VMware Aria Operations Reviews

The primary use case of this product is to essentially integrate third-party applications, as well as appliances, with the vRealize Operations for monitoring and capacity planning purposes.

A lot of benefits of this solution come to my mind. It allows me to see how my entire infrastructure is performing in a simplified manner. It also gives me a waterfall analysis and a lot of custom badges to tell me if there are any health, risk, or efficiency issues that I am running into. This helps me plan better for my IT infrastructure.

The best feature that works in this solution is the ease of pluggability that is provides and analytics engine which runs behind the scenes.

The biggest way it is intuitive to the user is it allows you to create your custom dashboards. There are a number of widgets which are available to represent your data in the way you want, as well as in the priority you want to see them.

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.

I have been working with this product since version 5.6. The stability of this product has been good. Through 6.7, there have been multiple improvements in terms of its GUI and performance. By default, support clustered more of its operations to support the skill and all of that works just fine.

The scalability of solution is actually fantastic. It runs in a clustered node. On top of that, the collector modules which are the work horses of collecting all the data, they give me to scale at the collector module level as well. This caters well to a large scale environment.

They are really good, primarily, because they are well-versed with the product and all its new features. From the 5.x series into the 6.0 series, the product has undergone transformation. While we were working with the product for integration, the technical support provided by VMware was fantastic.

I have seen a lot of custom home grown solutions in the industry before people started integrating with VMware Operations. 

I have been attending VMware events and part of the VMware club. Being part of VMware, I know about this product. That is where and how I started integrating with the product.

It's pretty straightforward. In the latest versions, after 6.4, the deployment has improved. It has simplified a lot. It gives me a programmable interface to automate my entire deployment. I can simply run a job and deploy the entire vRealize Operations solution quickly.

In terms of ROI, I have been working as a systems integrator. So, I am helping my customers when doing the integration. For multiple reasons, in terms of saving time and effort involved in identifying real issues and complex problems, that is the cost which has been saved. In terms of infrastructure monitoring, the returns are good.

The way it has helped improve troubleshooting helps me associate a lot of different infrastructure components, right up to the application layer. E.g., any issues coming in because an application is slowing down due to performance. Because of the hierarchy of all the objects labeled for that particular application, I can browse through the entire infrastructure and see where exact problem is. This helps me narrow down the surface area of the problem that I am trying to solve. That's a huge saving in terms of time required for resolving any particular issue. 

It also provides me with a very intuitive way of understanding my capacity usage, whether I'm running out of capacity and how long before I would need to bump up my capacity based on my usage history. So, it's helped me do capacity planning in an intelligent manner.

If you are running an infrastructure with a variety of components from various different vendors, and want to get monitoring all in one place, this is the solution to go with.

The important criteria when selecting a vendor for any solution:

1. How stable the product is.
2. The ease of usage.
3. Support's availability.

I would rate the solution somewhere between an eight and nine, because it has worked like a charm for me over the years.

It is a little bloated right now. I would like to see it broken out into microservices, so the overall footprint of the application is reduced. That would get it to a ten in my eyes.

1. There is the VMware environment for our operations.
2. We have another instance running for the VDI environment.

It allows me to automate a lot of tasks. Because in a college, we have many different operations going. We need to automate as much as possible. Generally, vROps does a good job.

The automation brings insight into how we will grow. I can look at it, then make my recommendations on what equipment we need to do for the next fiscal year.

• The automation is the most valuable feature.
• The UI is pretty easy to understand.
• It gives me insight into the environment.
  

• 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.

It's completely stable. There's no problem with it.

Scalability is good.

We had a product called StrataCloud for years, which was good, but very complicated. It turned off the team. They wouldn't even bother looking at it, so we discontinued it.

The initial setup is fairly straightforward. I had a few questions for support, but it was relatively easy.

It has helped me optimize certain VMs and made them more efficient.

The optimization is a huge return on investment alone.

Do it. Just start off small. Add one vCenter, then add the rest as you go.

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor: 

• Straightforward use; I don't want complex. 
• Reliability. 
• If it snaps into something, the better. Because our team is very small for our environment. The fewer consoles that we need to know (or access), the better.

We use it for a general health check of the environment: What is broken and what is not performing right. 

