VMware Aria Operations Reviews

We use VMware Aria Operations to give the business reports on performance statistics whenever there are issues with latency, or CPU, or memory high utilization. We also use it to interrogate the vCenter space to identify how many VMs have been offline for more than sixty days, as well as the ones that are heavy hitters on the storage side.

VMware Aria Operations helps us to make decisions by comparing workload versus what we are consuming, allowing us to save costs and make recommendations to the business. We use it to ensure that we do not unnecessarily increase CPU, which can have negative impacts, and instead, identify root causes like application performance issues.

The most valuable features of VMware Aria Operations include monitoring CPU, memory, and storage.

Improvement is needed in alerting. If Aria could send alerts when a specific system or VM is using excessive resources, we could consult the storage team to address the problem proactively.

We have implemented VMware Operations Manager for about five years, and we have recently upgraded to VMware Aria Operations.

I would rate the stability of VMware Aria Operations a ten. It is a very stable solution.

I find it to be a scalable solution, and I would rate it a ten.

The customer service and support rates a nine. Since the migration from Dell to Broadcom, we have faced some challenges, but overall, the support is good.

Positive

We did not use any other product similar to VMware Aria Operations.

The initial setup was managed by our team, with one individual primarily responsible for the upgrade and installation.

The implementation was done by our in-house team. A specific individual, Kevin Spacey, took the lead on this project.

VMware Aria Operations helps us manage and save on costs across our various departments, providing a return on investment by allowing us to avoid unnecessary upgrades and ensure resource efficiency.

From my perspective, the pricing is fair. I would rate the licensing cost an eight out of ten, indicating it is somewhat affordable for business.

We conducted a POC with Microsoft virtualization in the past, but ultimately chose VMware.

I would recommend VMware Aria Operations to other organizations and banks. It provides real-time insights and is beneficial for troubleshooting, especially for those operating in a virtual space.

I would rate it a ten out of ten.

I use the solution since I am in an industry associated with training where I train the customers on products, like VMware Horizon and VMware vSAN. I also take care of areas like cloud management and automation, along with vRealize Operations Manager (vROps) and VMware Avi Load Balancer.

VMware Aria Operations is a good monitoring tool, as it gives customers a lot of visibility into the VMware environment. It is a good tool for reporting, optimizing, collecting history, and generating good dashboards. Overall, it's a good solution.

Capacity planning and workload optimization are good areas in the tool. Dashboard has good capability.

I don't see any weaknesses in the solution because the customers don't ask for it. I don't think I have seen any customers saying that they didn't find a particular component or they didn't miss out on any component. I think it's a good tool overall. I have seen a lot of improvement, and a lot of metrics are being reported, especially the super metrics that the customer builds. I find it quite handy. Overall, I think I have no complaints. I have not seen many complaints from the customers.

There is always room for improvement in the tool, such as adding more metrics or dashboards and making workflows easy. The tool should have an easy workflow with some guided steps to make it simpler from the customer's perspective.

In the future, I think AI will be the big story in the coming days, so I think that may be embedded as part of the tool or maybe something to open the deeper product in terms of integrations, depending on the ecosystem and how the customers work and how they report. Depending on the vast ecosystem, how the customers have the different applications moving around, and maybe a more application-centric approach model could be some improvements in the tool.

I have been using VMware for ten years. I have four to five years of experience with VMware Aria Operations. My company is a training partner for VMware.

I think users generally do not complain a lot about it, but I don't know because now VMware has been taken over by Broadcom, so I don't know how the support works. I think, generally, the users have some complaints now that support has gone bad over a period of time. Previously, the support was far more efficient.

I have not previously worked with VMware Aria Operations. When it comes to monitoring tools, I have not used any products. Long back, I delivered training for Microsoft System Center Operations Manager.

I have no idea of the tool's pricing, so I absolutely have no idea because I am just in training. I don't deal with anything related to pricing.

I don't know how to use the analytics capabilities. I know the tool does a lot of analysis. It generates a lot of reports, and then I think users primarily use it for capacity planning and performance optimization.

The customers are using it to generate dashboards and intuitively look into the VMware environment, the virtual machines, and they do application monitoring. And I want to do more on the performance optimization also. So at times, they see a lot of wastage on the resources. So these are the challenges that they're trying to address.

In terms of how the tool aids our company's customers with AI-driven decision-making, it is an area that we have not touched as of now lately, but I am not too aware of that side of the story or how the customers would be impacted or would be using that.

