VMware Aria Operations Reviews

We use vROps for our many VMware infrastructures. It is mainly for IT operations because we're processing a lot of information. vROps is good for us for reporting and for monitoring hosts and VMs.

The most valuable feature would be the reporting because if the frame or something is not syncing or we have an issue it will report it to us and give us a warning.

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.

Stability isn't bad. Not perfect but not bad. 

Their technical support is good. I am happy with them at the moment. 

Overall, the initial setup was straightforward. There are many ways to do this life cycle. We have many different views.

I would rate this solution an eight. It serves its purpose but it has room for improvement. For example, vCenter has Flash version and HTML5. HTML5 is really, really good. It's fast and good. If they can make it simple like this it would be perfect. 

The company I work for is Sureskills. We're a consultancy based company. We have multiple customers that we sell a lot of virtual products to. We don't just deal with that. We deal with a lot of Microsoft, Stack, and Dell EMC products as well, but we do an awful lot of VMware based products. 

Our primary use case is two-fold. From one perspective it gives the local on-site IT people some ability to see what's happening with their virtual state and let them know if there's any issues or problems that may be starting to come to the surface. Secondly, from our perspective, because we provide support to these companies, it allows us to quickly see from a number of different reasons why there would be issues from this. It's useful from both sides.

The most valuable features would be that it gives us a breakdown on the ESX host and then the virtual machines themselves. Also, with some of the add-ons that they provide with vROps you can start to see if there are any issues with things like Exchange Infrastructure or SQL add-ons, etc. It's useful to get from the hardware perspective to the virtual machine down to the actual application that's running on those VMs themselves.

I do find this solution to be intuitive and user-friendly. You could set vROps up in an hour and start to get some statistics from it. It's a very simple tool to use.

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.

We haven't seen any downtime. From our perspective, we haven't seen any issues with vROps in itself. It's simple to install. It's very easy to operate, so from our perspective, we would see it as a natural add-on to anything in terms of the virtual infrastructure.

Even if you're a small to medium size business and you have 50 virtual machines or if you're a large company with several thousand virtual machines, the solution works across the board for all.

Their technical support is outstanding. We would deal with VMware on a fairly regular basis for our customers, and possibly because a lot of the support is based in Ireland, we would have a fairly good relationship with them and they're very good at getting back to us very quickly.

The initial setup was very straightforward. From the web interface, you can literally just go straight into actually installing vROps with very little previous knowledge required to get it up and running.

I'm not sure about return on investment per se, but certainly in terms of being able to troubleshoot and identify issues quickly and in a timely manner which further down the line may have caused an issue with the production infrastructure. It's intuitive from that perspective, that it allows us to deal with issues before they become a problem and that could cause an issue down the road which would potentially impact on costs for our customer.

They compare reasonably well to alternative solutions. There are several products that are out there that would manage a virtual infrastructure for customers, but we perceive it to be the best of the existing range of products in that area.

I would rate this solution a nine out of ten. 

Our primary use case of this solution is to monitor the server and desktop environment. We've never had a performance issue.

It has helped our organization because we can keep the metrics within our ratios. In this way, if something jumps out we can be on it right away. It has also helped to reduce troubleshooting time. 

The alerting feature would be the most valuable feature for us. It gathers more metrics. In the latest versions, there are metrics that are being exactly captured with vCenter which are a bit better. Aside for that it provides a historical analysis of metrics over time. 

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 pretty stable, we've never had any issues with it. 

Their technical support is okay, it could be better. 

The main points that we look at are the costs and ease-of-use. Ease-of-use is the main thing for us because if we can't get the data we need it's not going to be helpful to us. 

We looked at Foglight, vRealize, and Veeam. The main reason we chose vRealize is because it's included in our license. 

I would rate this solution a five. There's a lot of stuff that we'd like to do that we can't. 

I would advise someone considering this solution to take classes and get a lot of information because this solution may look simple but it's a lot harder than it seems.

Our primary use case of this solution is to gather analytics. We don't use it very often but it's working and collecting data. 

It has helped my organization by running analytics on use cases, performance, and by running clusters. It has also helped reduce the time it takes to troubleshoot issues for the VDIs. 

I find this solution to be intuitive and user-friendly, for the most part. It's the type of thing where if you don't use it, you lose it.

I have found this solution to be stable. We have never had any downtime. 

I've never had an issue with scalability. 

We've had to use their technical support and we've found them to be great. 

I would rate this solution a seven. We don't use it enough for me to give it a ten. There's a lot of value to it but we don't fully exercise it. It's a great product depending on what everyone's needs are. 

Our primary use case of this solution is for the performance monitoring. It's been performing well.

It has helped our organization a great deal in terms of being able to identify and troubleshoot problems. The time it takes to troubleshoot has been reduced. It has also helped with its capacity planning features.

Various metrics that we have for all the particular performance features, like CPU monitoring, memory, storage and so forth are the most valuable features for us. 

I also find this solution to be intuitive and user-friendly. Their feature set is very good. 

