VMware Aria Operations for Logs Reviews

I use the solution to troubleshoot performance issues. It has a lot of dashboards. They give us an overview of the performance of the environment. We have several customers. We use the dashboards to see the performance of every customer’s environment. We can deep dive into the environment to see the issues.

I like the interface. I like the way we can build the dashboards. We integrate the solution with other products from VMware. We also have some Hyper-V hosts integrated into the tool. It does not use a lot of power because there is less hardware. It saves a lot of costs. We save almost 30% of our costs.

The tool is expensive.

I have been using the solution for two years.

The product is pretty stable. We haven’t had any big issues in the environment.

We can scale the product easily. We just need more licenses.

We contact support frequently. The support is good. We can call support for high-priority cases.

Neutral

The initial setup took weeks.

The tool is expensive. However, we get a lot of functionality for the price. The solution is worth the money. There are no additional costs associated with the product.

We also use Microsoft Hyper-V for some customers. Microsoft’s support is not as good as VMware’s. Technically, VMware is much better. VMware’s user interface is easy. It is easy to move servers around the environment.

I recommend the product to our customers. Overall, I rate the product an eight out of ten.

My company uses the product for log analysis and troubleshooting.

The tool helps my company deal with security and log analysis, which are very important areas for us.

I haven't reviewed or compared other products in the market against VMware Aria Operations for Logs, so I am not in a position to discuss what additional requirements are needed in the solution.

From an improvement perspective, the tool needs to be made more user-friendly.

I have been using VMware Aria Operations for Logs for four to five years. I use the solution in my company. I use the older version of the product, VMware vRealize Operations 8.4.0. My company is a customer of the product.

It is a stable solution.

It is a scalable solution.

My company has around 50 users of the solution. My company has ten members as administrators for the solution.

I am satisfied with the technical support for the solution. My company is happy with the support offered by VMware. I rate the technical support an eight out of ten.

Positive

The product's implementation phase is easy.

I think it is a reasonably priced product.

VMware Aria Operations for Logs is a very stable product that we have been using for quite some time in our company, and we are very happy with whatever support we are getting from VMware.

Even if you are a first-time user of VMware Aria Operations for Logs, you will find the deployment phase to be easy.

The documentation by VMware is very good.

The product has been promoted enough to be visible in the market.

I haven't tried to integrate the product with other third-party solutions. My company already has a VMware infrastructure in place.

I rate the overall tool an eight out of ten.

There are various use cases for it. We use it for Operations monitoring. It's part of VMware's suite of products, including vRealize Automation (vRA) for automation and vRealize Orchestrator (vRO) for orchestration. Previously, it was known as VMware vRealize Log Insight.

vROPs tells us about the health, risk, and efficiency of our systems. For example, it identifies over-provisioned VMs that can be rightsized. This helps with cost sustainability by reclaiming resources in VMware, reusing them, and avoiding additional servers. That's one benefit.

Secondly, it helps us identify situations where VMs need more resources so we can upsize them before encountering issues. This allows us to be more proactive on potential problems.

The insights it gives for the virtual environment are valuable. vRealize being built on vROPs and Aria being native to VMware are both plus points. However, the landscape is changing, and this is where it gets interesting.

Here's the key difference: If you only care about infrastructure and its management, then vROPs or Aria are great. But today, organizations and enterprises need end-to-end visibility. This means full-stack visibility across cloud, applications, services, all the way down to transactions. That's where other products come into play. 

vROPs or Aria limit themselves to the infrastructure layer because they lack visibility into the layers above, which require additional tools specifically designed for those purposes.

If you only need visibility up to the infrastructure layer, they're good. But that's not enough. Let's say you need a dashboard showing complete visibility for applications and stacks.  As you move up the stack, visibility into just the infrastructure isn't enough. Ultimately, you need to see how that infrastructure helps or hinders the applications and services you deliver to customers. 

That's where other products come into the picture. Now, in my case, I manage the entire VMware stack along with many other systems, creating a heterogeneous ecosystem. The challenge is having to look at multiple management consoles - vROPs for one thing, then somewhere else for another, and so on. What's truly needed is a holistic view, and that's the goal.

One of the things I like about it is its interface. When it comes to generating reports on VMs and stuff, it's very quick. 

This is very handy for the technical team, who need to generate reports quickly. So that's really good.

VMware Aria is suitable for infrastructure visibility, but for a comprehensive overview that includes applications and services, other tools are required.

The monitoring landscape is getting bigger. When it comes to infrastructure monitoring, we need more visibility. VMware needs to integrate more related applications and third-party products. That would make it more appealing to an audience beyond the VMware team.

Let me explain the scenario: Suppose I have a third-party product deployed on top of VMware, like Red Hat OpenShift containers. I generate a report using vROps, and it gives me recommendations related to OpenShift. But I can't apply those recommendations directly because Red Hat (or any third-party vendor) has its own resource management approach. This creates a conflict.