I recommend the tool to others.

I absolutely have no control over what companies use the tool because I have customers who generally come in for the training. They either already have the tool or are already in the implementation phase. When it comes to the recommendation side of the story, we don't deal with that angle.

I rate the tool an eight out of ten.

I use the solution in my company as it comes along with our VMware license, and it is very useful for analyzing our issues and incidents. It is quite a well-performing tool.

The most valuable features for capacity planning revolve around the fact that real-time alerts are good for us. For capacity planning, even if you see any kind of computing, I get proper updates via logs from VMware vROps and Aria Operations.

Regarding what the tool is meant for, I believe that we will get a proper response from it in our company. It is a good product.

There are some delays in response to the solution's technical support, making it an area where improvements are needed.

I have been using VMware Aria Operations for two to three years. My company has a partnership with VMware.

It is a good and stable solution.

It is a scalable solution. Scalability-wise, I rate the solution a nine out of ten.

I am just a customer of the tool. Our company has an environment with VMware Aria Operations and other platforms, and we are happy with them.

I rate the technical support a five or six out of ten.

Neutral

I rate the product's initial setup phase a seven or eight on a scale of one to ten, where one is difficult, and ten is easy.

The product's deployment phase was managed in a few hours.

The solution is deployed on an on-premises model.

The tool comes with a VMware ESXi license. I don't know whether the tool is expensive. If one is cheap and ten is expensive, I rate the product price an eight out of ten.

Our company doesn't have any automation processes in our infrastructure. My company has not integrated VMware Aria Operations with any automation tool.

I am not sure about the tool's AI part, but for analyzing and insights, it is a very good tool.

I recommend the solution to others.

I rate the tool a nine out of ten.

There is a lot of different operations software available and some customers use other vendors instead of Broadcom VMware. My use case primarily involves on-premises installations as I prefer on-premises over cloud setups.

The solution has not really shortened incident response times, though it is a predictive tool that informs when something is about to happen. It has helped in anticipating issues, thereby assisting my team significantly.

One of the most valuable features is the ability to perform 'what-if' scenarios. We have basic solutions already implemented, so with the click of a button, issues can be fixed. It also facilitates easier reporting. The predictive analytics is a great tool for informing the operations manager about imminent requirements like running out of storage.

I can't pinpoint any specific areas for improvement at the moment, though there is always room for better pricing, licensing options, and potential enhancements in the user interface or customization.

I have around ten years of experience working with Aria Operations, as part of my work in various operations spheres.

The stability of this solution is excellent.

The scalability of the solution is good. I rate it an eight or nine out of ten.

I always receive top-notch support from VMware when I call, rating it a ten out of ten.

Positive

Some customers use other vendors not due to the fact their products are necessarily better. They use them to avoid being locked into one vendor for everything. It may be that they have a history with other products like OP5.

The setup process is straightforward. Though it may require a learning curve for the environment with configurations, it is manageable for IT professionals like myself.

The customizable dashboards are notably beneficial, providing flexibility to configure them according to specific needs and requirements.

The cost is included in our vCloud Operations licensing. I am unsure of the exact pricing or if it is available separately nowadays.

I'd rate the solution ten out of ten.

I use two key features of VMware Aria Operations. The first one is job automation, which helps me to automate tasks and streamline operations. The second feature is capacity utilization analysis. It provides reports and insight into the real capacity utilization of VMs over the past six months.

Its job automation features and reporting capabilities are unique and valuable.

After the automation, the code changes are implemented as well as CPU changes in VMs, which require a reboot. Enhancing automation features without interruption would be beneficial.

I have been using this product for six months now.

The stability is almost perfect. I would rate it nine out of ten.

It offers excellent scalability capabilities. I would rate it nine out of ten.

We experienced a delay in their assistance, which was ultimately attributed to the unavailability of an engineer. Consequently, the troubleshooting process was prolonged and took approximately fourteen days to resolve. I would rate it eight out ten.

Positive

We previously used Microsoft Hyper-V, but it doesn't provide the stability nor as many valuable features as VMware Aria Operations.

The initial setup was easy. I would rate it nine out of ten.

The deployment process took about two months and few people to complete. It involved migrating all components from Microsoft Hyper-V system to VMware Aria Operations. The implementation of the solution was facilitated by CRU.

It is an affordable solution that doesn't require any additional costs. I would rate it five out of ten.

I would rate it eight out of ten.

We use it for daily administration tasks.