We can do a lot more with it, and we want to, but we haven't gotten as deep into it as we want to.

It allows us to engineer our infrastructure more efficiently, because vROps will tell us capacity-wise if we are overbuilt, so we can scale back. We have learned to right-size our stuff much better since we have been using vROps.

The dashboards are great. You can quickly see things at a glance without having to dig through a lot of data.

It allows us better visibility into our virtual infrastructure than we could get through vCenter or other tools by providing us a lot of metrics. vROps is good at spotting problems.

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.

Stability has been good. We haven't had any downtime.

We haven't scaled ours out beyond a single appliance, but I know it can scale out farther.

The technical support is good and responsive.

The initial setup is straightforward. I was able to do it with little to no initial reading.

It has reduced the time to troubleshoot, because we would have to go to ten different places otherwise to get all the data that it gives you in one single picture. 

Start small. Don't try to put too much stuff in it at one time. This way you won't have information overload when you start receiving data back from it.

I was able to start using it quickly the first time.

I have been working with VMware for forever. It has been a good experience.

Most important information when selecting a vendor: 

• Be responsive.
• Provide good support.
• Have a solid product.

We use it for analytics and metrics of the system. We've had it installed for about a year but have really been using it just within the last month. We're still discovering the power behind it and what it can do for us.

It has helped to reduce time to troubleshoot issues and improved quality of service. As far as showing us where the problems are, what's useful is that it gives us suggested solutions to fix them, so that's helpful.

The most valuable features are the health tree and the alerts that tell us what's going on from a glance at the dashboard.

It's definitely stable.

It's scalable. We can add the Management Packs which have helped us. For example, we've added UCS Management Packs and that's been helpful.

We used technical support on a problem we were having when we did an upgrade, and when we had an issue with the integration of Log Insight. Technical support was great.

Definitely utilize any training resources you can find so you understand the product's power and what it can do. Trying to figure it out on your own is not so easy.

It's mostly user-friendly and intuitive. They're improving their dashboards which makes it a lot easier. Sometimes, drilling down and trying to find the exact thing you're looking for can prove challenging at first, but it's getting better.

Regarding cost savings through higher capacity utilization, we haven't seen that so much, but we're running pretty lean. It even tells us that now, so we didn't have a lot of capacity over-use.

I think it's a good product. I'm sure there's room for improvement: integration with some of the other things. I can't really say it's the best product that I've ever seen, but it's doing what we need it to do right now.

Primary use case for vRealize Operations is from an optimization standpoint. We're actually getting analytics from our VMs for over-provisioned VMs, under-provisioned VMs, and making the adjustments accordingly, per the recommendation from Operations.

One of the benefits for our organization, in particular, was the optimization piece where, historically, our virtual environment has always been over-provisioned. We've always tried to go from a physical to virtual, one-for-one. Now, with vRealize Operations, we're actually proving to the company that we're utilizing the virtual infrastructure to its fullest capability, but actually scaling back instead of adding more resources.

From a troubleshooting standpoint, beforehand it took us a lot of time to actually go into esxtop, pull the actual raw data that was happening from a storage level, a network level, a CPU/VCPU and memory level. But having all of these resources at our fingertips, from a graphical user interface, we can pinpoint the pitfall very easily. And it is very user-friendly, with the red, green, yellow "what's wrong." And getting the right teams involved faster has helped us the most with vRealize Operations.

Most valuable feature is the dashboards that we can customize per-user that logs into them. If we need to make a dashboard that's very high-level for our executive to see how our virtual environment's handling things, we can do that. Or, if we need to deep-dive technically, we can do that for our engineers. They really need to see the important stats that make our virtual environment work the most efficiently.

The solution is very user-friendly. From an installation standpoint, it only takes about half a day to a day to implement. Integration with vCenter is very seamless, starts collecting data, almost immediately once you make those connections, getting real-time data within the first 24 to 48 hours. User friendliness is very easy.

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.

It's extremely stable. Since we implemented it, we haven't had a restart or reboot that wasn't for a maintenance period, and we've been up ever since, collecting data.

Scalability is very easy. Once you implement a new vCenter, it's pretty much just make the connection to the new vCenter and it automatically starts collecting data from all the VMs in that new vCenter. Clusters, DRS recommendations, HA recommendations, everything's at your fingertips and it's very easy to upscale, per your environment, for the growth of your company.

