VMware Aria Operations Reviews

I use the solution in my company for the virtualization purpose. Basically, the server virtualization is the main purpose. Other purposes are for the cloud part, which is the private cloud. My company has a local telco customer in Pakistan who works on public cloud infrastructure, and they also have VMware Cloud Director product deployed in their environment.

The most valuable feature of the solution revolves around vRealize Operations, which is a good tool. The product is highly reliable, and it is easy to deploy and manage.

There are some challenges with the tool right now after Broadcom's acquisition.

The major challenges associated with the product stem from the fact that after Broadcom's acquisition of VMware, all partners are no longer VMware partners. One has to reapply for Broadcom's partnership, which is a very time-consuming process. Broadcom seems to be confused since it does not have the exact partner strategies that a product needs to have in place. Broadcom does not provide a good pricing mechanism, and it also has some other issues in areas like distribution. Previously, VMware used to use Aptec, an Ingram Micro company. Broadcom has some issues with Aptec, so currently, it does not have a deal with Aptec, and everything is messed up. Broadcom does not have a proper distribution mechanism, so we have delays in getting codes and all that. After so many reminders, once we get the codes, things are still very time-consuming, and the prices are still not good. My colleagues who work with VMware products were opening support cases on VMware's portal, which has now become Broadcom's portal, which does not have enough information like VMware's portal. Although Broadcom has been trying to integrate all of it with its own portal while also attempting the existing VMware portal with the Broadcom portal, the migration does not seem to be successful. Broadcom has missed out on a lot of data, which means that previous service tickets that were generated under VMware won't have any records. You cannot use a learning mechanism from existing information, which makes it a time-consuming process. We have to go back to the existing information from VMware to figure out what the solution is for a problem. With the acquisition of Vmware by Broadcom, we have to do all things from scratch, and all such things are very painful, and customers, partners, and our company feel troubled. Everyone is trying to see how to get rid of the vendor. We are just trying to find an alternate product.

The pricing mechanism is not available here. There are some distribution issues, and there is not enough information on the portal. The migration process from VMware to Broadcom actually messes up a lot of data.

I believe that the scalability area of the product has scope for improvement, and I say this based on the feedback received from my team.

I have been using VMware Aria Operations for ten years or more. My company has a partnership with VMware. My company is a customer of VMware.

Stability-wise, I rate the solution a ten out of ten.

I don't think that the product has any mechanism in the area of analytics.

I rate the tool a ten out of ten.

I rate the technical support a ten out of ten.

Positive

The product's initial setup phase was easy.

The time required to deploy the product is something that varies from one customer's environment to another customer's environment or site. I can say that the product is not a single table that can cure everything.

The solution is easy to maintain.

For a small environment, only one person is required to maintain the product. If the size of the cluster is big, then a few people are required to maintain the product.

I have experienced an ROI from the use of the solution, but the prices are still not much economical.

If one is low price and ten is high price, I rate the product price a ten.

I don't think that the product has any mechanism in the area of analytics.

I rate the tool a ten out of ten.

We use VMware Aria Operations for the provisioning of the servers.

The solution gives suggestions regarding whether resources are underutilized or overutilized. It can also do automatic rescheduling like we do in the cloud. The solution's predictive analysis helps us in our future planning for procurement of the server, provisioning of the server, and capacity planning.

The solution’s pricing could be improved.

I have been using VMware Aria Operations for a couple of years.

VMware Aria Operations is a stable solution.

VMware Aria Operations is a scalable solution. More than 10,000 users are using the solution, and we have plans to increase the usage.

The solution’s technical support is good.

The solution is easy to deploy and doesn't require much effort. The solution's documentation helped us to do the installation and configuration.

We implemented the solution through an in-house team. For deployment, we consider doing some certifications, which is the best place to keep some items, whether on-premises or on the cloud, the cost, and compliance. After that, we make a plan and then do the deployment.

The solution is slightly expensive.