If a user is experiencing issues with an application running on a Windows server, and the application is almost non-functional, I investigate the cause. If the server is overloaded, I address the issue by expanding the storage capacity of several disks within a few minutes. This ensures that the application can operate at normal speed and reliability.

What I find most valuable is its simplicity, which allows us to seamlessly migrate views from one physical server to another, be it due to resource overloads or transitioning from one set of disks to another. This process occurs without any disruption to the machine, ensuring continuous operation.

While the system itself continues to operate, the user interface may temporarily freeze or fail to display immediate changes. It requires loading and other steps before all modifications become visible. This limitation hinders my ability to customize the display of certain elements, posing a minor challenge within the system. Having the capability to manage the enterprise display would be highly beneficial.

I have been using it for almost twenty years.

I would rate its stability nine out of ten.

It provides excellent scalability capabilities. We have a couple of hundreds of users within our organization. There is a plan to increase usage in the future. With new personnel joining our company each month, I anticipate that this environment will likely double within the next year and a half or possibly two years. I would rate it nine out of ten.

Technical support poses a challenge, especially for large companies with competition centers situated in countries like India and Malaysia. When an issue arises in the morning for us, it's nearing the end of the day for their support teams. As a result, cases are often shifted from one person to another, requiring me to explain the same problem two or three times. Another factor is that English is not our native language. The variations in pronunciation across Europe, Malaysia, India, the United States, and Australia sometimes lead to difficulties in understanding each other. This language barrier has prompted us to resort to written communication, particularly through chat, which impacts the efficiency of problem resolution. I would rate it five out of ten.

Neutral

I've used Microsoft solutions and previously worked with Citrix, but I find that VMware surpasses both in nearly every aspect. It stands out as a superior product, particularly in minimizing bandwidth requirements for communication, whether it's a direct or indirect connection. This is especially beneficial for long-distance connections between two countries or similar scenarios.

The complexity of the initial setup depends on the smoothness of the upgrade process. If any issues arise, resolving them may require a significant investment of time—many hours or even days—addressing nuances to establish a good, proper configuration.

The deployment time significantly hinges on the scale of the environment. For smaller environments, such as a few servers, it typically takes just a couple of days. This includes the configuration process and addressing any potential issues. However, managing hundreds of ESX servers, and deploying such a substantial environment can be challenging and time-consuming.

Over the years, our environment has remained quite consistent, with a moderate number of ESX servers per site. The foundational physical servers for the VMware Infrastructure are regularly upgraded to newer generations. Despite the steady evolution, I've never encountered significant issues where resources approach full capacity. I actively monitor the environment with operations, using it as an additional tool rather than a critical necessity, given the robustness of our system and the reliability of the basic online information it provides.

Overall, I would rate it nine out of ten.

VMware Aria Operations is a new platform that provides visibility into different areas of the infrastructure, reduces or eliminates downtime, and makes customers more proactive. It gives customers the insights they need to be proactive rather than not active, and it helps them plan for capacity needs, ensuring that they are doing their best to avoid over-provisioning or experiencing contention. It also has a self-service option so that end users can be more independent from the infrastructure team and monitor their needs.

Avoiding problems in the monitoring area is our strength. We use real-time monitoring models and real-time monitoring to do this. We also provide other capabilities, such as seeing changes in the environment.

The VMware Aria Operations solution is a very technical product and is not for everyone. As a top-of-the-chain VMware tool, it is only normal that it has a learning curve. While the UI has been improved, it may still be difficult for some users. The solution has a lot of functionality and can monitor all areas of infrastructure, such as storage and network.

I have been using VMware Aria Operations as a partner for seven years.

I rate the solution’s stability a ten out of ten.

I rate the solution’s scalability a ten out of ten.

The documentation is perfect.

Positive

The initial setup is easy. The setup time depends on the scale, but it can be as short as a few hours. Once the valet solution is deployed, you must link it to the infrastructure. This process takes a few hours, as the key must pull data from all the infrastructure components. In most cases, the valet solution will remove the entire infrastructure into CRM within a few hours or less.

I rate the initial setup an eight out of ten. 

Most small users don't adopt VMware Aria Operations until it's necessary. Small businesses are looking for it, too. We need more monitoring and insights, so we're analyzing solutions to help us out here.

I rate the solution’s pricing a five out of ten.

VMware Aria Operations has many hands-on plug-ins that can help you monitor all the elements in your infrastructure, such as storage, networks, and more, beyond VMware infrastructure itself.

