VMware Aria Operations Reviews

It'll ask me basically to obtain information regarding the statistics of all my servers in real-time. It's very important for us, because we have a large scale of VSX servers that we have to monitor. It allows us to find out if something is wrong in our resources, or there is, basically, an ESXi server that might be having some issues in real time.

It has improved us because in the past, in order for us to approach a problem, we needed to look into it on a server-by-server basis. Now, with vROps, we can see all the dependencies that are part of that server. If there is a problem with a virtual machine, we can find out if the problem is related to the virtual machine, to the host, or to the cluster that particular machine belongs to.

vROps has helped us avoid outages and shortened our outage time, because we've got a capacity manager; we are able to identify those clusters that are running out of resources and we are able to add resources to them before they run out of resources.

At the capacity-management level, it has helped us, because every time there is a new project and we need to account for new resources, it allows us to bring reports and, in real time, show our management team, "Look, in order for us to stand up these type of applications, these are the resources that we need." It has allowed us to provide management a visual of why we are asking for more resources.

Regarding performance management, let's say, as an example, if a virtual machine has been affected by a performance issue, there are many dependencies; it could be storage, it could be the computer, it could be networking. With vROps, we are able to see in a single pane of glass what might be affecting the VM itself.

I would like more alarm notification improvements; that's something that I would like to see. In comparison with technologies that are the competition, that would be something nice to see.

It's very stable. We haven't had any problems whatsoever. We run two different clusters of vROps: one in America and one in our European data center. Up to this point, we haven't had any issues.

It allows you to scale very fast because every time that you need to add a server into it to expand your data footprint, you're able to do it without any problems.

I have used technical support sometimes, when there is a question that we cannot answer ourselves regarding the functionality of the product; definitely, we'll reach out to technical support. So far, we have had a very good experience with them.

I previously used a different solution. Due to the fact that we are a video game software company, we use a lot of open-source software and there were technologies that did not offer the functionality that we needed in order for us to monitor our infrastructure. That's the reason why we looked into vROps. We are a VMware shop, so what better technology than vROps to use for monitoring?

I was the one that set it up. With any new technology, there's always complexity that you have to account for. Before I deployed the technology, I went to training and I got myself training about the technology. It was easy for me to set up because I already knew it.

We are always looking to different solutions, but due to the nature that we're a VMware shop, that's the first type of solutions that we're looking to.

Compared to other solutions that are in the market, for example, Splunk, vROps, in my opinion, has a leg up because it allows you to integrate with other VMware products, so to speak, so that's one of the beauties that I like about vROps.

When selecting a vendor like VMware, we always look for a company that invests in their own technology. If it is a new technology that, let's say as an example, has been on the market for one year, and we don't see that the company has a roadmap for the next five years into the future, that's something that disinterests the company that I work for.

Go for it. Don't think about it. It will save you a lot of time.

I have given it a perfect rating because it has helped me a lot in the past; that's the reason why, I will be sincere.

The most valuable feature is its ability to drill down into the very specifics. We're using it for a VDI environment, so to be able to actually look at the conversation and how it's progressing between the client and the server is really valuable for us.

It's a really big product, so it gets really complicated really quick. Therefore, maybe more simplicity in pre-configured dashboards and some of those kind of things would be nice, especially around VDI. VMware actually does not have a class in the education about vROps with VDI specifically. They just have a vROps class. When you add the VDI environment, it changes thing around, so that'd be another thing.

I have been using it for about a year now.

It has been consistently stable over the last year. We haven't had any problems with it. It's never gone down; never had any glitches. So far, it's been really good.

We're actually looking at deploying it to our production server environment as well, and we run about 24 different hosts. We haven't had any problems with scalability at all.

Technical support is good. We really haven't needed to call on this specific product, but whenever we needed to call, they're always there.

Initial setup is easy. It deploys as an appliance; wasn't hard at all. Configuring the agents was a little complicated, but once we figured that out, it wasn't bad at all.

