VMware Aria Operations Reviews

Optimization and reclamation.

It's been very successful. Before, we didn't know, as an organization, where some of the VMs or platforms were. Now, it's unified our organization to troubleshoot.

So far, since we upgraded the product, over the course of a quarter, I've reclaimed in our team, over 2,500 CPUs. That's a significant amount of CPUs, and we're still continuing. And using the DRS automation field and other features, we're seeing a lot of success as far as load-balancing, and we can also forecast some of the trends that we have in our organizations with the product.

Regarding the time to troubleshoot issues, on average, a NOC user or operations could spend at least 15 minutes just finding that VM or the issue. The solution is saving an average user, like myself as a consumer, about 40 percent. We have the issue, we have the problem. Before, we were spending an additional 40 percent just trying to find where the issue was.

As far as cost savings go, we're seeing significant growth as an organization, and we're also seeing the cost savings in the reclamation. Right now, we're being challenged regarding our growth, and we have to find capacity, and using the product sufficed a lot to not (have to) purchase other new products.

Gives a glass pane for our organization, it makes it very simple to give operations a simplified go-to product to find a VM, for example.

It's absolutely very intuitive. For example, we have a big environment. A simple case, for example, is, we get a request when there's an issue with a virtual machine, or the organization is (asking), "Where does that machine live? Does it live in which data center?" Now, they just plug it in on the search field and it gives them all the simple information: data center, the host, location.

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

Compared to other versions, this version has by far, in my opinion, exceeded expectations.

Scalability is very simple and very efficient, as a product.

Technical support is always better every year, and so far it's actually all the new features that VMware has for technical support. One of the features is that it's very simple to just plug in your issue and you get a response. But I notice that the response time is more efficient than in previous years.

When I started at the organization, we had other, existing competitors, and we also had vROps, but it wasn't fully scaled-out for our organization. But I saw the value just based on my experience.

vROps was definitely on the top list, then we had VMTurbo (Turbonomic) and there's another product called Runecast. We have higher-tier products like Scalar but it's not really an operation type.

Pick something very simple and very intuitive and very efficient for operations. As an engineer, just basically simplify. It's a simplified product and vROps is the product that I would highly suggest and recommend.

In terms of how the product itself has improved, the first one I've seen is the UI, the dashboard, and the intuitiveness of the product, how it works with the web browser, it's very efficient and fast. That's one of the improvements I've seen.

Right now, I strongly feel the product is a solid eight. I haven't got the exposure to the vROps products, I would give it a ten, but the way I feel right now once I feel that it's a solid ten I'll give it.

I work in property and casualty insurance.

Our primary use case is to monitor our servers and infrastructure, provide alerting for any type of system issues that we have had, and give us real-time alerts to go into the system, troubleshoot, and deep dive into what the issue may be.

vROps has improved our organization by giving it that high level monitoring of the complete environment with the different plugins that it has. It is a single pane of glass to our environment to monitor everything.

The system has reduced the time to troubleshoot issues with the real-time alerting built-in. The alert comes through, we can click on the link, take us right to the alert, and it has the metrics that triggered the alert right in the message so we know right where to look to resolve the issue.

It has helped us improve our end users lives with our Horizon VDI monitoring. We can look at our Horizon environment, see our response times for our users, quickly drill into any latency issues, and proactively troubleshoot without the end user not even knowing.

Application monitoring: Checking to make sure the HTTP application is alive, if the Windows service is running. If it is not, then providing a real-time alert. It also provides the ability to resolve the alert on the fly.

We have a specific application that relies heavily on a Windows service. The product is not the greatest, so it is known to fail from time to time, where the Windows service will just stop running. When this happens, we receive an immediate notification that the service has stopped and our engineers can go in and analyze the issue taking care of the problem quickly.

The latest versions of the product has really changed the user interface, making it more user-friendly than it used to be.

It has great charts and graphs which provide a high level overview of our environment. Being able to click through those to deep dive, we can easily get to the information that we are looking for.

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.

The stability of the product has been great. It just runs. We don't have to worry about troubleshooting or monitoring product.

The scalability is great. We have never had any issues with it being unable to size properly in our environment.

You can quickly deploy extra collectors to the environment or your wide area network, if you have remote servers that you need to collect against. 

We have not had to use vROps tech support at all. It is a set it and forget it application.

This is the first solution that we deployed for total enterprise monitoring. We went with vROps because we were heavily invested in the VMware architecture, so it made sense to go that route. 

I was involved in the initial vROps setup. It is very straightforward virtual appliance deployment, configure it with the IP, and point it to your various ESXi hosts. It can get a bit complex when getting into the endpoint monitoring, but it is still not overly complex where it makes it difficult to deploy.