Overall, I rate the solution a nine out of ten.

The most common use case for vROps is to monitor infrastructure. Infrastructure includes, for example, your virtual machines. 

If a customer has an on-premises data center, they tend to integrate their adapters with vROps. This means that if there are any issues, alerts, or anything else that goes wrong with the system, vROps will pick it up. 

It will then use an inbuilt algorithm, depending on the events and alert system that you have configured, to trigger an email. This can help you to avoid a lot of problems in the future. 

For example, if there are a few appliances that are being monitored by vROps and their root directory or any other issues are getting beyond thresholds, say 80%, it will automatically trigger an email. If you have any ticketing system integrated with vROps, it will then trigger a severity one or severity two ticket to the respective team so that they are aware that there is something that might go wrong if it is not looked at on time. 

So, it is basically helping customers to avoid those situations where they might get into any issues or trouble. So, it is monitoring your system. 

Another stuff, so it is like if you want to have any visual representation of the data, of the performances, or of the data that has gone through in the last hour, last week, you can create a lot of dashboards on that, which is a visual presentation of the data. 

So, it helps you in a long way to monitor and understand your environment.

One of the things that is really valuable is its ability to help you implement security measures into your organization's standards. It helps you to have full control over more than 90% of the hardware and network infrastructure where you are installing vROps, so that you can have granular control over the infrastructure, which is pretty important these days. 

It's deployed mostly on-premises, but you can deploy it on the cloud as well. So, as most customers today are going for hybrid cloud deployment, they need a tool like vROps to give them a standardized, centralized view to monitor their infrastructure across both on-premises and cloud environments. It provides a single pane of glass to see what is going on across the entire infrastructure. 

vROps is a VMware tool, and most of the applications that our customers are running are virtual machines. So, when you have an infrastructure that mostly uses ESXi hypervisors, vROps really help you to have better control over your infrastructure and what is going on. This can help customers to run their day-to-day operations more smoothly. 

Moreover, in the older days, we used to perform health checks and other stuff manually. vROps automates a lot of these tasks, which lowers the burden on the operations team so that they don't have to worry about keeping an eye on each and every sort of thing. Even in the off business hours, when no one is there to take care of any stuff, vROps is still monitoring all of the data, appliances, and everything else. This helps them out in a big way.

The first area of improvement is cost. VMware licensing is always a bit costly. It has never been an open-source tool or something like that. So there are costs associated with that. 

Another thing is that you somehow need to have high-end people to perform the integrations with vROps as well. It's not as easy as it seems to deploy and integrate it with the different systems you want to monitor. 

It is user-friendly, but everything needs some specific skill sets. For example, if you go for even vRealize Automation, it comes as a bundle. So vROps is just one part of vRealize Automation suite. So, we need to know the product before we can start deploying it or start using it. We need to have people who have experience with specific tools before we can use them in our day-to-day operations.

So, for me, based on my experience, costing is one thing, and then there are the integration challenges that our company faces. And along with that, it does take up a bit of resources as well. It is resource-intensive.

I have not been using it directly because I work as an architect. Whenever there is a project for customers using vRealize Operations in their environment, we are the ones who have been designing the infrastructure with respect to vROps. 

So it has been around 12 months or more that I've been associated with projects where I have been helping customers deploy vROps and how to make proper use of this tool.

The stability of vROps depends on the environment that you are using it in. vROps comes as a suite, and when you're using it with other VMware products, such as vRealize Automation (vRA), vRealize Network Insight (VRNI), and VMware Cloud Foundation modules, it is already compatible with those products and is generally pretty stable. 

For example, when you are using it for virtualized workloads or VMware Virtual Desktop, it's very stable.

It is a scalable solution. You can scale it up depending on your configuration setup. 

There are different options for scaling, such as multi-node setups and collector setups. If you need to collect more information from different tools, you can simply add a collector to your environment. 

vROps is a good choice in terms of scalability. Even when you scale it up, it's not a big hassle to put more load into the system.

As an architect, we mostly design vROps implementations. The day-to-day operations are typically the ones that reach out to the support team. So, the support is mainly for people who are managed in the customer environment. 

We provide guidance on which integrations or adapters to use, and how to get the endpoint systems integrated with vROps. But when it comes to support, it's a matter of cost. VMware offers different levels of support, and the enterprise level of support is quite expensive.

If you're looking for a higher level of support, then it comes with a cost.

