tool, that would be a nice-to-have.

ServiceNow implementation is rough.

I would like to see them add a little bit more functionality and the ability to create more dashboards.

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.

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.

In terms of user-friendliness, there are a lot of areas that take a lot of time to research and figure out what the information is actually telling me, so that I know how to better use the product and troubleshoot issues that I see. It would be nice if they could fine-tune the user interface a little bit.

I would like to go back in history on the performance data and blank out some of that performance data so that it isn't used in calculations. For instance, if an application goes wild and uses up all the resources, I don't want that to be understood as that VM needs more resources.

* The learning curve is pretty steep, but support help decipher it for us. * It could use more integration with the hardware. * A reporting engine would be good, where the database could dump into something like Splunk integration, so we could write our own reports. That would be better.

I would like to see a better interface, something that's more intuitive, one dashboard that shows everything I want to see on. The dashboards that come with it are focused on certain things that aren't the big picture. I'd like a dashboard that does everything faster and also a faster web interface.

The first impression is that it is not that easy to find everything. But after two or three times, you will find everything you like. In vROps, I would like to have both automation and monitoring together, not two separate things you have to buy. I want them included in one package, one installation. Also, there is a good page showing what happens, the performance over time. I would like to have that in a good report, to be able to print it out or to send as a PDF to customers. The page today is very good, but I would like to be able to send this report every week to customers.

I'd like to see a little more training, free training on the VMware site; to get some more information within the VMware community. There's quite a bit of stuff out there but getting that access can be daunting sometimes.

It's a very complex product. It has gotten better over the years, but they still have some work to do. It still requires a lot of time, and some training, to get accustomed to it. Moving forward, I would like to see some tighter integration with the vSphere Web Client, just so that I don't have to open multiple windows and jump back and forth. We're currently running vSphere 6.7 and there is a lot tighter integration between vROps and vSphere, but it can always be better.

I've already spoken to the project managers during the TAM Customer Day here at VMworld 2018. They need to bring back the My Project piece. They removed it from the current release. That's the reason I haven't updated to the current release. They say the project or the infrastructure capacity planning is coming back.

It's a little bit scattered. I have to go through a lot of steps to get everything in one place. I would like it that if you click on one cluster, you get all the information from the host, VMs, whatever is there. Sometimes I have to go to different places to get the information.

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.

The one thing that I am always missing is training specific to Horizon. There is no training class you can go to for the Horizon add-on for vROps. I'd like to see specific training for Horizon admins, as opposed to general vSphere admins.

If I had used it a little bit more I would have a bit more feedback on additional features, but right now I'm just trying to digest all that information. It's great at providing information but to the point where it can be overwhelming sometimes. The reports are a little bit too much if you don't set them right. You just keep getting report, after report, after report.

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.

One of the most valuable features was the cluster modeling, but they took that away. That's why I rated it a seven out of 10. They keep saying that it's going to be back in the next release and that's what we're looking for. We really want that back.

I sure don't find the solution to be intuitive or user-friendly. It takes a lot of time to get familiar with the interface. You've got to spend a lot of time poking around there, it's not very user-friendly. There have been improvements over the versions but, even still, there is a pretty steep learning curve for the product, in my opinion. In the latest and greatest version, there has been quite a bit of a step up from the last version, as far as the user interface goes. They are making improvements. So that's positive.

I would like to see multi-cloud support. It would be nice to see analytics not only on-prem but on VMWare Cloud on AWS. I think that's in the roadmap. They should just keep growing it. More HTML 5 would also be good. I wish vSphere Client would mirror it. I wish they announced it on day one of 6.7. HTML 5 is good. I miss the thick client, but I'm conforming.

I would like to see even more scalability and the ability to customize more templates to our advantage. Also, we do like to be on the latest version of everything. I know VMware has their hands in a lot of different places, but if they could have a rollout and say, "Don't be using the latest and greatest, you've got to use two versions back to get to this, to be there at the latest and greatest." That would be wonderful. We did run into a small issue. The latest version of it would not work with Horizon 7.5, so we had to roll back vRealize. But, they say it's coming out soon. Can't wait for it. We're looking forward to it. But other than that, it's been great.

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.

They should improve the vROps Federation Management Pack, so each customer can create a single pane of glass for multiple sites of vROps.

I would like to see them bring in metrics for other things in the infrastructure, not just the virtual infrastructure: for example, being able to bring in metrics from my arrays themselves or my fiber channel switches or my ethernet switches. Being able to collect that data would help in being able to lay a holistic view on top of how my entire system is functioning, from the hypervisor all the way down to my end-point.

It needs dashboards that we can present at the executive level. The GUI, overall, could be better.

One missing component was the integration of Log Insight and vRealize Business within vROps. But, with the new version of vROps (v6.5 & v6.6), this requirement was also met with, as the other products in vRealize Suite are now fully-integrated.