VMware Aria Operations is deployed on the cloud in our organization. If users have a valid case, they should go for the solution. Users need to pay more if they go for the premium support.

The solution's integration with other tools is good. Sometimes, we need to connect the solution with different tools, and all the tools are easily integrable.

Overall, I rate VMware Aria Operations ten out of ten.

Our clients use VROps to monitor their virtual machine performance, create reports, do capacity planning, and do project planning. We also use the tenant-student app for billing purposes.

I've found the reporting and analytics features to be the most valuable. 

The latest release of VMware Aria Operations has some great new automation features, but I think the pricing could be improved. It's quite expensive, especially for the entire VM workload.

In future releases, I would like to see VMware Aria Operations integrate with Ansible. I understand that VMware has their own orchestration and automation product, but I think it would be valuable to be able to integrate with Ansible as well. This would give users the flexibility to choose the best tool for the job, without having to invest in two separate products.

I have been using VROps for about eight years.

It is a very stable solution. But it requires a lot of knowledge to manage. For example, if you are collecting a lot of data for analysis, the virtual appliance drive spaces can fill up. In this case, you need engineers who know how to expand those spaces. The procedure is simple: you just add a new VMDK and start the appliance. The appliance will automatically expand the drives with the NVMe and stuff. However, the problem is that you need engineers who know how to manage and clear up the logs and ensure that they are sent as a stop.

I would rate the scalability an eight out of ten.  I did have some scalability issues when working with the VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) stack. For example, if I deployed one instance and needed to scale out to a second instance, I would sometimes run into problems. 

VROps is most suitable for enterprise-level companies.

The initial setup process is fairly simple, especially if you are only setting up a standalone instance. However, if you are setting up a multi-tenant or multi-cluster environment, the setup process can take longer.

Our clients have hosted it on cloud as well as on-premises. 

The licensing is quite expensive for our company. I would probably give it a rating of seven out of ten, where one being expensive and ten being affordable.

I've used both VMware Aria Operations and Veeam ONE.

If I need to troubleshoot a problem, I would use VMware Aria Operations. If I need to get a complete overview of my environment and generate reports, I would use Veeam ONE.

Overall, I would rate the solution a nine out of ten. There is only one area of improvement for me.

Primarily, we use VMware Aria Operations for monitoring VMware and the cloud. We also need to report on physical servers.

We are not currently using the solution to the extent of what it can do. But we are moving in that direction. We are in the process of getting an integration to our ServiceNow instance, which will replace a lot of small tools used for monitoring.

The ease of installation and configuration is the most valuable feature, especially for VMware and the cloud. The solution is almost one click, and we get our workload.

Adding some intelligence to VMware Aria Operations, such as event correlation, and some level of AI apps will improve the solution, similar to what we see with the more advanced monitoring solutions that we don't currently have.

I have been using the solution for almost four years.

The initial setup is straightforward.

I give the solution an eight out of ten.

This solution is mainly used for the orchestration of servers and for obtaining reports such as utilization reports or load reports.

In decision making, it is very useful to have a nice dashboard. We have also integrated with QlikView, which is an analytic tool.

vRealize has a very nice dashboard.

It integrates well with other products such as those from Oracle.

It would be good to have more detailed reports and more details on the dashboard.

I've been using it for five years.

It is a very stable product.

It is scalable as well. Our system administrators and data center administrators use this product.

VMware provides 24/7 online support, and I would give them a ten out of ten.

Positive

The initial setup is very easy because VMware provides 24/7 online support to us. Everything is much easier for us, because of their support.

The deployment took about one to two days. You would need one or two people, such as IT managers, for deployment and maintenance.

We used a third party team for the deployment.

We have licenses on a three year basis. Licensing costs are much higher, but given the stability of the solution, it is a reasonable price.

It's a stable product and is recognized worldwide. It is much more expensive than other products, but it is stable. Therefore, I would rate it at eight on a scale from one to ten.

We use this product for monitoring, to verify what is and isn't broken within the cloud environment.