We didn't have a solution at the get-go. Once we implemented this, we actually saw the grand scheme, or a higher level, from top-down, of our whole virtualized environment, that we weren't getting before without really deep-diving into the underlying hypervisor level. That's really what we've been using it for.

We learned that we had the licensing for it, I downloaded the file, and just ran with it. It was very straightforward, just downloaded the file from the internet, uploaded into vCenter, ran it, IP address, log on to the web console and go.

We had a little bit of Hyper-V, but normally, mostly VMware.

If you're running VMware, implement vRealize Operations as soon as possible.

I would rate the solution and eight out of ten. The only reason why (it's not a ten) is because of that graphical interface (issue) that I just described.

I use it for capacity planning and day-to-day metrics for how VMs are running. Most people think their application isn't running fast enough, so you need some numbers or pretty pictures to show them. vROps is a good place to obtain them.

1. You want to be able to plan. You want to budget going forward for what you have and put your hardware in before you can create VMs on it.
2. It is not a technological thing. It's a people management thing. If you have some pictures, numbers, or something that you can show how things are performing, the management will want to see what they're getting for their buck overall. However, individual app owners and business units want to see how their machines are performing, and if they can do better.

The newer version is a lot easier to use than the older version. It's one of the easiest ways to obtain some insight into vCenter.

The latest incarnation of it is intuitive and user-friendly; the previous versions, not so much.

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.

It seems to be pretty good.

We don't have that big of an environment that it's on right now. So, I wouldn't be able to talk too much about scalability.

They are pretty good. We used to buy VM, vCenter Support, and ESX Support from HPE, because they were a reseller of it. It wasn't so good. 

So, when we did license renewals, we bought the support from VMware, and it was much better.

There are a lot of third-party monitoring and other tools that you can buy, but we decided to go with VMware's product in that it would be kept up-to-date together with vCenter and ESX, then everything should jive together a lot nicer.

The initial setup was straightforward.

There has been a bit of cost savings in that we could decide to move workloads around a bit better. 

Though not so much for SevOne outages, but for the day-to-day, warnings, critical things, and alerts that come in, you will run out of disc in X amount of time. Therefore, this product is handy to have.

Bundle it in with your license rather than buying it as a separate product. It saves a lot of money that way.

Our primary use case for vROps is enabling operational efficiency in the data center from a support perspective. We use it to diagnose problems and look for proactive signs of failure. This makes a big difference on the troubleshooting side.

It's definitely improved the organization by increasing the efficiency in which we can diagnose issues. If a customer were to call in reporting a problem, we've probably already noticed it in vROps and are actually working on resolving it.

It has made a big difference in the time to troubleshoot. It's significantly reduced it. 

As a cloud provider, some of the reports which are available in vRealize Operations enable us to be a partner to the customer and show them there are some workloads which are over-provisioned. While that might mean scaling back some resources, ultimately, it means a better experience for the customer.

The most valuable features for us are some of the trending and analysis on workloads. It doesn't just look to see if something is maximized at 100%. It figures out what the normal is for the application, so it's not just if something is maxed out and causing a problem, but if something is higher than normal or running outside of its normal range. This helps us to identify something that other products might not necessarily note as an issue.

vROps is more user-friendly than some other products that we've seen on the market. It was very easy for our technicians to pick up. The search functionality works well. It makes it easy for our technicians to get down to a workload that they're possibly having an issue with.

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 stability in vRealize has been great. We've had no outages nor impacts. The upgrade process has been great so far.

We have 11 data centers. We utilize vRealize Operations at all our data centers. We've really scaled it out. We're at around 16,000 active VMs reporting into vRealize. We've had no scalability issues.

We've used tech support from VMware for pretty much all their products. The vRealize Operations support experience has been pretty good. 

Probably the big one that a lot of people would compare to vROps is Veeam ONE. We looked at Veeam ONE among other products and found that the level of metrics that we got out of vRealize Operations, because it comes from VMware, were pretty much second to none. 

It's a nine out of ten. There's always room for improvement with any product, but it's a solid solution. 

vRealize is easy to stand up. It's very easy to point at your workload. It's not going to be impacting. Put it up there. Take a look at it. Point it at your infrastructure and just see what comes out. I think you'll be surprised.

