VMware Aria Operations Reviews

We primarily use it for performance and monitoring and troubleshooting for our virtual infrastructure. We also use it to monitor and troubleshoot our Dell EMC storage arrays.

We have a troubleshooting dashboard that our team uses. If someone complains that a system is slow, they can go there, search for that virtual machine and see if there are any alerts for it. We can start our troubleshooting from that step.

The most valuable feature is the single pane of glass so we can see all our vCenters, all our machines, all our storage arrays. We can see if there are alerts in any of these systems, and follow up on that alert and see if it's impacting just that area or if there is a bigger problem behind it.

It's useful day-to-day. Every day the operations team can go and see if there are any new alerts, and they can monitor the infrastructure through it.

I find it user-friendly. The first stage gives you the overview of all of your infrastructure. It shows you the capacity, how much you have left, how many of your data centers can have more VMs hosted. The tabs are really nice, they're very self-explanatory. You can click them and it will pull out a menu. You don't have to roam around to find things. There are search bars you can use to look for things as well.

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.

It has been stable so far. We have not faced an issue where we had to troubleshoot to keep it up and running.

Scalability is good. Since we have had it for our current infrastructure, we haven't grown so large, so I could not comment how big it can scale.

Customer service is good. I haven't used any ticket systems for this solution, I haven't opened any cases for it, so I don't know about technical support.

We have always used this solution. We wanted something so that we have a total view of our infrastructure and that's why we use this product. We haven't used any other product for that purpose.

The most important criteria when selecting a vendor are

• its stability in the market
• how many people are using the product
• what the support structure is like for the product.

Those are the main criteria.

The initial setup was straightforward.

I rate this solution an eight out of ten. It's not a ten because there is no clear definition of the metrics. That is something I would like to see.

We use it for capacity planning, troubleshooting, and monitoring of our environment.

The benefits of the solution are stability, uptime, and awareness of what's going on in our environment. By being aware of issues, potentially even before they happen - for example, we'll see trends and metrics that can tell us that there might be a problem coming in this environment; maybe it's 30 days down the road - lets us get in front of them before they're actual issues or cause an outage or impact to the actual business unit.

We're definitely seeing quicker time to resolution on problems. It's yet to be determined what kind of cost savings we're getting from capacity usage. I know that there are some features that are in the product that probably we're not leveraging yet, but they're there and I know that's something we're probably going to be able to leverage soon.

The most valuable feature is the ability to get a view of our entire environment in a single pane of glass. We're a very large company, so going from one interface to another to troubleshoot an issue, or even just to get capacity information, is time-consuming and not efficient. Being able to go to one place and get that information is very helpful.

With the latest version, it's definitely user-friendly. It has come a long way. Originally, I don't think it was, but here with the latest update, probably the last two updates, they've made it more and more user-friendly. They've streamlined it, made it more efficient, and made it more simple.

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.

From a scalability perspective, the nice thing about vROps is it's more of a horizontal scale model. As our workloads increase, as our vCenters and different environments grow, vROps is easy to scale to consume that capacity by just adding another node. That can help. It keeps it from getting bogged down from not having enough resources. We can easily add a node in, it takes the additional load, and keeps up with our growth.

We're a BCS (business critical support) customer with VMware, so we already have a higher level of support. The BCS experience is great. They've been helping us with vROps if we have issues or troubles. No complaints there, it has been really good.

We had a lot of homegrown solutions and different products. We have Splunk, we're using Tableau, different reporting services that were based on gathering our own data, power CLI scripts, going out and individually running things against vCenters, pulling them back in, and then dumping them into something centrally that we could view for capacity. But it really was point-in-time, it wasn't real-time, it wasn't something that could even be predictive for us. We would look at it and say, "Well, that looked different last month so let me go look and see why," and then it was a lot more time-consuming to go about that method. It was more of a manual method.

vROps is a tool that gathers that data every five minutes, or whatever the time duration is that you have set for collections. We're more up to the minute, more quick to respond. I think it's a smarter product than homegrown stuff. That's why we moved away from the homegrown stuff.

When looking to select a vendor, they need to be innovative. They really need to not just answer the need but go above and beyond it. And then cost is a big factor as well.

The initial setup was very straightforward. To pull in an OVA, it was very easy to consume it. It was very easy to scale. There wasn't really much trickiness to setting it up. Do your homework, read through documentation, understand how the product is used with the different types of nodes and how they work. But it was very straightforward.

Cost is an issue on vROps. The Standard edition, for an organization our size, is just not useful at all. However, I like the price point of vROps Standard. But as a company, the Advanced is the minimum version that we can use, because we need the customization, we need a lot of the features that Advanced brings. But the price is substantially higher than Standard. 

It's always been a challenge to try to go in to my leadership and say, "Here's what I want." I've always got to go back and super-justify it and it's not an easy win. Whereas, if the pricing were closer to the Standard model, or maybe even a little bit above that, it's an easier conversation with leadership. But because it really feels like more than double the price, I'm not sure the value, double the money, is there, as an easy-sell to my leadership.

vROps is a ten out of ten. It's a really good product, I'm excited about it, I like using it. It's also one of those products that I like engaging with on a daily basis. It's easy to use, it's kind of fun and insightful to look at all your different environments and be able to get the answers you need. Honestly, it makes my leadership happy when they see the stuff that I generate out of it. That's always a plus too.

Primarily, today, we use it for troubleshooting problems and being proactive in the management of our capacity.

It gives us a faster time to resolution on some problems. It also helps us plan our growth when it comes to the budgeting time frame, to help plan our capacity needs for the coming year.

The solution has helped us improve quality of service to users, by giving alerts when different performance metrics get outside of their normal ranges. For example, I've had times when there have been memory leaks in applications and this solution has shown me as my memory usage gets outside of normal bounds. I'm able to find that and resolve it before my customers get back to me to tell me that there's a problem.