The monitoring and verification functionalities were the most useful features.

I was pleasantly surprised that vROps has a plugin for Kubernetes, so it works quite well with that, which was useful for one of our customers.   

The solution also works very well with VMware, but not so well with Hyper-V, and compatibility with KVM was very poor. It also didn't have certain abilities that we liked, like being able to run in a bare-metal environment. 

Monitoring is useful but if the solution can't automate or function without my input, it's a waste of my time. That's where I found out there are some issues with this product, there are elements that are not as intuitive as they could or should be. 
My problem is that I think it stays static too long, it doesn't continue to look at the changes.
I would like to see better remediation, automation, and better connection with specific security pieces. I'm not talking about firewalls. Firewalls are beginning to lose favor in a lot of the environments that I deal with. I need products that give me a zero-trust architecture, and this solution still doesn't provide that. 

We have been using the solution for a little over six years. 

We didn't really have any issues with the stability once we got used to the way changes are rolled out. We had to add security, as the security of the solution isn't sufficient for our needs. 

I think it scales fairly well. We were able to run it around the world which helped tremendously.

The quality of the customer support varied. Sometimes we would get junior staff and our own team knew more about the solution than them. Then we would get escalated and connected with someone who really knew what they were talking about, and they were very good.

The initial setup has gotten a lot better over time. The last one we did, we were able to talk to Google, Azure, and AWS altogether.
Cloud foundation software helped a lot during setup with remediation, prevention, and troubleshooting. It had not always been that way.

I would say vROps gives us 30% faster throughput, faster return on investment or better return on investment, so I consider it a good investment. It's at least 30% if not more, so I'm positive about that.

I would give the solution a three out of five, with one being cheap and five being expensive. There are some elements of the pricing that are good, and some areas where I feel like I'm being charged for something the product can't provide yet.

I would rate this solution a seven out of ten.

If you're going to go full VMware, then the compatibility is there. If you're going to have multiple, different versions of systems, then you could run into some issues. There are other products out there depending on the size of your environment.
We were at the top. We were originally using AWS, which I still don't like because they charge you for everything. I used the multi-cloud and that caused some issues. We carry out a lot of testing, so we look at how well the solution performs with Google, Azure, and AWS. It seems to work better in AWS than most other providers, the problem was that I was trying to make it work with so many different versions.

We use this product for monitoring, resource management, and troubleshooting of our virtualized environments. We have been using Heavy Hitter VM dashboards for oversized and undersized VMs. We use vROps to find the contention in the CPU, RAM, and storage. We evaluate the IOPS and throughput of our storage connectivity with our storage back-end. We receive some alerts about some misconfigurations. Mostly, we are using vROps for two main purposes: monitoring and resource management.

In my current organization, we have two nodes; a master node and an HA node. So, we have two nodes of vROps working in vCenter.

We had an incident where a service owner reported to us that there was a slowness. The services on that VM were not running smoothly and clients were having problems. We moved to vROps and used it to understand the contention and congestion in the CPU, RAM, and storage usage. In the end, based on the metrics that were provided by vROps and the datastore at the VM level, we understood that there was a latency in the usage. Based on the recommendations that vROps gave us at that time, we moved our VM into a much faster datastore and were able to solve that problem.

We have been using vROps for the DRS of our clusters. We send metrics that allow analysis provided by vROps to vCenter to better manage and schedule the DRS operations. So, it has really helped us in that particular field.

It has helped us to better manage our resources. Especially right now as we are in the nick of resources, it has really helped us to find oversized VMs and better manage the resources.

I love the resource management and ability to find oversized and undersized VMs. 

The dashboards are really good. They give you a glimpse of what is really going on in your virtualized environment. The ability to create customized dashboards based on your needs is also great. 

The Troubleshooting Workbench, which is for deeper troubleshooting and understanding of your virtualized environment, is really good. We have been using it to monitor vSAN.

The forecast feature of vROps is really good. By understanding the forecast, we can possibly mitigate some challenges and the threat of running out of resources, then having downtime or a disaster. 

