VMware Aria Operations Reviews

The alerts are the most valuable feature of the product. We run terminal servers and I like the granular ability of it getting into the guest OS. It gives us alerts for the hard drive, how is it on space, or pretty much anything happening at the guest level. It gives us a single pane of glass.

We use it a lot for capacity planning. Like I’ve mentioned, we do terminal servers. What we've been doing lately is giving it a metric that shows how many more VM's can we fit on that particular host. It's been great for that, and told us, with the research that's available, we can fit 10 more VMs on that host. From a capacity planning view, it's been great.

It has definitely helped us avoid outages with our internal servers. We've been having an issue with temporary profiles filing up the hard drives, and early on, before we really had the monitoring, that terminal server would just go down. Now at least we have something that says we have 10% hard drive space left on this particular machine; we get the alert in vROps, and we are able to get to it before it goes down.

It has not been helpful from a capacity planning point, but we have done a lot with the oversized reports, tuning some VMs. We were able to pull back vCPUs, memory and storage. We can reclaim some of that space that was being wasted on oversized machines. I guess that's capacity planning to some degree, but tuning is more what we use it for.

We also haven't really used the performance management features too much.

Even though the set up was kind of straightforward, getting the lay of the land was at times kind of confusing; I don't know if that's an indictment on me or the software. There was documentation readily available, it just wasn't as intuitive as I thought it would be, straight out the box.

Other than that, I don't really know about specific areas with room for improvement because at this point, we are just scratching the surface of what it does, because we are a smaller shop. We just had a merger, so at the top of the year, we're going to be onloading, onboarding a lot of DRs and scaling pretty quickly. Then I'll be able to really take it for a test drive.

Stability-wise, I haven't had any issues.

Because we are still a smaller shop, we haven't really had to scale it. Pretty soon, we probably will, because we are going to add some VMware Horizon for our VDI and NSX. I'm pretty sure we're going to have to scale it.

I haven't used technical support for vROps.

We weren't previously using anything. Just having a central measurement point was light years ahead of trying to go into each one, or setting up different types of software that have monitoring. It was just easier doing it with vROps.

Initial setup was actually pretty straightforward. I pretty much launched the VM, went into the web query and set it up from there; set up all the sensors, took you through a wizard. That was pretty much it. I didn't have to read about any customization.

Before choosing this product, I did not evaluate other options. We actually bought vSphere with vROps, so we never even looked at anything else.

Definitely go with it, if you're looking for a centralized management point, as far as being able to monitor everything, without having to manually go in and get sizing reports for VMs. It even reports on networking issues.

I'm waiting to see when we go into VDI and NSX; I think we'll really open it up then with a lot more monitoring options.

The most important criteria when selecting a vendor like VMware is pretty much support. We've had some vendors where it's not that the product’s bad, but when it does go south, the support hasn't been there. We definitely research, whether it's going online, looking at message boards, just kind of getting a feel for what other customers’ expectations are, if the vendor is meeting them or not. That's one of the things that we are really big on, the support perspective.

The most valuable feature is the fact that it understands what is normal for a workload and alerts only if you go outside the given boundary. It knows if a workload spikes at the end of the month, that doesn't mean it has to alert, because if that workload is spiking every time at the end of the month, it knows this is normal for that workload and will not alert. It'll only alert if that spike goes beyond the normal range of that spike.

It has the ability to filter and alert you only when you want to be alerted. It understands the IO profile of the workload. It knows when it has spikes, when it has valleys, in a manner of speaking, and accordingly will alert you.

It's a great troubleshooting tool. If you have enough management packs in it, you can see the entire supply chain all the way from storage to compute. It helps you see where exactly, potentially the problem is happening.

Of the newest features, the workload balancing is something we might use. Currently, the way our clusters are laid out we truly do not have a need for that use case. We are not a good candidate for that use case, but the fact is it might help us when we try to consolidate data centers. It can help us to take two clusters into the data center and perhaps migrate workload between the two. It might be used for a data center migration, the way I look at it.

As far as using the capacity and performance management features to save on storage, I cannot answer to that because we have a different team for storage. They manage the storage, they monitor performance and capacity. We monitor the compute side. We use vROps on a regular basis from a capacity management for the compute side; the built-in features, views, heat maps, and whatever they have are pretty good indicators of when we need to add capacity. It has been pretty reliable from that perspective in the sense that it tells us we have a defined threshold that it takes us x number of days to add capacity. It has been pretty reliable from that perspective.

