VMware Aria Operations Reviews

We use it for monitoring our VMs and our data storage.

It has certainly saved me from problematic phone calls from people like VPs in my company saying, "Hey, this service is down," because we know in advance when we are running low on disk space. It preemptively alerts us and we can go in and fix the issue. That is what I really wanted from it.

We would get calls a lot. We'd have servers that would suddenly start chewing up a ton of resources and storage and then, when they would run out, everything would stop. I would get that phone call at 2 am: "Why is this down?" and I would have to dig through and look. It's gotten rid of that part of it.

It is also helpful how vRealize looks at your data over time, at the performance of the machine over time. It can make assessments of the machine's health, based on that, for example, if there are sudden changes. That's helpful to look at because we've been able to see, on occasion, where machines suddenly start doing things that they weren't doing.

Sadly, we actually found a machine that had been compromised because it started doing a lot more work after hours and at weird hours. Apparently, somebody was using us for Bitcoin farming. It was helpful in that regard. That is another return on investment because I wasn't expecting to be able to do things like that.

It does exactly what I program it to do at this point, which is to tell me if I've got machines running out of disk space or over-utilizing CPU or memory. The monitoring component of it is the most valuable feature.

Intuitive? Probably. User-friendly? It could probably use a little work there. It is something of a beast. There's a lot that it can do but getting in there and getting everything working the way you want it to can be challenging. You have to dedicate more time than I've given to it.

It seems very stable. I haven't had any issues with the server going down. It's been pretty much hands-off. I set it up three years ago when we got it and it's still emailing me today, without any interference on my part. I probably need to go back and upgrade it.

It is pretty scalable. We really haven't gotten into building it out. We have a fairly small operation as far as VMware goes.

We really weren't using anything before. We tinkered around with some third-party products. Then I came to one of the VMworld conferences a few years back, and they were talking about - it was called something else before, like vCOPs, vCenter Operations. I sat through a spiel on that and realized it called out 90 percent of the things that I needed to know about and that I was getting calls on.

The initial installation was very easy, straightforward. Getting it to do the three things that I wanted it to do, in terms of emailing for those specific metrics, that was very easy to do. Beyond that, when I started looking at some other things it can do, it gets very complex very fast. There is a lot more to it.

The ROI certainly is apparent with the downtime being eliminated. As a college, if any of our critical systems go down, students can't register for classes, students can't get in and do things, and that means lost productivity for a lot of people - not just me at 2 am fixing something, or one of my guys fixing it.

We used ManageEngine, but that was more looking at the Windows side of things. I can't remember any of the others we looked at.

I would definitely suggest to colleagues that they use this solution. I would encourage them to take a training class on it so they can get more out of it, get their money's worth.

I rated it an eight out of 10. I like it. I think it could be a 10. There are things I'm not doing in there, so any difference between my score and a 10 is probably my own fault for not utilizing it fully.

I use vRealize Operations to do integrations with Log Insight, vSAN, NSX, and vCloud Director (vCD).

I have used it to pull recommendations for our data center or cluster and load balancer, then apply them.

It provides variety of management packs. It also supports the latest version of vCD, NSX, and vSAN.

I have found the recommendation tool extremely helpful.

It provides optimization recommendations for data centers, cluster workload migrations, and vSAN.

They should improve the vROps Federation Management Pack, so each customer can create a single pane of glass for multiple sites of vROps.

I did not encounter issues with scalability.

I used GroundWork before switching to vRealize Operations. I had a bad experience with GroundWork's support while doing software integration with its latest version.

vRealize Operations has proved to be a cost effective solution for our big environment.

I checked the integration capability with tools like JIRA and ServiceNow.

I recommend vRealize Operations for bigger work environments. It is a very helpful tool compared to others.

In my previous organization, the basic utilization was to monitor our systems, to do a better job than just performance counters were showing within vSphere.

It was a medical institution and we had implemented a solution called Epic. Epic is a big medical system for things like admitting, billing, patient documentation, etc. It's massive. vROps has a plug-in that actually monitors Epic systems.

In my current organization, it has been performing really well. My current job is also medical and we are going to be using it for the same purposes: Not only monitoring hardware, we're also going to be using it to monitor Epic.

vROps not only monitored my vSphere environment, it was actually able to monitor into my Epic environment, to make sure that all of my transactions and all of the ins and outs of that system were working properly. vROps became a focus of how we monitored and managed the system.

It enables me to anticipate our system needs, to be able to know if a host is overloaded, to be able to move things off of it. In my case, it's medical. This is something that could be considered life or death. It's critical that my clinical people have access to the resources that they need to accomplish their jobs. It's a 24-hour-a-day, seven-day-a-week job and vROps has really helped us focus in on where the trouble spots are, to be able to alleviate those problems before they even become problems, so it's great.

It has reduced time to troubleshoot issues, improved the quality of service to users, and provided cost savings through higher capacity utilization.