VMware has added more default dashboards, which are really good, intuitive, and informational.

We have been able to find the density in multiple layers, e.g., the storage layer and the computational layer. The resource management of finding those bottlenecks as well as oversized and undersized VMs has helped us with managing resources better and improving the overall performance of our data center.

The problem with vROps is that I personally didn't find a lot of knowledge base resources on the Internet. This is a very comprehensive and complicated product. In order to be able to use it, I expected them to have more resources and documents on the VMware website. Or, as an example, they have books available for other products, like vCenter and vSphere. We don't have that level of information available for vROps. It would be great to have a better, deeper, and more comprehensive knowledge base for vROps or even have some resources for learning.

vROps has a hypervisor level of monitoring going on in our data center. We are using other products, like SolarWinds, to have a service and OS-level of monitoring. Because we are using two solutions simultaneously for different levels of monitoring, it would be really nice in the future to have a service monitoring or OS-level of monitoring in vROps, e.g., adding the support online for monitoring services, like Linux services, Linux Databases, and Linux servers as well as Microsoft Exchange Server, Microsoft Active Directory, or other Microsoft services, since we use them a lot. It would definitely help us in the future if vROps implemented this feature.

We have integrated vRealize Log Insight with vROps. We received logs from vRealize for the VMs and ESXi hosts inside the dashboard of vROps, and it was good. However, there was a problem with that. It worked at first for two or three months. Then, I think there was a problem with the certificate of vRealize Log Insight. We haven't had a lot of time to troubleshoot this problem.

I have been using vROps for a year.

There is a team of multiple people at my company working with vROps.

In the nine months that we have been using it at my current company, we haven't faced any sort of problems in regard to crashes, the integrity of the data, or dashboards not showing. We don't have any problems like that. It is really stable.

We don't have any plans to scale this out. If there is a new feature or service implemented in vROps for future versions that VMware will publish, we might jump onto that. Right now, we don't have any plans to extend and increase the scalability of our vROps solution.

We have a team of five people who work with vROps. We have almost 1,500 VMs as well as 70 to 80 physical/ESXi servers. 

A user would have read-only access.

A colleague and I do the maintenance for vROps, e.g., troubleshooting, customizing it, or building a dashboard.

We have not used the technical support because we haven't faced complicated or problematic kinds of issues. We have been using the online documentation, which has helped us a lot.

My current company was using Veeam ONE. After implementing vROps, the company decided not to use Veeam ONE anymore because vROps was more extensive and comprehensive when it comes to monitoring.

The initial setup was straightforward at my previous company. We downloaded the OVF, then implemented the integration with vCenter and other products, such as vRealize Log Insight, and that was really straightforward. 

I personally didn't face any problems. The tricky part is there are two ways of implementing vROps. The first way is using vCenter. There is a part of vCenter where you can specify, "I want to implement this in vROps." If you go that way, it will be a little different than implementing the OVF yourself, then going through the wizard and using the VMware documentation.

Once, when I had a problem with vCenter, I went to vCenter, and I said, "Okay, I want to implement vROps." The problem was that vCenter and vROps were not integrating. The usernames and passwords were not synced, so I couldn't log into vROps. However, that was the only problem. Later on, I switched to implementing the OVF directly. In that way, the problem was solved. Generally, the implementation was straightforward and the VMware documentation, for this part, was good.

It took an hour or two to implement one node and integrate it with vCenter. It was just a simple implementation for vROps without customizations. 

Our implementation strategy: We wanted to test this feature. At first, we wanted to make sure that we needed this product. We then went into a testing and researching phase. We implemented it because we found it really useful. Then, we began customizing it, making sure that the dashboards and everything else worked best for us.

I did the implementation at my previous company. I personally went through the implementation step, then I used VMware and other resources on the Internet to implement the service.