I haven't yet truly used it for proactive monitoring. It's been reactive, but it helps nail down the issue very quickly, based on a VM, a host, or whatever. Their views are the biggest source of views out there.

I think they need to make the UI a little bit more simplistic. It can be a little overwhelming for people who have never used the tool before. For someone who is using these products, you can find things very easily once you're in the UI, but we tried for our users so that they can go in and look for their stuff in there. If they can make the UI a little bit more simplistic, that would probably be one thing I would ask for.

We are trying to empower the users. They should be able to go in and look for their VMs and do minor-level troubleshooting and similar tasks. The UI is a little cluttered from that perspective. If they can make the UI a little bit easier, similar to Google, it would help a lot.

We run infrastructure. Users have a mindset of different things they look for. For them, if there's a custom dashboard that we could set up with a very simple basic UI, where they can see the obvious things. They could just jump in there and see that dashboard, see where the problems are happening right away, instead of moving all over the place. That's why I haven’t given the product a perfect rating.

If it is designed well, it is quite stable. You need to know how many VMs will be reporting up to it. Based on that, if you stand up the cluster with a sufficient number of nodes; data nodes, management nodes and remote collectors. If you design it accordingly, based on the requirements, it performs really well.

So far it's been working well. We have a pretty big cluster; it's around seven nodes. It has been working just fine.

I have run into issues and the support I have needed was more from a guidance perspective than any big help; just asking them, having an upgrade, what would be the steps? What is the recommended procedure, if any? Is there any good guidance around it? They have been pretty helpful with that.

I haven’t actually had many issues with technical support. Once they kind of laid it out, given the environment, “This is how we would recommend that you do the upgrade.” The upgrade itself takes time just because of the scale of the environment. Beyond that, not much.

I was not involved in the initial set up, but I have been involved since then. The solution was already stood up by another team member of ours. He's no longer there, so I inherited the solution, but I have expanded the cluster and I've incorporated additional BUs that we have all over the U.S. and they're reporting into vROps now.

It's a pretty big product. From our perspective, it does a lot for you. You just need to do your homework and try to understand what you're looking for. It has all the answers in there. It does. You just have to know what you're looking for and know where to go to look for it because it can be a very complex product for a first time user. It can be.

The alerting is probably the most valuable feature of the product. If issues come up, we can tell right away to look in the system, dive a little deeper and see if there's a real problem and if so, we can fix it before there's an outage.

I definitely think some of the adapters could be enhanced.

When building out metrics, it would be better to have a more granular approach to that. Sometimes the metrics are all or nothing, and it would be better if you could adjust those to make it fit your particular needs better. On occasion, we can't even use some of the metrics because of the way our environment is set up; I can't turn it off for this pool and then have it on for this pool. It will give errors and then those errors don't mean anything. If you give errors that don't mean anything, then people stop listening to them and then bad things could happen. I would definitely like finer control of some of the metrics and how they work.

I have been using it for about a year and a half now.

It is a stable product most of the time. Occasionally, the adapters will go down and I'll have to reboot them, but that's maybe once every few months.

We haven’t needed to scale it yet. We have about six nodes and it's been pretty solid.

Technical support depends on the product. The people that work on the vROps side are definitely a lot more knowledgeable than some of the other support people I've worked with. Anytime I put a ticket in for vROps, it usually gets solved a lot quicker than a ticket for vSphere, Horizon or something like that. They've done a good job training their employees on the vROps part.

We switched from another solution to vROps because we weren't really happy with the first product.

vROps was attractive because it was part of our licensing deal so we figured if we don't have to pay for it, why not use it? Also, it does integrate a lot better with both vSphere and Horizon. We're big Horizon customers, so that was one of the big driving forces.

When I choose a vendor to work with, my criteria are that the product needs to be stable and easy to manage, but still be able to customize it to fit our environment; then, definitely, regular feature updates and bug fixes.

Initial setup was pretty straightforward. The Horizon adapter had some interesting licensing part to it. You just had to follow the white paper but it was a little tricky at first. Once I got the hang of it, it was no big deal.