We looked at several different options and it seemed to be the most complete package.

I definitely recommend vROps. I think it's a complete package, as I’ve mentioned. It integrates well. It gives us a single pane of glass. We can add on different agents for different applications, SQL or whatever we need. It really gives us a lot of insight into what's going on in the environment.

When selecting a vendor, we go on Gartner a lot, and see what quadrant the vendor is in. We're always looking for the best in breed and those kind of things. We also look at somebody that we're going to build a long-term relationship with, and we know that they're going to be stable as a company. Those are probably our biggest factors.

• Performance bottlenecks and the entire IT infrastructure, on the storage side and the virtualization side. That helps us out a lot.

We are partners of a lot of vendors out there. We also do management services. That helps a lot of our end customers resolve any of their bottlenecks on the storage side or virtualization side or the VM specifically. So that helps us out.

At my previous job, not at this location, vROps helped avoid outages and shorten outage times. It clearly projected what the growth pattern looks like on a specific data store. So it really helped us. If we didn't have that report from vROps, the data store would have probably filled up and would probably have gone down; that would have been a lot more impactful. Luckily, vROps did trigger that alert for us. Then, we were able to act on it. It helped us out in avoiding a big outage, I would say.

It does a really good job of capacity management, as well, because we have automatic reports that we trigger every week. We compare it with the previous week. It does a good job of capturing the capacity management metrics.

The performance management features have also helped. We have taken the recommendations from vROps. We have seen performance go up. Definitely, it helped.

I've heard certain improvement ideas from certain customers. There are certain issues with capturing the information on vSphere application metrics. vROps doesn't clearly capture those metrics. That is what I heard. I still have to play with it. I've not gotten a chance to play with that piece of it, but I've heard from customers about it. If at all, if they could improve that on vROps side, that would be helpful.

It's perfectly stable.

It's scalable. We have done a lot of upgrades and we didn't have any issues moving them around onto a different server as well; no issues.

We have used a lot of technical support for vROps. We have had a lot of custom-built tabs for our vROps environment. Technical support was awesome. We are business critical customers. We are on the BCS support. It's awesome.

Initial setup was pretty straightforward. It wasn't a big deal. Just getting it installed, pointing vCenter to it and then monitoring and capturing all the information. It was pretty straightforward. It didn't take us that long.

We have an ELA with VMware, and vROps is part of the ELA.

We were not looking at other vendors to provide a similar solution.

VMware is one of our big partners. That's the reason we go with them.

Just go get it.

I've been using it for a long time. I know the ins and outs about it. I've been happy with it because there's no other solution which can really do end-to-end, that kind of stuff. That's the reason I'm in. This is the only product that's out there that can really do end-to-end monitoring, management, and at the same time, capacity management. That's the simple reason for my perfect rating.

The most valuable features are probably capacity management and performance monitoring.

It improves the way my company functions because it's a better look at the ways that we can purchase hardware. We're able to make slightly more intelligent decisions on when we need it, how quickly we need it. Then, from a performance standpoint, it really helps us to be able to determine when we're getting clusters that are in contention or certain VMs and similar items that might need additional resources and so on. It's been able to spot issues on VMs that needed additional resources.

I don't think it speeds anything up. It might improve the ability of a VM but it doesn't really improve our process any.

I think there's always room to grow.

I'd like to see better integration between the tools, such as login sites. Having to go between the two of them is kind of a pain. It would be nice if you could kind of pull those up in between; or stay in one tool would be really nice. I'd really like to see some of the metrics and stuff that we get from vROps show up in vCenter as well.

The learning curve on some of the dashboards and similar items could be a bit more intuitive; getting the policies and similar items tuned out. It would be nice to be a little bit easier.

Stability has been pretty good. The later releases here have been really well. We've had some really good success with it.

So far it has scaled well. It's holding our thousands of machines, so it seems to be good.

I personally have not yet used technical support.