I have worked with this product at two companies. At the first one, I used to implement it, then I moved to another company. In that company, we had vROps implemented and installed. We are using it for monitoring and resource management purposes. In the first company, I implemented it, and in the second company, I have just been a user.

We have definitely seen ROI by removing unnecessary servers and VMs. By having vROps as an assistant when it comes to monitoring and managing resources, it has helped us a lot with cost savings and managing expenses.

On multiple occasions, we were having slow performance, performance issues, or resource management issues. vROps has really helped us to understand the problems or issues much faster. It has improved our performance for finding these type of problems and mitigating them by about 50%,

The solution's capacity allocation and management has helped us save on hardware costs by 25% to 50%. We have also saved on power and other data centers by 15% to 20%.

By using vROps, we have found resources and VMs that were not damaged and in use. We have been able to reclaim those resources. When it comes to licensing, it has helped us save about 15%.

If you have a large-scale enterprise environment with hundreds of servers and thousands of VMs, it will definitely help you a lot when managing your resources.

I have been told that the company tried SolarWinds Virtualization Manager. While they tried SolarWinds, the winner was vROps in the end because the level of integration, comprehensiveness, and extensive data provided by vROps was much better than SolarWinds and Veeam ONE.

At first, vROps might be really intimidating due to the amount of information that you get. from vROps. You might say, "Okay, this is so huge, big, and complicated." However, after using vROps for a couple of weeks, you will understand the value of this product much better. I think a lot of people might jump into the UI, then its level of complication and complexity, they would say, "SolarWinds or Veeam ONE is a better solution because it is really simple." I would say to them, "Challenge yourself with it. Involve and engage yourself to work with the UI. After a couple of weeks, you will understand that vROps is definitely the best choice when it comes to monitoring VMware solutions."

If you have an enterprise-level environment or work in a large-scale data center, I would definitely recommend using vROps. It helps a lot with resource management as well as understanding the congestion and bottlenecks of virtualized environments. It is the number one solution for monitoring virtualized environments, especially if you are using VMware.

Generally, it is a very comprehensive, good product.

The user-friendliness of the UI is really good. It is better every year. I haven't used a previous version of vROps. I have only used version 8. I saw some screenshots of the UI before, and this version is much better. 

With the integration with vRealize Log Insight, we were able to view logs in one dashboard. So, we were not going back and forth to vRealize Log Insight. It improved the performance and efficiency of personnel, like myself, to better troubleshoot problems.

Right now, we don't have any performance issues, especially with the help of vROps. We have more of a lack of resources for future projects.

In the future, we might use the vendor’s Tanzu solution along with vROps for Kubernetes monitoring or management.

I would give vROps a nine out of 10.

We wanted a tool for monitoring the entire virtualization infrastructure. In addition to infrastructure monitoring, a second use case was application monitoring. At the time we were looking, they had a tool called EPOps through which you could do application monitoring. We also heard about some other components, partner integrations for VMware, through which we could monitor the SAP landscape and storage performance.

There was a team of five or six members. Only one member implemented the vROps, but the visibility was provided to all five of the core infrastructure members. They have been able to use the tool effectively to monitor all the applications from an infrastructure point of view.

We also created an application-specific dashboard, from an infra point of view, which was released to end application teams, so that they can then monitor the performance of their applications: How is the CPU and memory? How is the software: working or not working? It is a one-of-a-kind solution where we have onboarded application teams and given them logins for their specific areas.

vROps also provides proactive monitoring, at some level. It's not practical to keep on logging in to the tool to look at it. So you can create alerts and it will alert you if memory utilization is going beyond 80 or CPU utilization is going above 90. It significantly improves the monitoring, because we are able to act on it beforehand, before the system goes down. It has decreased our downtime by 20 percent. We are more proactive in anticipating and solving problems, and it has also reduced our mean time to resolution for infrastructure by about 10 percent.