Another vendor on our shortlist was WhatsUp Gold. 

Try to stay with something that is going to monitor your entire environment. Don't go with one solution that will monitor your virtual infrastructure and another that will monitor the Window Servers or applications. Get that single pane of glass view so it has that entire overview of your environment in one spot.

I would rate the solution as an eight out of 10. It is a set it and forget it product. We are not constantly having to babysit or troubleshoot it. It does what it is designed to do, and it does a very good job of it.

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor: supportability. Everything is going to break sooner or later, and how they support or fix it says a lot about a company.

We are using it to monitor our virtualized environment, to take care, ahead of time, of any problems that develop, before they become major crises. It's a complement to our existing monitoring solutions.

We've managed to save quite a lot of resources because we haven't had to deal with the issues of over-provisioned VMs, which was a constant problem. People would always ask for very large VMs to hedge their bets. That's been its biggest assistance. We've been able to say to people, "Hey, the last two weeks your thing hasn't done anything. It doesn't need to be this big." We have been able to notch it down, save some space.

It has definitely helped provide cost savings through high-capacity utilization. We've been able to streamline a lot of our products and we're also getting ahead of problems before they really start becoming major issues.

Mostly it's pre-warning. We get to know ahead of time when systems are starting to have problems. We can pay attention to the alerts and know right away that there's an issue developing at some point.

We also use it to monitor poorly configured VMs: over-configured, under-configured.

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.

Rock-solid. No problems at all.

So far, so good on scalability. We're medium-sized so it's okay.

We only had to use technical support once, when we were doing the initial set-up, and that worked out. It was great.

We had been using an external monitoring solution called Zenoss. It worked great. We still use it, but we weren't getting good insights into the depths of VMware. vROps, for what it does is absolutely fantastic. It's good because it comes straight from VMware. We're not messing around with some third-party product. They know their stuff, obviously.

When selecting a vendor, what's important for me is stability, that the vendor has been around for a little while, and that they've got good, solid tech support.

The initial set-up was relatively straightforward. It was just an appliance to deploy. The setup took a little while to get right, but it wasn't that bad.

With this particular solution, with vRealize Operations, if you have a reasonable-sized on-prem environment, it's definitely worth investing in. If you're going to be just straight cloud, it may not necessarily be as perfect. But I would definitely recommend it.

We're currently using it for reporting, mainly to see where we're over-committed or under-committed on resources. Right now we're still in the process of going through it on a daily basis, to see where it's going to help us improve things.

It gives us a new layer that we weren't using before to tell us when we don't have our resources in the right spot. This report or this monitor will tell us where we're over-committed, under-committed.

The most valuable feature is the fact that it does tell you about resources. The reports are great. They give you great insight into what's going on in your VMware environment

It's also very much user-friendly and intuitive.

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.

I haven't seen any issue with stability.

We had an older version that I didn't even know about. We've had a lot of turnover in our business on the network side in the last year or so. Somebody had installed it before, another network engineer, and we didn't even know it was there. We had a new network engineer come in and say, "Hey this is a great product, why don't we install it?" We came to find out we had it, but it was an older version.

We didn't invest in a new solution, we found it was part of our license already. It was something like, "Hey, we've got it, why aren't we using this kind of thing?"

We're way too early with it to consider ROI.

If you're not using it, certainly go out and get it. And if it's part of your licensing, certainly install it, because it really is a great product.

I need to use it more to see what I can do with it. There are additional features, which would require additional licenses, and we'd have to make the case for that. But it's certainly a great product.

We use it to monitor performance.

It's been helpful in troubleshooting certain CPU and memory issues. In terms of uptime, it helps us to keep a better eye on our infrastructure, to be proactive before an outage occurs.

I can go back a little bit, a week or a month, look at the history to troubleshoot.

It's also intuitive and user-friendly.

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.

The stability has been pretty good.

I have not had to use the technical support.

We used SCOM, Microsoft's Operations Manager, and we still use it in a supplemental way. vROps is a little easier to use, it's easier to get the information.

Figure out what you need, what your requirements are, and see if the product meets that.

One use case was to get better insights into the infrastructure, to be able to do things like closed-loop automation, based on the data that we're finding within vRealize Operations. But we're also using it to get a better understanding of capacity within our environment. That was the primary use case. We've expanded those use cases through integration with Log Insight as well.

We went from using industry standard KPIs to going to a complete on-demand model based on the algorithms from vRealize Operations. It has enabled us to drive more utilization out of our existing compute infrastructure to the point where, for a period of six months, we didn't purchase a single server or any additional compute. We were able to continue to sweat our existing assets.