We did a proof of concept against vROps and a couple of their competitors, and we liked the vROps. It went really well from a licensing model, and the metrics and information are a little bit easier to read. It kind of won out against the other ones. I don’t remember the other solutions we considered, though.

When selecting a vendor like VMware, it really depends on what we're looking for, drives the evaluation matrix, but typically for some of the big ones, we look at how long they've been around, what the user base is like, what the support's like. Obviously, cost is always out there. Usually, those are pretty common across all of our evaluations. Then there are specific criteria for each of the products.

Initial setup was pretty straightforward. We followed the best practice guides and everything else that were already published out there. It was pretty good. The wizard was pretty helpful and everything, so we just followed the wizard. It was really what the best practice guide said to do. It was really well done.

Evaluate it. Run the PoC. There are plenty of opportunities out there to put it into your environment. Let it pull some metrics in and really see what the power of it is.
It's a really robust product. We've had really good luck with it. It definitely helps out in the environment, so it's definitely four stars. Not quite five because there are a couple of things that would be nice to have smoothed out a little bit, but definitely not bad.

Right now, we've been creating a lot of custom dashboards for the application teams, so they can see all their application and server performance. We've been trying to do a lot of the integration with their management packs, so you can basically try and see everything from end to end.

It improves the resolution time for troubleshooting, but we also can predictably see issues as they start to happen so we can jump on it before it really becomes a problem for the end users.

Even though I'm not sure how often they're finding issues – I don't really deal with that too much because I'm not in the operations side – I know that one guy that we've been using heavily for a VDI environment now, and they've been able to track down a lot of problems as they start.

They haven't started using many of the new features for version six, but it's one of the things they're looking at, trying to mess with.

We do not have any use cases where we avoided outages or reduced outage time. We're not using it for any actual alerting; it's just the dashboard and troubleshooting really.

We do use it for capacity management. Well, I was when I was doing the job; I was using it for capacity management. There were a lot of cases where we could save on storage but, because of political reasons, we weren't allowed to reclaim a lot of the space that was being wasted. It was a good tool to show that waste was happening. We weren't doing any VM provisioning on the array side, but because of vROps, we were able to prove that we have a lot of waste here; we needed to start VM provisioning somewhere. They got that implemented on the array side.

We'll see improvement in the phase when we're trying to get more people to use the tool. As a VMware admin, I find it useful for capacity planning. That's the big one for me. We're trying to get our transition more on the engineering side, so I don't really use it as much now. We're trying to get the operations team to kind of embrace it a little bit more.

This is a difficult area to address because I'm not using it much anymore. I don't know. A lot of the big areas for improvement, they've already addressed with six; the ability to integrate with vRealize Orchestrator, adding some automation to it.

Some of the thresholds and what not are a little tricky to set up, and that's where we're struggling right now; our operations team isn't really managing those properly. Right now, I don't even know if they have a process to set up the thresholds anymore. Basically, they are just relying on the out-of-the-box setup. Every time they come to me and say, "We've got these alerts that are red," I say, "Did you actually validate that it's a problem?" Nine times out of ten, it's not. It's just out of the norm, and they don't really understand that.

With version six, stability is really good. We're really enjoying six. Five was stable. Six is a lot easier to use. That's the big one.

Scalability is really good, especially with the new model in six. Five was okay. It wasn't too bad, but you're limited to a couple of VMs. Now, you can just add new VMs.

I actually haven't had to use technical support. A couple of the other guys have, and it seems to be really good.

We were using Foglight a long time ago. I barely touched it, but I remember it being just a giant pain to manage. It's hard to configure. To me, it seemed kind of convoluted.

Actually, both five and six were pretty easy to setup initially.

You have to play with the thresholds and make sure they meet your needs. If you see something red, don't freak out because it could just be an abnormal spike from 10% to 20%.