My advice would depend on what you're trying to do with it. Our main goal was more of a monitoring solution, but obviously it does well in analytics, so I would ask what you're trying to do for it and then I could probably go into some of the details on what features would benefit you and if that was something you found useful, then yeah, great.

Capacity management is probably the most valuable feature that made me want to bring it in. There was a lot of overprovisioned infrastructure before I came in. That was the main goal: being able to have evidence for when issues are not the infrastructure's fault, when there are application issues. There was a big issue with a financial management application that they were just certain they didn't have enough CPU and memory. We were able to demonstrate that, no, here's what it's using exactly, so what is going on is that the software is poorly written. vROps helped rectify those situations.

There's room for improvement; it's really good. Again, it's very powerful, but it's difficult to harness that power, and there's a lot of room for improvement there. They could improve the licensing and the expense, too.

In a vROps session at a recent conference, I heard they're trying to make it a little simpler, because when you first install it, it's very overwhelming. It's one of those products that's very, very powerful, but getting to a place where you can harness that power, there's a pretty steep learning curve. Doing custom dashboards and making things look simpler are not easy to do, compared to some other products. At my previous employer, we used VM1, which is a competitor, and I know there are other competitors such as VMTurbo; there are all kinds of other ones that do it. I guess those other solutions went more towards the ease-of-use side and less towards the power; the getting-into-everything side.

I've been with my current company for just over two years. About a year in, I campaigned to bring vROps in, so I have been probably using it for just over a year now.

It is a consistent, stable solution. Although it's not really a stability issue, we had one issue when we upgraded from vCOPS to vROps and tried to run it in parallel. It wasn't really clear about how you would go about doing that, so we ended up having to reinstall vROps completely, and had to start over. It takes 30 days to get to where you have good information coming out of it, so we had to start that over again. That wasn't necessarily the product's fault as much as the documentation's fault.

We're fairly small from an infrastructure standpoint, so I just have the one appliance. I don't have any remote collectors or anything running. I have one vROps appliance monitoring vCenters; one has about 400 VMs, the other one probably only has about 20 VMs that run all the time. It's our DR site, and there are some production workloads that run there all the time.

I'm one of those guys that'll never call technical support, so unless we have a major issue, I'd rather figure things out for myself. And my company tends to buy the lowest level of support. I don't usually call.

We did call them one time for vROps, which was the issue I’ve mentioned about the database becoming corrupted because of the way we had done the migration. They just said, "Can't do it that way."

Initial setup is really easy, especially with the appliance. You just deploy the appliance, and point it at vCenter. I had one issue that was a little bit non-intuitive as far as setup, which was the ability to pull in vSphere tags. If you want to pull in tags, you have to give it more permission than what you would do for a normal vROps appliance.

It is complex when you first set it up. It depends on how quickly you want to be able to get good and actionable information out of it. Obviously, there are things that are in it that are actionable from the start, but it's probably a subset of what you're actually looking for. If you do want to have custom dashboards and items like that quickly, you need to have a professional services organization, whether that's VMware themselves or a vendor that's familiar with vROps, just because of that learning curve.

There aren’t a lot of – at least there haven’t been – good resources for vROps. I don't know what it is about vROps, because for just about everything else in VMware, you can find lots of information. It's hard to find specific information on how to do things. Maybe I just haven't found the right places, but it seems to me that it's harder to find information – walkthroughs and things like that – on vROps than it is for some of the other products.

The tool really gives our VM admins the ability to dig deep into the VMs and really get a feel for what's going on. That's really a gap that we had prior to this product. Application teams would claim performance issues, etc. Our team really didn't have the tools to get in and do that deep-dive analysis without logging onto host and doing some very deep, technical commands. Very few people were able to do that type of analysis and this tool has really allowed us to open that up to more of our team, to be able to get a quick idea of what's going on with a VM.

It gives us quicker time to resolution. If we're in an outage situation, our teams can quickly get in there and identify whether it is a storage issue, a network issue, or a compute issue. It gives them the ability to discover that pretty quickly and then, when there is an issue, we can go back and do root-cause analysis. It gives them that ability to dig deep in and not just see it was a network issue, but get more specifics and hopefully get to an actual resolution because of that long-term fix.

It's a very powerful tool. It gives us the ability to get a lot of visibility that we just did not have before. The capacity management side of it is very big for us as well. Just being able to understand you know are we getting the most out of our infrastructure or not.