The VMware team, limited to their view of VMware, might think vROps or Aria recommendations are the gospel. But the respective application's monitoring and operations team has a different perspective on resource management. This disagreement leads to operational conflicts.

Now, I understand you can't completely blame VMware for that; each vendor has its own way of doing things. But VMware should somehow bridge this gap. The recommendations coming out of vROps or Aria need to be agreeable to others.

We've been using it since 2016. We've been using it for quite some time.

I would rate the stability a seven out of ten. No issues here. 

Our environment has over 7,000 VMs running on the VMware stack. The product seems quite scalable. We haven't faced any challenges there.

I would rate the scalability an eight out of ten.

We've had great direct support from the vendor, VMware. They've been very responsive. No complaints there.

Positive

The initial setup was quite straightforward. The installation itself is simple. You'll need some time to generate more insightful reports over a period, but nothing unusual. It was quick and easy. The entire deployment took a couple of days.

In our case, the entire ecosystem is completely VMware, so it's very native. We start with ESXi, then vCenter on top of it. Then comes vROPs or vRealize Operations with vRealize Automation (vRA) in between for provisioning automation and orchestration. 

vRA with vROPs helps us provision VMs quickly. vROPs also help get storage from different, non-VMware sources, further improving our provisioning operations. 

Then vROPs or Aria does real-time monitoring and tracks resource usage to ensure efficient compute resource allocation. You don't waste resources; you have them where you need them.

I would rate the pricing a three out of ten, with ten being very cheap. It is not cheap. But it is worth it. 

When it comes to virtualization and server-side virtualization, we've only been using VMware.

For infrastructure resource management within the native VMware stack, I don't think there's anything better.

I would absolutely recommend using this solution. 

Overall, I would rate the solution a seven out of ten. 

The primary use is for system log collection and analysis. 

What I like most about the solution is the interactive log analysis and then that we can use the analysis to send alerts. 

I think there are a lot of areas where the product could be improved. To start with I would like the capability to do additional customizations, like integrating with third-party products. Every customer that we have is not using Log Insight. For those people who are using Solarwinds or Splunk or any other monitoring tool, there should be an option to forward the logs from Insights to the other products and options for this that we can choose. It would be good to make it so we can start forwarding logs and analysis to other monitoring systems. 

It would be good to be able to increase log retention. They improved log retention in the latest version. Before it was only 30 days that you could keep the logs, but in the latest version, they have increased that limit to a number of months. One thing that goes along with the enhanced log retention is we need to have a lot of space to store the logs. 

So, integration with other monitoring tools and log retentions are things that should be more under user control. We need to have additional storage, fine. That is okay, we have a lot of storage at our data centers and if necessary we can put in additional disks. 

But the license cost is too much. Compared to the storage costs we will have to increase capacity, the license from vRealize will be more costly. 

We have been using vRealize Log Insight by VMware for a few years, from 2014 to the present. 

I think it is a stable solution. 

It is a scalable solution. I can say that I agree with the claims that it can be scaled. It is an awesome product. Organizationally it is able to cover our needs completely. Most likely we have nearly 40,000 fixed logs. There are a lot of things that we can do with Log Insight. 

We used to have HP OpenView monitoring. Then we moved to Centreon monitoring. Then we moved to Splunk. Then later we changed again to using Log Insight. 

The reason for changing finally to vRealize was it based on the fact that we got a vRealize site license site. Log Insight is a part of the vRealize Suite. With this product, we did not need to buy an additional license for log monitoring. 

The setup and installations are very, very easy and straightforward. There is nothing that takes much effort and in that way it is fine. 

The amount of time that it takes to do the installation depends on how big your infrastructure is. If we are going to do a single node, it may take a few minutes. If you are going to do an installation for a cluster using Log Insight, then it might take some additional time, but it based on the number of modes. It total, it may take an average of twelve hours. 

Log Insight does not cost much when compared to Splunk. The license cost for Splunk or any other monitoring tool is too high. Compared to Insight that way — just looking at the license — the vRealize solution is kind of a cheap and better than other products cost-wise. 

My advice to people looking at Log Insight as a monitoring tool is that it is good and that they can go ahead and go for it because it is a good solution. 

On a scale from one to ten (where one is the worst and ten is the best), I would rate the product overall as an eight-of-ten. 

We are using it for troubleshooting. We centralize the log information from the VMware products. When we need some troubleshooting or we need to locate some information, it is a central point to check reactively. 

I think having better training options would be an improvement. Paid or free it does not matter, but it is complex to find good training material for vRealize Log Insight. It would be helpful to have an easy way to access some kind of material or if VMware would integrate with the clients who use vRealize Log Insight in a different format.