When I started working with vROps three years ago, the company mostly used vROps. When I joined, I started with the vRealize Suite. And they have different types of monitors. For example, there are different tools for different monitoring purposes. Like, for security, they'll have different tools for log monitoring.

We use vRealize Operations. We use vRealize Automation (vRA). We use VMware Cloud Foundation. That's vCS. And then, we have been using vRealize Network Insight. Then, we have been using Cisco Insight or Cisco FlashStack. These are the few software that I've been working on in the last twelve months. So, different teams will have different tools which are being used.

The initial setup is quite easy and straightforward.  The majority of the time, implementing vROps is not time-consuming. 

However, if you are migrating from one vROps version to another, you may need to take care of a few things, such as downloading the new configuration and other necessary changes. But overall,  vROps implementation is pretty simple.

So, besides the license overall, you have to pay for the type of support you want. With the license, there is a support cost as well.

Typically, people don't just purchase vROps individually. It's usually part of a larger suite, like the vRealize Suite, which is expensive. So, the suite includes vROps along with other software. 

If a company purchases vCloud Foundation (vCF) or vRealize Suite, vROps comes with it. vCF and the vRealize Suite have been acquired or purchased by large customers who have the financial resources to support the licensing costs. 

For example, I've seen many banking sectors using vROps when they purchase vCS. Recently, I worked on a design for a major European bank, and they were using the entire suite. 

So, no one really goes for the individual product because its value is significantly higher when it's part of the suite. So, there are many customers who use it, but the number of people who use it within a team depends on the company. For example, service-based companies that support multiple customers may have different needs based on the number of customers they support. They may train or onboard more resources to use vROps, depending on their requirements.

The main reason my company goes with VCS is that they already have a current VMware setup. When people go with the VCS suite itself, suppose you have a VMware virtualized network and VMware workloads running on one platform. 

For the network, you may be using different switches, and for storage, you may be using different SANs. So, with this approach, you have to pay different vendors because you're not relying on the same vendor for everything. 

And whenever something goes wrong, you have to open different tickets, which can be costly and time-consuming. So, people go for VCS mostly because they are getting everything in one single setup.

VMware has your networking, your virtualization, vSAN storage, vRealize Automation for automating workloads, vROps for monitoring, and VRNI for monitoring specific networks. So, it comes as a bundle, and it's pretty easy for companies to know that if they buy everything from the same vendor, it streamlines their processes. 

It also leads to operational efficiency because they are dealing with one vendor. And then, when you have two different products bundled in a suite from the same vendor, compatibility is never an issue. That's one of the main things. Because if you have different vendors and products, there is always uncertainty about whether upgrading one product will be compatible with another product from a different vendor. 

And if we look at what VMware has done recently, every year they have validated design guides. So, through that, we'll have everything within that guide, which one is compatible with which, which doesn't work with which, and if there are any limitations with any releases. So, we get everything in one suite. 

So, that's the reason most people go with them because they can foresee their future development in terms of hardware, in terms of their workload, or in terms of their business.

First of all, I would always suggest you go for vROps initially and always go for a temporary trial license. That way, you can check your VMware or any workload stuff you have, how your trial license works, and how it works with your production environment. If you have any workloads that you're going to manage through vROps, always go for a trial license first. Don't straight away go with the production license.

Also, always try to use different workloads, different metrics, and different configurations. This is because it also depends on the specific data center you have and the different products you're using. Ensure you are trying to integrate or get the alert generated for most of the products you are trying to integrate with vROps. A POC (Proof of Concept) kind of thing is always required before you go for the production license.

During the trial period, you can see how your dashboard looks, how the alert system is working, if it's not working, and if it's really meeting your security considerations as well. So, these are the things before you fully decide to go for the production license. Always take a trial license integrated with your current setup, which you have appliances and tests on, before you even decide to go ahead with it.

Overall, I would rate the solution an eight out of ten. The reason is that there are many new advancements coming into the market that are AI-enabled. VMware really needs to do more when it comes to preventing alerts. For example, many security tools use algorithms to detect alerts and give you a whole scenario of the reports that show how you can prevent this action from repeating again. These are a few things they absolutely need to work on more.

Also, security has been a boom for companies in the last few years, and considering how important security is, there have been a lot of tools that do the rating. So, it is more integration-friendly if the current tool can be used for any integrations in any environment, which is something VMware is not yet that efficient at. But I would still give it an eight because most of the workloads currently being used are virtualized ones, VMware workloads. For them, it's perfect.