Being able to get the proper performance counters was the biggest deal. If you use the vCenter stuff, it's okay when you get the information out of the performance counters there, but vROps actually gives you more realistic numbers.

Between the previous version and this one, they should keep going with the improvements in how intuitive it is, streamline it more, and keep going with that notion.

If possible, for the medical industry, I would like to see it work with Epic, being able to focus in on Epic during the installation and have it move right into the Epic role. That would be great.

Stability has gotten better over time. In general, we haven't had any downtime.

I've never had to scale it up. What we did was we set up high-availability and we added failover ability to keep it going, to keep it continuously operational. So as far scaling, we haven't had the need to do that.

I can see vROps meeting our needs, going forward, for the next five to 10 years.

It was something that we tried out and then it became our solution. It evolved on us and became something that we could mold to our environment.

In this case, what made us look at it was its involvement with Epic, having that plugin for it. That's what originally got us going. Epic is an investment, it's huge. So to have something that could bring those components to the forefront, to show you if there are any problem spots, was worthwhile.

The latest version of it has been a much easier installation. The previous version I had installed needed a lot of resources, a lot of time to sit and mold it. The new one, not so much. It's been a much easier installation.

We didn't work with VMware to install it. That's how intuitive it is now. You simply download it and install it. There is obviously some molding that needs to happen with it, but the installation on this current version is much more intuitive and much easier than the previous ones. They've definitely made some improvements. It's pretty straightforward.

It's priced competitively.

Epic actually has its own product to monitor itself. It wasn't until vROps revealed that it had this, and we could see how it operated, that it came to the forefront. So we really didn't focus in on anything else.

Work with your VMware TAM, work with your VMware support group to get it installed the first go-round, get used to it. Definitely do a PoC, don't just try to roll it into production. Assess it first.

It is faster than HPE Operations Orchestration. I also think that it is comparatively easier to program.

For us, it's predominately a back-end system so I don't expect to see that much in terms of cost savings, with respect to end-users. But I think that there will be a huge saving in terms of time. With HPEOO we're talking 45 minutes, at least, for provisioning of a VDI. For the VMware stack, with vRA and vRO, we've cut that down to about 12 minutes.

I definitely love the feature richness and the ability to cross over any platform that I need. Right now I'm working with a lot of other products. We're in the process of flushing out our old HPE system and moving everything over. A lot of the automation that we do, and emailing, sending out customer notices, we've been able to take that over from the HPE Operations Orchestration, and the old stack, and automate it into vRO very quickly.

It was user-friendly after training. There is a lot to it.

Also, integration seems to seamless, as far as I know.

I get in to code whatever I need and then get out. So perhaps they could support different coding languages. I know that JavaScript is their primary "cash cow" but I'd like to see c#, personally. I'd like to see different capabilities for adding code.

So far it hasn't failed us. Once in a great while it will crash, but it's just a restart of the system and it's good to go.

It seems to be as scalable as we need it to be.

Technical support is very good.

We chose to move from HPE to VMware because the HPE was end-of-life. We were looking for a new product that was easier to use.

Also, it is a matter of the length of time it takes to get done what you want to do within the product. In order to get down to where I'm able to actually code script into HPEOO takes well over 10 minutes, just to get to that point. The library within our Dev environment was just massive and crawled. Whenever it would try to do callbacks, with HPEOO, it would have to go back to the server. Callbacks took forever. It was clear that the solution just did not want to work the way that we needed it to work.

After training, it is worth the effort.

We mainly we do a lot of reporting, trending reporting, with vROps, monitoring on a day-to-day basis.

The biggest improvement it has brought to our organization is the way we do our utilization trending reporting. One of the biggest challenges we had, when we deployed to our call centers, was that we never had that visibility in terms of trending reporting. How does the environment work? How do we look at resource utilization, memory, CPU? How do we look at round-trip latency when our users are connected to our VM? It has given us more insight into how we run our entire environment.

Also, being able to see a problem prior to the end-user experiencing it allows us to resolve it prior to it impacting the end-user.

Finally, it has helped us to reduce our troubleshooting time and improve quality of service. We've definitely come a long way. With every new release - we just recently moved over to Horizon 7.4 - vROps has really helped us monitor the environment, troubleshoot, and see how it's performing.

I like the monitoring aspect. One of the biggest things in our environment is being able to see what the entire vCenter environment looks like. The health status, being able to determine when we're having issues with resources, utilization, memory, or CPU.

It is also very user-friendly. We have gotten to the level where we're utilizing dashboards that we're able to customize for our needs, as opposed to their being out-of-the-box dashboards. So it's very intuitive.

One thing I mentioned when speaking with the engineers is that we'd like to get more granular reporting. We'd like to see more real-time reporting on the application-process level. Right now, we don't get that. For example, if I have a VM that's spiking up on memory or CPU, I can't really drill down to the application level and say, "Hey, I have IE that's spiking due to the user's streaming of video and that's affecting their entire session." vROps doesn't do that. The engineers tell me there are a couple of other tools that we will be able to utilize. But hopefully, that is something that could be packaged together, contained within vROps, as opposed to having us to go to a third-party.