The biggest gap that we have today is that it doesn't integrate with our ticketing system. We get alerts out of the system in an email but those aren't actionable alerts. We actually did another professional service engagement with VMware to try and tailor those alerts some. We have been able to do that, but it's still an email alert, where we'd really like for that to be a ticket, so that somebody can be responsible for taking action on that.

There's also some gaps with the ability to aggregate the data and show it at a higher level. You have to dig deep into the specific VM to get the information you want. Not just anybody can do that. We've been able to open it up to more people on the team, but it's still not a completely intuitive tool that they can just pick up and use.

It seems to be a stable tool. We did have some issues early on with getting the kind of configuration correct. We've actually had to rebuild it, I believe two times, because of some bad configuration to start out with and, I guess, some databases getting too large. Outside of that, the tool has been pretty stable for us. For the most part, it's pretty reliable.

It seems scalable as well. It does a really good job of looking at the entire environment and aggregating all that data together. Going back to the scale and the database issues that we have had, I think that had to do with the amount of data that we were collecting on the number of VMs we were collecting. Now that we've got that fine-tuned a little better, it does seem to be pretty scalable in meeting our needs in that aspect.

We have used technical support. I don't know that I have a very solid answer regarding it, though. That would be more of our technical guys that were in there, day-to-day, dealing with it. I do know that we've had issues we've been able to resolve, but how easy that was, I'm not all that sure.

We really weren't using anything different. We were just using the vCenter functionality, really knew there was a gap there, and looked at the tools on the market at the time. We went with this tool because it really did give us that ability to dig deep into the VMs and get that technical deep dive. With some of the other tools, it was more of trusting the algorithms to tune the VMs correctly. We really wanted a little more control than that; that's why we went with this tool.

We use professional services to do the setup; that definitely helped us there. We did have configuration issues. There were some things that maybe weren't apparent at the time we went through the install. Over time, support realized there were some issues and made some different recommendations. I'll say using professional services definitely gave us a good foundation that we at least were doing things according to best practice at that time.

VMTurbo was the main one that we looked at.

The most important criteria when I’m selecting a vendor like VMware is the relationship. We have a good relationship with VMware. Also, whether it is a proven product, and then obviously cost is always at the top of the list.

I recommend vROps. I recommend professional services engagement, as well, especially for the tuning of the alerts, because it comes out of the box with just a lot of information. It takes a bit to get through that and kind of narrow it down. Your team either needs to really understand and be able to spend the time to do that, or get somebody to help you that's been through that experience before.

Capacity planning is the most valuable feature, as far as the storage is concerned, your servers are concerned, your ESX environment is concerned; when you need to add more ESX hosts.

It tells you if you have oversubscribed any of the VMs, if you're giving them more memory than they actually need, which is bad for the VM. You have to run that report and it shows you what the VM is actually using. If you have oversubscribed it, you can bring that number down; you can reduce the memory or the CPU.

Another good thing is when a customer asks you about an application running slow, you can go in and give them a snapshot that might show that the application is using only 20% of the memory, only 10% of the space; there's no issue with the resources as far as the server's concerned.

Clean up the dashboard; I need all the information right there, a high-level overview of everything. In the newer version, it's better. In the previous version, it wasn't.

I'm in the process of getting the latest version deployed. Right now, it's just gathering all the data. I still have to learn the product. I am not fully aware of the features that have been added in version 6. We’ve already purchased and deployed it; we’re waiting on professional services to come in and help us.

It has been stable

It offers flexibility; you can scale your environment any time.

It has not gotten slow at all. We have enough capacity on our ESX hosts to accommodate our workloads.

We use technical support a lot. It's good but they don't offer critical support for certain products. For example, we are using a product called VDP, vSphere Data Protection, to back up our VMs. We’re moving away from that; it's not reliable at all. It's like a free product.

For our operations manager, initial setup is complex, so you can't just have someone who just deploys ESX hosts. You have to research it and then move forward. Or, it has to be configured properly upfront before you move forward.

If you're running a VM, it's necessary that you get the Operations Manager. You can use third-party tools, but the data won't be that accurate, as far as monitoring using a native tool versus a third party.

The most valuable feature is the ability to get a view into all of my clusters from each one of my data centers at the same time.