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

Stability is good. We haven't had any major issues with it. 

Scalability is pretty good. The fact that we can actually use it to expand on other aspects of it by adding additional packs is really good. 

We have rarely needed to use their technical support. They're pretty good. 

I was involved with one out of two of the setups we did. It wasn't very complex. We had a little bit of trouble in the beginning but nothing was significant enough that prevented us from moving forward. 

When selecting a vendor reliability and ease of setup is something that is very important to us and are the reasons why we proceeded with this solution.

I would rate this solution as an eight and a half. I would tell a colleague who is considering this solution that it's worth investing in. 

The analytics and operations management are our primary use cases of this solution. It's been performing well. 

The ability to analyze optimizations, the performance, and balance have all helped my organization. 

It provides my team the awareness to see what's going on with the nodes and the clusters. It will then either rebalance them or allow the automation to rebalance them for us.

The alerts and awareness would be the most valuable features for us. 

I have found this solution to be user-friendly and intuitive. I also like the integration point and that it's a single pane of glass.

It's very stable. 

Scalability is good. I've used it in previous versions and I'm looking forward to using it in the current version, 6.7. I think it's phenomenal. I look forward to the product growing even further. I understand version 7.0 is coming out soon.

I haven't had to use technical support for this version but I have had to use them in the past with other versions. There have been some challenges with them. It's hard to get through to the right person and resolving issues in previous versions was hard. 

The initial setup was straightforward. 

Our primary use case is to monitor the performance of the virtual machines as opposed to monitoring the performance of the OS. We'll monitor OS and stop at the OS, whereas vROps will pick up what's going on underneath. If the datastore is having a problem, it will bubble up to the VM and show us that.

It has allowed me to give the developers insight into what's actually happening underneath the covers. They used to only be able to see their app and now, they can see underneath. We've also given them access to see into the OS and we've given them a full stack view of how their application is performing.

It has helped to reduce the time it takes to troubleshoot issues and has improves quality of service to our users. 

The most valuable feature for us is the one that allows us to take over the DRS within vCenter and does it more intelligently. 

We have found it to be intuitive and user-friendly. 

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.

Stability is fine. The only issue I've had with it was an issue that I myself caused. 

We're not big enough to warrant scalability. 

Their technical support is good. They found the problem quickly. Support gets back to us quickly. When you raise a support call they don't get back to you with a candy email, they actually get back to you and help. 

The initial setup was very easy. 

We looked into a competitor but it was way too expensive. The fact that vROps came as part and parcel of the vRA enterprise gave us a huge win on the cost. 

I would rate this solution an eight. 

Our primary use case of this solution is to monitor our systems and capacity planning. It has been performing great. It's a little bit of a beast to run sometimes, a lot of knobs and dials, but it runs well.

The biggest benefit to us is that it shows us where our pain points are; where we need more storage, where we need more network or bandwidth, where we need more CPU or more memory. We know where our problems are before they happen.

It has helped reduce the time it takes to troubleshoot issues and has improved the quality of service to our users. 

The most valuable feature would be the capacity planning. I can see where we're at as far as usage on our data stores, our CPU and memory. It lets us know where we need to grow. 

We haven't found it to be intuitive or user-friendly. We're on version 6.0, it's gotten better since but there's a lot of things we have to do under the hood to make it work how we want it to work. It doesn't work out of the box very well until it's been fine-tuned.

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.

It's very stable. It's a beast to get configured but once it's been configured it's easy to use. We don't have any downtime from the product itself. The initial configuration is quite painful. 

It scales very well. It's designed for huge operations, so when it's used for a small company, it's not quite suited for their needs. It takes a lot of time to figure out and to make it work for your needs which is why it's precarious.

Their technical support has been very good to work with. They help us get to where we need to go pretty fast. They're very knowledgeable. 

We bought some tools from vCenter. We had to go through all the logs yourself, all the metrics ourselves. It tied into our UCS system that we had attached to our UCS, Hitachi system, and vCenter system. We could all the stuff in one pane of glass, which is nice, but it was one of those things that we had to do a lot under the covers to make things work for us.

The criteria that we look for when we evaluate a solution are functionality, price, and feature set. 

The initial setup was complex. There's no wizard to install it. We have to read a lot of documents then there's a whole other guideline to install the next part. There are a lot of steps. The documentation was great but there's a lot of pages, around three to four hundred pages of documentation. 

I did most of the installation myself but called support when I needed help. 

We have seen ROI with this solution but it's hard to monitor. 

We looked at ManageEngine and SolarWinds. We chose vROps because we're a large company and they gave us a good price cut. Also because the feature set looked good from the demos. 

I would rate this solution a seven because it's complex. The new versions are a lot better.

If you're considering vROps I would tell you do first do your homework. Make sure that you're ready and that it's going to fit your needs. Make sure there are full-time employees to manage it because it's not something that you just set up and go. It's got to have someone to babysit it and maintain it. Somebody needs to take care of the many different dashboards and functionalities.