Right now, we’re primarily just using it for monitoring. However, based on a VMworld session I attended, we’re looking at using it for enhancing our efficiency and to guarantee performance; make sure we can use vROps recommendations to relocate workloads based on utilization and so on. That session was interesting because they talked about cross cluster, being able to automate cross-cluster motions. That future ability is pretty good. For the most part, right now, we’re using vROps for just monitoring. We’re just monitoring vCenter right now, but we’re looking at adding all of our hardware UCS.

We’re expanding, but currently, we’re just using vCenter monitoring right now. Even that’s advantageous; just to have that dashboard. We need to do a lot of work to get where we want to go, but the tool is huge. I’m looking forward to that. Not a ton of value yet, but I can see it on the fairly near horizon.

I’m not our monitoring guy. We have a monitoring team and they’re responsible for that piece. I’m responsible for the cloud architecture. I’ve been a little unplugged from that because we’ve just moved multiple data centers. We’ve had a busy year and just implemented vRA and things like that. I need to get my hands a little dirtier this fall and try and get that moving along.

We’d recently done a business transformation. We’re in healthcare. We deliver software-as-a-service for the province of Saskatchewan. Recently, we’ve expanded our business to infrastructure-as-a-service and platform-as-a-service, those kinds of things, and we’re starting to look at consolidation of 15 distinct health regions in the province, all with their own data centers and IT shops. Our, at least my VP’s, vision was to consolidate at least from an infrastructure perspective down to two data centers in the province from thirty.

One of things with that is being able to give your customers some insight into how that environment is behaving; how the machines within their tenancy are behaving. We needed some sort of analytics to be able to show them everything is running fine. They’ll know anyways if it’s not, but when you get up to certain levels, they just want to see some nice graphs or charts or whatever to show that their they’re getting value for their investment.

It’s that piece, just monitoring that multi-tenant environment, that is the primary driver, but I’ve got lots of extra uses for it as we go.

I’d like to see the ability to monitor more stuff we’re actually looking at vROps to pull in data from. I guess there is already a lot of stuff it can capture, but I’m actually pushing to use vROps as our managers’ manager. I’d like to pull data from SCOM, Windows, SQL, Oracle and all those kinds of things, and use vROps as our primary dashboard, as our MOM, basically.

I’m looking for broader support, and also like we talked about in the VMworld session, the ability to use the analytics within vROps to actually trigger events to possibly alleviate performance issues before without requiring manual intervention. Obviously, the further we go along this SDDC journey, the more important it is to automate and not have your guys doing it. vROps could suggest this server is starved for storage. It already knows that. Why do I need to have somebody go in and look and try and find a spot, when vROps already knows, has the analytics to probably find a better spot for it than the tech would, right?

The automation piece will be big for us. Then getting into the cross site, cross cluster discussion is neat because I didn’t even know they were looking at that. There is kind of a future state. It’s already got me rethinking how we build our clusters. We might have some more flexibility with how we build clusters because traditionally; we’ve built clusters around planning for DRS to handle some of that workload movement. Within a cluster, we’ve had to do a fair amount of, I don't know, due diligence to make sure that we had the right workloads in the right spots. DRS being able to look into that cross site, cross cluster is a cool feature. I’m looking forward to that.

I have been using for just several months, six months maybe.

It has been stable so far. We actually have two instances. I have to try and figure out how we’re going to consolidate that. We have an instance for our cloud and then an instance for EUC, for the end-user compute side. I’d like to amalgamate that into one. I’ve got to ask some questions to figure out what the right architecture for that is.

I hope that it is scalable. I haven’t looked too far into it. We’re not a massive shop. In state, we’re about two to three thousand server VMs and probably about 14,000 desktops. It’s large enough. I don’t think I’m too worried about scale. Most of the VMware products we have scale really well. I’m assuming vROps falls inline with that.