Trending of performance and capacity. Also, being able to dive into some more detailed analysis of performance metrics and compare them to a baseline of what's normal for particular time frames.

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

The stability is very good.

The scalability is good as well, it's worked well for us. We've increased the size of nodes and deployed additional nodes without any problem.

Our experience with technical support has been very good. Every time I've opened up support tickets, I've gotten resolution of my problems within what I would consider to be a reasonable time.

Overall, part of the ROI is more being able to provide statistical information to back up what we tell our application owners. It gives them a little more faith in what we tell them about what we see for the performance of their applications and whether the problem is at the core resource level, or if it's pointing back to a problem with their application.

I've been a user of this solution for quite a few years so it's something I've believed in for a while. I've looked at some alternatives but nothing that's given me everything that I needed, that I get out of the vROps.

I would rate this solution at about eight out of ten. To get to a ten it would have to have more ease of configuration and maybe some wizards in there to help configure more typical scenarios that people want to do in there. It's still fairly complicated to really get the full use out of it.

We use it to monitor our private cloud.

It has improved our organization with respect to allowing us to size our environments correctly. We get metrics about what our stuff is actually using, how we can scope for future projects, where can we save some resources.

It gives us a better look into performance, a better look into right-sizing, a better look at possible issues or, more so, trends.

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.

It's pretty solid. We haven't really had any issues; a little slow, but other than that, pretty solid.

It's a small environment, so we really haven't seen scalability with it.

We went with this solution because it was already included in our licensing.

When selecting a vendor one of the biggest things is cost.

I rate this solution at eight out of ten. It would become a ten if it were easier to scale out licensing and easier to use dashboards. Those are is my two top points.

We use it to help us optimize our environment and make better use of our resources.

We're new to it, so we're just learning the early steps of how to use the product and how to integrate it into what we do now.

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.

So far, the scalability has been working out. There's a cost involved in scalability though because you have to purchase the license for each of your hosts to go with it. Then, depending on what we want to do from here, there are more costs involved. If we want to look at the vRA automating stuff, there's another cost involved with that product. So we're in something of an evaluation phase.

We haven't used much technical support yet. We've had a few problems, but I was able to overcome most of them myself, with the KB articles and the like.

We didn't have a previous solution. We purchased it when we got an Enterprise Agreement with VMware. We had to buy some more stuff and this is one of the things we bought.

The initial setup was fairly easy. It's an appliance, so you just build it up and then turn it on.

There is a learning curve because it's a complex program. There is a lot to consume in terms of the metrics inside of it. That's the biggest hurdle: trying to understand all the places to go look.

We do have a competing solution in now. We have Turbonomic. We're looking at it at the same time.

Attend a training class first, before your boss hands it to you and says, "go."

We're new to it, so it's hard for me to rate it well at this time. In the early days, I'd say it's about a seven out of ten. I wouldn't give it anything higher than that until I get more time to play with the knobs and turn the switches and see how it works. It was easy to install, there's a lot of good documentation, and I'm finding a lot of good free training out there, since I'm constrained on purchasing training this year. This is my training budget for this year, the attending of the VMworld 2018 conference.

I love VMworld. I think it's very useful. That's why I'm here, to look at the vROps. I also came to talk to some experts about SQL questions I have, and some other clustering questions as we move forward with some projects. I have found the conference to be very useful this year.

Our primary use is to go back and review CPU utilization over a time period, and to reclaim resources from VMs that have been deployed.

It has improved our organization by going back and looking at, say, how cores have been allocated. For instance, if we have a web system that is only licensed for two cores or four cores, going back and reviewing, seeing if somebody made a change to that system, and what date and time they made that change, is helpful.

The most valuable feature is being able to go back and pull resources from people who have over-allocated resources, on their request for service.

I also like being able to hand out the link to hit that web GUI. I can give it to my web guys, the security guys, and let them look at what their actual servers are doing.

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.

It's very stable. I haven't had any issues whatsoever with it.

It's pretty scalable. For our environment, it's able to handle everything we have.

We had VMTurbo (Turbonomic) at first. Then vRealize Ops came out and we decide to give it a try. Since it was VMware product, it had more insight into the VMs. It was easy to upgrade to it. vROps was something we were able to roll in when we did our upgrades on contracts.

The initial setup was very straightforward.

We use it to monitor our entire infrastructure, scaling across everything compute and our Horizon implementation.

The benefit is that we are able to monitor the small things, catch them at the beginning, before they become large things.

The most valuable feature is the metrics, the ability to deep-dive into any issue we may be having from a virtual machine to a data store. Latency is a big thing - it's able to give us that metric pretty swiftly. And with our custom dashboards, it's all readily available.

Going from 6.5.1 to 6.6.1, the UI has increased tremendously. It's user-friendly.

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.

The stability is great.

The scalability is great. With vRealize Operations Manager, we are able to create remote collection nodes if we feel that it's too intensive for the current deployment. The remote collection nodes allow us to collect more metrics from other sources.

We are currently measuring this solution against other products. We have several different monitoring tools in the environment. We are trying to whittle it down.

The most important criteria when selecting a vendor for our company is cost.

We mostly use it for monitoring and making sure that we have all of our systems right-sized. We also use it for digging in, looking at things whenever we have issues, like storage issues, etc. We don't really use it for monitoring network flows.

We're able to monitor a set of hosts all at one time. We can go from monitoring one thing to everything. We get a holistic overview of what's going on.

It gives us a single pane of glass to look at whenever we're trying to troubleshoot issues, so we can go to one place as opposed to multiple places.

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 seems like it's very stable. No problems.

The scalability is very good.

The most important criteria when selecting a vendor is that their product works.