We also use it for capacity management, for buying new capacity. It has saved us on hardware costs because we're able to plan properly and we're able to buy the necessary hardware. It has saved us around 50 lakh in Indian rupees [about $70,000 at the time of this review]. And because we are not buying as much infrastructure, the licensing requirements and costs have also been reduced. And it has saved us about 5 to 10 lakh [about $7,000 to $14,000 at the time of this review] in power and other data center costs.

For VMware monitoring, it gives a good amount of data, which can be circled back with the IT hierarchy, or application owner, to have a discussion. 

VM rightsizing is another very good feature and capacity planning is something else that I like about it.

In addition, over time it has become more user-friendly. When we deployed, it was only three-years-old. Recently, it has matured enough to monitor cloud infra also, but we have not tried that yet. But it has matured over the time. The GUI has become more user-friendly and it is very lightweight now.

It shows end-to-end visibility for infrastructure: CPU, memory, and all the processes that are running on the server. It will provide you everything. It will provide you some information about applications, depending on the tool capability, but it is not an application performance monitoring solution.

We integrated vROps with vRealize Log Insight, but it was not helpful to me. It was not giving me any good data.

Another area where there is room for improvement is an area which I've not looked at: cloud management and how efficiently it can do it. 

Also, while it is able to do VMware management very effectively, if you have any other hypervisor solution, I don't know how effectively it would work. It should scale to other infrastructure also.

We have been using VMware vRealize Operations (vROps) for the last five to six years now.

The product is more or less stable. We may find a database-related issue once in a year because it uses the open source Cassandra DB, so sometimes that does not work the way it should. 

Also, high-availability within the product is not so good. They have tried to improve it over the time. We have created a two-node cluster where, if one cluster goes down, the other node will take over. Whenever we have tried, it was not that seamless, and we had to involve their support.

It is scalable. It is easy to scale. We also implemented it in a remote location, where we just had to install a remote connector. All you need is good connectivity.

In a given week we were using vROps three to four times. That frequency has been reduced and now we use it about twice a week. I look at it in my role as manager of IT infrastructure and data center. On my team there are three people and they also look at vROps from time to time. They create VMs. They are database, software, and backup administrators. Above me there is our leadership team that also looks at it on a case-by-case basis.

Technical support is very good, no doubt about it. If you raise a very high-priority case, you will get an immediate response. And most of the people are able to solve the problems. You don't have to roll the case over to the next available or superior agent.

We didn't have any tools before vROps, but it provides a single tool for virtualized infrastructure monitoring.

The initial setup was a complex process, and it is still a complex process. There are too many products: the UI, database, and you have to properly size it according to your requirements, otherwise it does not work well.

Our deployment was a one-year project.

We took a full suite of licenses for all the VMs which we had. And that time we had some 600 VMs. We took two types of licensing, advanced and enterprise, where we were trying to achieve our application monitoring in the enterprise licensing. The advanced was used to create dashboards and other kinds of reporting.

Besides this, we used one more product, VMware Compliance Manager, which they have now stopped. That is one area which they have now integrated into vROps, but we have not tried it so far.

We used VMware professional services. Our experience with them was okay. We thought we would implement way further, with VMware onboarding, but it took a year to complete the project.

We haven't really seen ROI. That was not the idea at the time. We wanted a monitoring platform. Return on investment on such a product is also fairly difficult to calculate.

Over time they have changed the pricing and the licensing model. Five or six years ago, when we took it, it was a very good option. Now, I think I have to reevaluate, to be honest.

We looked at SolarWinds and BMC. One of the primary reasons we went with vROps was that we had a large VMware infrastructure. Also, at that time, the dashboards were very good. Also, at some level, it was an agentless solution. In all the other cases you had to install an agent in the end VMs. But because vROps is tightly integrated with VMware, it monitors without agents. That was a factor. Cost was also a factor.

My advice would be to look at it holistically, meaning look at what you want to achieve in the final endgame. Also, evaluate a couple of products to get a feel for them and which product suits you. In addition, create roles within your company, because this needs dedicated attention when you implement it and attention to sustain it. There should also be alignment with an application team or leadership team when implementing this kind of solution.