It allows us to meet the needs of our customers a little better as far as capacity management. We can keep ahead of the curve of adding new hardware at the cluster side to meet the demand for what the other teams – such as the Windows team and Linux teams – need for their VMs.

The biggest room for improvement that I can see on vROps is for slightly better definitions around the metrics inside of the reporting. For some of that, it's difficult to find any kind of documentation that explains exactly what you're getting out of each particular metric.

I haven't seen any issues with stability at all. It works great.

Once again, I don't see any issues with scalability.

I have not had to use technical support.

We weren't using anything previously. Of course, we had a few talks with our reps at VMware, and they suggested we use it. We looked into it a little bit and it looked like it'd be a good tool for us.

The most important criteria when selecting a vendor such as VMware is obviously market space and how popular they are. What everybody else's experience with them are.

I was not involved in the initial setup. I heard it was straightforward for us.

I don't believe we were considering any other solutions at the time.

Definitely give vROps a shot; at least if you can get a PoC to see if it works and if it's the right solution for you.

I think it works good. I'm not as experienced with it as some of the other people on my team, so they might have a few more things they dislike or like more about it. But so far from what I've seen, it works great.

The capacity planning is probably the biggest thing that I use and then I guess the monitoring alerting system and performance troubleshooting. Those are the top three.

It helps with troubleshooting the performance of different systems when customers complain or they say there's an issue. It helps us to narrow down and drill into seeing what's the root cause of the issue. It kind of gets in a good vicinity of that.

It has not helped us save on storage at all, and it has not helped us avoid outages, yet.

It's helped me plan capacity so that I'm always ahead of the curve. I'm actually deploying out systems and not delaying projects, because I have the insight of what resources that I'm short on or what resources I'm not short on. It's helped in that way. For capacity, that's been the biggest thing.

There are a lot more improvements that need to be done with the product. They've advanced from the last version, but there are many more things that should be there, and they're not. And they seem to be working on it, but until they get those things done, and I guess reduce the complexity of getting the system actually set up. As far as the initial setup, it is extremely easy, but then to configure and tailor it for your environment is very complex. Until they streamline that, I couldn't rate it any higher.

Until this week, it was very stable, but in the last week and a half, we've had some issues and we have a ticket open with VMware now to troubleshoot why there's an issue with it. And it's just random, that's the complaint I have about it. There's no way to actually troubleshoot or have insight when the product starts to go bad, when the system itself goes bad. Outside that, when it works, it works very well. But when it stops working, it's just all of a sudden. It's abrupt and there's no indication of why.

I'm not extremely large yet, and it has scaled fairly well. I've heard of other customers having to deploy many instances of it because of the global reach of their environment, or sometimes just the size of it. For me, I'd say it scales very well.

VMware actually had to make some changes because of us, because when we deployed it, we found some bugs in it. I worked with the product developers and engineers that developed the product to help resolve that, get the proper sizing, and get it to where it's scaled out to support our environment.

Technical support has been very good. When I escalated up, they got me in touch with the people who actually write it and develop it directly, so I'm on with them at 1:00 or 2:00 in the morning on a Friday night/Saturday morning and so, they are very good. They're very helpful, they did the best to get in and find out what my issues were and get it resolved.

I've been using vROps since before VMware bought them. I knew of Integron before, when EMC bought them, and then transferred it over to VMware. I have used VMTurbo, but I like vROps much better. vROps has more in-depth analytics and things in it, and the capacity portion of it is much better. There's only one or two things that VMTurbo might do just as well as vROps but, overall, I like to have all of my solutions in one single pane of glass, and that's what vROps provides me.

I did the initial build. The setup was extremely easy, I feel. The original documentation about sizing was incorrect. That's why the system failed after I got it set up initially. Outside of that, the setup was extremely easy.

Support is going to be the number one criteria when selecting a vendor like VMware for me because on day two, after I get it set up and the vendor is gone, I want to know what type of support I'm going to have going forward when issues arise and when it's in real-world activity.

If someone asks me for advice, I'll say, Do your homework for one, engage their TAM, their technical team, to help them size it properly and make sure that for what they're going to use it, they're actually scaling it and setting up a way to accomplish that. Also, get involved with the community, go online. There are so many other resources out there: VMware employees that actually have blogs, and plugins. They just make your life much easier.