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor: As a cloud provider, we have a dedicated team that goes through and evaluates new products. It's what we do day in, day out, and we have a fairly lengthy evaluation process that goes in. We look at everything from the support of the product provided by the vendor, the patching process, the upgrade process, and their roadmap. We really go through every facet of the product to make sure that it's going to be a good fit for our organization before we consider putting it into production.

Our primary use case for the product is to to look at all of our infrastructure and provide stats to our performance team for most of our applications. We integrate with vSphere and have a fairly large vSan, which we rely on vRealize Operations to keep on top of to let us know if there are disk failures, alerts, or system health issues. This is pretty much the day-to-day triaging problems of vRealize Operations. 

It has been performing very well. We've been a vRealize shop for about five years. There were early kinks in the some of the virtual appliances as we rolled them out, but for the last year and a half, it has been rock solid.

It has enhanced our ability to troubleshoot and effectively manage our solutions to understand what clusters are having issues and diagnose those programs right away, so we can be proactive. We are now proactive, which we weren't before. We achieve this through vRealize.

We're catching problems earlier. The troubleshooting which goes into it is proactive. One thing I did recently was right-size all my clusters. I did that through vCOPS within a couple hours. I was able to move workloads around to different clusters and optimize my whole environment, which was across about 300 ESX hosts. So, it's very powerful.

We pay attention to disk snapshots which are in the overhead on SAN data stores that we have. They have the ability to collapse different virtual machines to different data stores and do a lot of cleanup. Without that visibility, we would probably have a lot more wasted space and more money that would have been out the door.

One of the things that we had to rollout in the last year and a half is compliance. The product has done a great job of ensuring all of our virtual infrastructure is compliant, and we have met all our regulatory compliance, which has been a huge help. 

There is rich dashboarding, which has the ability to customize dashboards. It has gotten better with the versions. I have assigned it to some co-ops who learned it within a few weeks and have dashboarding almost right away. It's very intuitive platform. 

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.

We don't have any downtime for our vRealize app. It's definitely helped out with the stability of our platforms. 

It's very flexible and scalable. Adding things in has become a lot easier along with utilizing some of the capacity analysis features. If I have a project to add in resourcing, I can go to vCOPS, and do an analysis. I can put it through its workflow, then it tells me what to add and it's usually pretty accurate.

From time and time again, there's little tweaks you got to make to the vRealize platform. The technical support has been excellent. 

I haven't had any problems. Usually within an hour or so, we have diagnosed the problem and have a solution that we either need to implement or implement right away. 

I was involved in the initial setup a long time ago. 

Now, the lifecycle product has provided some things which are very easy to roll out within the vRealize suite. It is just check things out and roll it out, then it sort of monitors the application. This has greatly enhanced our ability to roll out vCOPS quickly and augment it too.

The ability to not have to buy as much hardware. I can look across all my clusters and spread the resourcing out. I can see where I have some low and high points, then not have to go out and buy a whole bunch of blades which I don't need. It has helped us in our capacity analysis and purchasing. 

We looked at Turbonomic. It was expensive because of their ability to learn your environment. We already owned a piece of the vROPs suite, the compliance manager, so we sort of fell into the suite. We thought we can go out and buy Turbonomic, which will cost us so much money or we get the enterprise product because we already have the compliance manager piece, which is what we did, and never looked back. 

It's an excellent solution compared to others. When I first looked at a Turbonomic was a few years ago, they had a few more features than what vCOPS was doing at the time. I gave that feedback and all those features are now in the product. Therefore, there's not much of a comparison today.

• Dig into your requirements.
• Put a list together.
• Then, start taking a look at vCOPS, because it's a great product. It most likely will fit your requirements. 

I would highly recommend the product to anybody who is out there. It has saved us a lot of money.

I would give it a nine out of ten. It's an excellent product, but there's always room for improvement. I never give anything a ten.

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor: We usually put together a list of requirements about what we are looking for within the product. One was the extensibility; the ability to kind of have a single pane of glass. This has been one thing which benefited us with vCOPS, as we can snap in almost any other vendor's hardware, whether it be UCS, Dell, or Cisco switches. This was a big requirement for us.