I have been using vRealize Log Insight for a few years now.

vRealize Log Insight has been running without any issues.

It is possible to increase the scalability of vRealize Log Insight. We have around fifteen administration users currently using it.

We have used technical support and we have had some issues with the knowledge base and faster service.

The initial setup was straightforward and I did not have any challenges.

We use an in-house implementation and it took around three days to deploy.

Pricing is good because it is part of the suite package. It comes in a bundle for us.

On a scale of one to ten, I would rate vRealize Log Insight a nine out of ten.

We integrate VMware for our customers. Our customer requested Log Insight, and we tested it. Log Insight is for logging the system to provide more information aside from alerts and anything related to the testing environment. It makes the environment more manageable through a single pane of glass.

Improved manageability is the main benefit.

It gives the customer a quick overview, so they don't have to dig. There's a clear dashboard with many sensors in a single space. He gets a helicopter view of his environment, but he can investigate further if there are serious issues. It's pretty user-friendly.

I would like to see more tutorials or at least an introduction video from the supplier, so you can become proficient and get the most out of the solution. You might not get the full benefit from a logging or reporting solution because you might not have a particular tool enabled. You could leave something out of your analysis because you aren't aware of it or you don't know how to set it up. 

I've worked with Log Insight for a year.

LogInsight is stable, but sometimes it's somewhat sluggish because it has to gather the information. It should be no problem if you deploy it on the right platform and have all the requirements in place. 

LogInsight is scalable. You can update it, and it's straightforward. 

VMware technical support is excellent.

LogInsight is user-friendly and straightforward. I rate it 8.5 out of 10 for ease of setup. After deployment, maintenance isn't a challenge so long as you keep it updated. You may need to update the software to stay in line with the upgrade roadmap, but the rest is fine.

LogInsight's licensing model is a bit complex. Runecast's licensing is more straightforward. On the other hand, licenses for just about anything is expensive, but ultimately it comes down to a return on investment. LogInsight's price is worth it in the long run. A proactive approach in the world saves you a lot of money by preventing catastrophes. 

Still, the license cost is a pain point for the customers. From a sales perspective, our challenge is to persuade the customer to see it as a long-term investment.

We also tried Runecast because we wanted more features to present to our customers. Log Insight is more about reports, while Runecast gave us additional reporting capabilities. 

This was for testing purposes only. We offer VMware, so we're always looking for the latest tools, and we test them for about four months. I have no preference for LogInsight over Runecast. It depends on what you want from the intelligence you're gathering from your system. The more intelligence you have, the easier it is to be proactive about your decision-making. 

Each solution has what the other one lacks.  Runecast is better for some situations, but LogInsight might suit you better in others. It depends on what you need, but both are good. They are not interchangeable. LogInsight is a bit more costly. 

I rate LogInsight seven out of 10. I give it a seven because it isn't easy to scale, and the cost is too high, but it's a good product overall. 

Customers should have a test environment to keep abreast with the latest software available in the industry. They can evaluate it and check themselves as well. Partners like us can help them make the right decision, but it's useful for customers to have their own test environment.

We primarily use the solution for complete log monitoring and management.

We're able to use the solution to analyze all of our logs, for years to come.

The root cause analysis feature is very valuable.

I don't use the solution on a day to day basis, so I'm not sure what specifically can be improved.

We have quite a few licenses, so for us, it isn't too hard to scale. Right now, we only have 15 users on the solution.

Personally, I don't log calls with technical support. We do, however, have an interior team that can assist with troubleshooting.

We didn't previously use a different solution.

The initial setup was easy.

We have our own interior team that handles the product.

The price of the solution is reasonable.

We use the on-premises deployment model. We're also platinum partners.

In terms of advice to others, if they're looking for a basic VMware solution, it's okay. We've tried other options. Log Insight seems to be better than other solutions in terms of very good integrations and working out items to be able to log.

I'd rate the solution nine out of ten. All of our must-haves are available in this product.

In our data center, we have too many physical servers and too many hosts. We are not properly optimized. We are implementing this solution and other virtualization to provide us with the best way to place different workloads with the goal of optimizing the environment.

We are using this solution in our data center.

Our current costs are too high, and this tool will help us to better optimize our infrastructure.

The dashboard needs to be improved because this is what I need to monitor my infrastructure.

We have been testing this solution for two months and we plan to fully deploy it next year.

We have not contacted technical support specifically for this solution because we are still just testing. However, we have been using VMware for 15 years and the technical support has always been perfect.

We are currently in an evaluation stage where were are choosing between VMware and Turbonomic. 

For the past 15 years, we have been using VMware for virtualization with ESX, vSphere, and vCenter. We are satisfied with VMware, and we already have this infrastructure in place, so we think that this VRealize Log Insight will be the better choice between products.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.