The most valuable feature is the seamless integration with the vSphere Client and being able to go quickly back and forth between an incident within the vSphere interface and the actual drilling into it within vROps, to identify problems.

I find it to be intuitive and user-friendly as well.

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.

Stability has been good. There were some issues where we didn't have it scaled out properly, initially. But once we got a handle on that, because of the size of our environment - how to have it handle that much information coming at it - it became stable and has been since.

Scalability has been pretty easy. You just add additional worker nodes into the environment. It has not been a problem for us.

We have had to use technical support extensively. We had a pretty significant engagement to stand up the product and we've been using support as needed to understand certain metrics better and the things that we should be looking at. There's such a breadth of information in there that we needed some help trying to boil it down.

We did see a big change in that with the latest release, not dumbing it down, but consolidating some of the data that you're getting into a little bit more of a consumable format. It is easier to make sense of it without having to drill too far into the weeds.

Be prepared to get it spun up quickly but, to really get the value out of the product, I'm not saying you have to dedicate resources to it, just give it a little care. Don't just make it a shelfware product where you install and use it for one very small thing. It's a powerful product but you do need some expertise and some time and effort spent to actually drive value out of it.

When selecting a vendor, what's important to me is commitment to the customer in terms of supportability and to be with me when I do have issues. I want them to work with me to troubleshoot and understand that it's not always about the price, it's not always about the name, it's about how they react when things aren't going well.

Because of the early struggles we had, I would go with an eight out of ten for vROps at this point. Again, a lot of those things were just figuring out how much infrastructure it needed, to perform in our size of environment.

The primary use case for our organization is forecasting and troubleshooting.

For our organization, the ability to go back historically and see the data that accumulates in there, that's really the best thing for us.

In addition, the solution has helped to reduce time to troubleshoot issues and improved the quality of service to users.

There are many valuable features. The top feature is historical trending analysis and future workload predictions. There's a workload forecaster/predictor model in there and it's very helpful for capacity planning.

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.

It's solid, there's no problem with stability at all.

It seems to scale pretty largely. You do have to add some nodes to it to make it scale, but that's not that big of a deal, so it's pretty easy as far as scalability goes.

We have not needed to use technical support for this product.

We didn't have a previous solution. We needed something to fill that gap.

When selecting a vendor, what's important for us is whether or not they can fill the need. That's top of the list, and behind that would be support.

The initial setup was not complex at all, it was pretty straightforward. Just deploy.

Give it a chance. They have a demo, you can fire it up and actually use it in your environment. That's the best way. That's what everyone wants to see, the product with their data. That's pretty standard but they offer it, and that's the best way to look at it.

I rate the product at eight out of ten because of the need that it fills, it's very specific. I don't know of any other products that fill that need to the same extent.

We use it to monitor our system utilization, in terms of disk I/O, in terms of CPU, in terms of memory.

The benefit that we've seen from this tool would be having a GUI that is able to provide us with a quick reference, a quick analysis, interpreting performance, and being able to monitor and measure that performance.

In the process of doing benchmark performance analysis, instead of going into PowerShell or the VMware or CLI, we're able to have vRealize provide that GUI that gives us that information up front, without the delay of scripting it.

The things that we find valuable are being able to have a GUI that provides us with an overview of the performance metrics that we need.

I find the solution to be intuitive and easy to use. The tools are color-coded and provide a clear, legible, English.

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 stability that we've seen is that it works for our needs for right now.

We haven't seen any problems with scalability, but we're still in a proof-of-concept phase. We have not scaled it to production.

Beforehand, we were using ESXi and we were going in and logging our benchmarks. In terms of switching to vROps, again, right now, it's still a proof of concept, it's not in production. But we're exploring the functionality and we're exploring the capacity and the potential.

Our most important criteria when selecting or working with a vendor include a couple of factors that are critical for us, within our organization: Factors related to cost and performance. But in addition, there are things related to security: NIST 800-53, NIAP Common Criteria at a high level.

When we first started the process of learning about VMware and the virtual infrastructure, there was definitely a learning curve associated with it. The documentation that was available online presented challenges in terms of confusing of terminology. So ESXi: is it vSphere, is it vCenter? There's a lot of technical jargon that's used to refer to specific components of the architecture. The more we work with it, and the more we're using it, the more we are able to connect the dots.

My recommendation would be to look at your use case and look at what exactly your requirements are and, from there, if your use case fits the model then you can reduce the amount of administrative overhead that's associated with managing the hyperconverged system.

I would give it about an eight out of ten. The reason is that we still see challenges with bugs. But we're also looking at the long-term feasibility of the product and looking at long-term changes within our architecture to reduce our administrative overhead.