Technical support is good so far. Again, we’re just grazing the surface, so we haven’t had much call to leverage support. As with any vendor, it’s the luck of the draw who you get the first tier of support. You just have to know how to escalate correctly. For some of our operational stuff, it’s a journey to get them to learn. Sometimes, you get a resource that maybe doesn’t know to escalate it in time. That’s the case for any vendor; Cisco, BMC, whatever. They might sit on it, and not really know how to solve it, but they also don't want to escalate every ticket in their queue, so you have to force their hand. Sometimes, we don’t do that. When my guys would complain about support, I tell them, Well, it’s kind of a bit on you. If you pressure the vendor to escalate it, then they typically do. Then you get that tier-two, tier-three kind of resource.

I have spoken to Blue Medora about monitoring UCS, SQL, Windows, using Hyperic or whatever they call it now, and those kinds of things.

I recommend it. I think it’s a good choice. I know there are other tools out there. Those people are knocking on my door all the time. I don't know. I’ve had lots of pushback from different IT shops in the province saying, “Well, why do we need to use this tool or that tool? You shouldn't use VMware’s tool because they might be lying to you, or whatever, for monitoring or those kinds of things.”

I’m more of the mindset, Why would I buy a Ferrari and put a Ford engine in it? Why am I going to buy a third party? There is definitely a spot for third party. We use lots of third-party applications. Obviously, VMware is going to have the best insight into how their stuff works. Obviously, they’re going to support all the features within there.

With third-party vendors, maybe that solution works great today, but when the new features in the VMware solution come out, there is a lag. You can't use those features because they don’t support it yet because they have to play catch up. On the other hand, obviously, VMware development teams are going to work together and try and coordinate: We have this new feature. Now, you can leverage it, maybe, into a new feature in vROps. Now, we can leverage it in vRA or however that works.

For us, of course, we’re an ELA customer, so we’re licensed for pretty much everything anyway. For us, my preference is always to use the VMware stack unless it’s not the best solution.

The faults and alerts features are the most valuable features of the product. That helps us a lot if we're looking at any VMs that might be having issues, something we need to address immediately. We like the over-size, under-size reporting too. It'll tell us if one of our servers needs more memory or CPU.

Right now, we're not using it too much as a proactive tool; it's more of a reactive thing, so it helps us pinpoint any faults when a user calls and has issues and helps us try to figure out what might be causing that issue. It helps us. It's like another troubleshooting tool that we can use.

The capacity management is helpful. It helps us. A lot of our developers and apps people will complain and say, "I need a lot more resources." I can show them with the reporting that you're barely touching the server, so that helps us. If we're running out of resources, we could also run reports and see if we need to add more hosts or whatever we need. It does help a little bit.

vROps has not really helped us avoid outages or shorten outage time. We also use other monitoring tools that, for some of the warnings, say the same thing as vROps. It's good that we know that, but not really any big outages of anything such as application or server outages but we have other tools that would tell us that too.

I don't know about room for improvement. Maybe have it be a little bit more user friendly because even though I know where to go to change certain thresholds and everything, my co-workers - who don't really work on it - they just log in, look at the color, is it green or red, and that's about it. It's pretty simple to use right now, but maybe because I haven't had time to look at it. Trying to get all of the features configured right for our company could be easier. I don't know if there is a way, though, because there are a lot of features available on vROps.

My rating would probably be higher if they improved the ease of use. The numbers are really nice; and also the badges. It's great for management, but most of the other VMware tools I have are pretty easy to use. I can try to figure vROps out, but this one seems to be a little bit more complicated. It might just be me because I haven't had too much time to spend on that.

I haven't had any stability issues with it; it's pretty stable for us.

We're not a huge shop. I think we have about 500 VMs, and it handles that fine. It's not like we have to build more machines or collectors or anything like that.

I haven't called technical support for vROps.

We were previously using VKernel for a lot of our over-sizing reporting, too, but the VM tool is a lot better. We worked with a partner and they were showing us how the VMware tool worked. They thought it would work well for us, so we tried it out with the trial and my boss liked it, so that's how we got it.