We use VMware support all the time. It's very good. We have a TAM who is very engaged. We typically get very good response from the support team. We can call them, we can go online, we can submit the request, and everything is done.

The initial setup was really straightforward. One of the biggest things that our TAM did was make it a simple process. 

The biggest piece of advice is definitely to learn your environment, know your metrics and, prior to implementing, have a baseline of where you'd like to be. That way, when you implement it, it's easier to measure based on your metrics, as opposed to trying and figure it out later on.

I rate vROps a 10 out of 10. We've definitely seen the advantages of utilizing vROps. There's tons of stuff that we're not really utilizing through vROps that I think would help an environment.

We use it to monitor old ESXi's, the storage, the vCenters, the Brokers, to see if they have enough memory, CPU; to make sure they're not overloading the network.

We can detect when a host is getting hit by a lot of VMs and we can take care of that host. We can add more memory, more CPU, or maybe we just replace the host.

It helps us to monitor the virtual environment. It is also easy to use. We have a monitor with vROps right there. We can see what is going on. Any activity is going to pop up right on the monitor.

It's a little bit scattered. I have to go through a lot of steps to get everything in one place. I would like it that if you click on one cluster, you get all the information from the host, VMs, whatever is there. Sometimes I have to go to different places to get the information.

The stability is good. It's fine. I don't have any problems.

We use technical support, but not that much. They're really helpful. Sometimes you get people who don't know what they're saying, but in general, it's good.

Whenever a new product comes, the licenses are renewed automatically.

Get it. It's the best.

No problems. It's a great product. I love it.

It moves our projects faster. We also use it for alarms.

It is user-friendly and intuitive. The mix of analytics and automatization is good.

It has reduced time, troubleshooting issues, and improved the quality of our service. When I need to increase CPUs and VMs, it speeds up operations management.

• It's a great tool for monitoring and tracking data of our entire environment.
• It projects costs and growth of VMs.
• The UI on the latest release is cool.

I would like to see more features, especially in the way of Flash to HTML5.

We have had no issues with stability.

We have been able to scale.

Technical support has been helpful when we contacted them.

It is simple: Deploy WVF file, put in an IP address, and go live.

We got vROps because it was integrated in the platform.

We will be implementing NSX next month.

We mainly use it for analytics, to get insight into what they're doing, to go above and beyond what vCenter does and into actual time-based analytics.

We went through a zombie and rightsizing exercise, we skimmed the surface to get the low-hanging fruit. That was the latest good example of how it has improved our organization.

It has also definitely reduced the time to troubleshoot issues. The fact that it gives us that single pane of glass to look for stuff, that's the first stop whenever we start troubleshooting.

We like the analytics that it does. We can rightsize VMs and look for zombie VMs that are consuming resources but aren't really being used. It's been a great product. Predictive DRS has been a great value-added feature for us as well.

And with the newest updates, with HTML 5, they made it a lot simpler to deploy and to use, so it's definitely intuitive and user-friendly. In particular, I like the Unity UI. That is fantastic. There are a lot of colors, everybody loves colors.

I would like to see multi-cloud support. It would be nice to see analytics not only on-prem but on VMWare Cloud on AWS. I think that's in the roadmap. They should just keep growing it.

More HTML 5 would also be good. I wish vSphere Client would mirror it. I wish they announced it on day one of 6.7. HTML 5 is good. I miss the thick client, but I'm conforming.

The stability is great. We haven't had any major problems stability-wise. It just works.

It scales up to what we have. We have around 65 - 70 hosts that it monitors, and around 2,000 VMs. So it works for us and we can continue to grow and it will keep supporting us.

Regarding technical support, it all depends on who you get. When you call into tier-one, you have to deal with them to get to tier-two and three, so it depends on who you get the first time.

We didn't really have anything before, we were just relying on vCenter. So we needed something. When we did our PoC bakeoff, we liked vROps the best.

The most important criteria we look for in a vendor are

• scalability
• cost
• performance. 

It's really a total-package thing. Cost, performance, scalability, and does it do what we want it to do? Does it fit into our ecosystem, our portfolio? There are a lot of variables there.

We do see an ROI. The rightsize exercise, if we get more aggressive on that, we could actually pay for vRO by rightsizing the VMs. There's definitely an ROI there.

Pricing could always be cheaper, but it's acceptable.

We have looked at several different things. We looked at VMTurbo - Turbonomic is what they're called now. We did SolarWinds. We looked at Virtualization Manager because we already have an ELA, so we were just able to add it on to our ELA. But I like keeping everything in the VMware ecosystem. I'm very happy with our choice.

Pluralsight is a good start, to get an overview of it. Research it, PoC it, stick it out, have it monitor production for a couple of weeks and see what kind of results you get.