Initial setup was very easy for installing the whole configuration part. We're not using that because we're basically accepting all of the default numbers and thresholds for the learning. I think if we had more time and resources, we would probably go in and tweak it to make it more customized for our company. That's probably the most difficult part - the configuration - but setting it up was real easy.

The most important criteria while selecting a vendor like VMware would be features, but just as important for me is price and the value we get out of that.

We were yet to fully deploy it as it should be. We've yet to fully implement it. Mainly because we have almost the entire HP OpenView suite, so that's been saving our life for right now, but we've noticed the benefits. We've noticed the night-and-day difference from monitoring everything from the hypervisor into the VM as opposed to from the VM's point of view out, without the machine knowing that it's really virtualized, that it’s sharing resources. It believes it is in a physical environment and it owns direct access to the CPU and memory, but it doesn’t: it’s virtual, it’s sharing it and it's pretend. vROps takes that into account because it all goes through the API for VMware.

Definitely, the first win for us was being able to see a CPU wait time where people were still building VMs as if they were building virtual servers, requesting too many CPUs. Not enough memory and they were really shooting themselves in the foot because you can have as many CPUs as you want, but if you're not really using them all, you're sitting there waiting for those virtual slots to fill up before it actually goes to the physical CPU. So you're adding so much overhead.

There were a couple of application teams that were able to take the constructive criticism, per se, and brought down how many virtual CPUs they had and they noticed a huge performance gain. Being able to do that for the environment was a quick win for us.

When you migrate from vCOPS to vROps, it has this awesome API where it grabs all the data, everything you've collected, and it puts it into vROps and you don't really lose that much. Everything you've already collected gets moved over and copied over and you're good to go. However, if you are on vROps and you're migrating to a major version of vROps or a new architecture design – like we're trying to do because we're trying to size it correctly – it doesn't go from vROps to vROps. I believe they had mentioned they were going to do that in the later version, or try to, but that would be my biggest request, because we need to build it out correctly and then migrate all that data we've already collected for so many years.

Aside from that, I would say getting around, creating your own custom super-metrics and all of that: It might not be that it needs to be easier to do, but maybe more well-documented.

Definitely reporting is nice and maybe they could develop an easier UI to do your own custom reports. We're still using all of the out-of-the-box reports, which are great. They've helped us hit that 70% of requirements, but it would be nice to have a nicer UI. Hopefully something like HTML that I can just drag and drop and just play around as opposed to the current UI that I have, which is like a popup; you have to know the metric name, and then somehow click over and get the metric. You really have to know how they're doing it and what they call their metrics and what they call the groups of their metrics and all that to know how to do the report right.

We actually got it back when it was vCOPS 5.2, so I would say we’ve been using it for about three years.

Unfortunately, it has not been a consistently stable solution, because we've never fully deployed it as it's supposed to be. If you go through their sizing guide, we need I believe three virtual appliances tiered and we're currently on one virtual appliance. We have to reboot it often and it's just because it's not sized correctly. That's on us. We haven't had the time. We haven't had the resources. It is a big appliance, one of the bigger appliances that we own, but it's mainly because of what we're monitoring. We're monitoring so many VMs, so many data stores, so many network paths, and all that goes into, I believe, VMware’s equation for how it should be sized.

I believe it will meet the company's needs going forward once we size it correctly. Definitely its internal high availability is very simple to configure. We haven't looked at the disaster recovery for it. Unfortunately, we haven't given it the love that it needs to get it up to the way it's supposed to be, but I believe it will meet the company's needs.

Technical support is excellent; never had an issue with support with VMware.

Try it out. Yeah. Just spin up.

We have access to the software. I don't know how easy it is for somebody else that doesn't have an account with VMware or doesn't have an existing contract with VMware, to get the software, but for me, my solution, for everything that I have questions about, spin it out. They're all virtuals; why not? Worst-case scenario, you erase it. Move on to the next one.