VMware Aria Operations Reviews

vROps is integrated with vRealize and VMware solutions, which helps us to get the best operation-level understanding across the environment; we get all the utilization reports.

By using vROps, you can actually automate your tasks, integrate it with vRO workflows, and amazing results can come up.

We have also used the integrations with DRS using the Site Recovery Manager, which are quite good. If anything happens at one site, another site immediately takes over; you can do that using vROps.

We have improved our understanding in terms of writing PoCs, and providing concrete examples of how vROps and vRA can get into the environment.

It should have some connectors in terms of showcasing third-party vendor's functionalities. For example, if some third-party storage that has been connected to the environment, this solution should actually be used instead of some third-party monitoring solution. This solution should work across the environment on its own, instead of relying on some trigger-pointed third party location and then acting it on it.

It should have some more functionality in terms of getting some more third-party vendor application-level integration.

The majority of VMware products are very stable, and I'm very happy with vROps.

I have not encountered any scalability issues.

For PoCs, we have set it up for a cluster of five servers to showcase the scalability of VMware products.

I have used technical support, because the VMware solutions guidelines are quite complete and amazing.

I previously used a lot of freeware monitoring tools like Cacti, Nagios, and Ganglia.
We felt that we needed to invest in paying for a solution because it's amazing. The integration with the VMware family is amazing.

Initial setup is 9/10; it was nearly flawless. Some minor configuration services were complex; how you connect it out across, or how you actually connect two different services.

Before choosing this product, I did not evaluate other options.

The most valuable feature is getting straight to the problem; figuring out the problem and getting to it. It allows me to verify what the problem is and then to dig deep into the problem to see what the solution would be.

• Quicker solutions to problems that appear out of the blue

vROps has not helped me avoid any critical outages, but I can see things coming up and I'll adjust. That's the big thing, so I don't even get close to an outage preferably.
I see the same type of improvements from vROps’ capacity management and performance management features. Seeing ahead is what avoids any problems.

When it finds a problem, the product currently provides certain solutions for you to implement to resolve the problem. It might be nice to have a trigger that would actually implement that solution directly into the VMware or into the WM itself; an action.

I have not encountered any stability issues at all.

I haven't had to think about scalability.

I used technical support in the beginning, but just during setup. Since then, nothing.
At the time, technical support was fine. It worked out fine.

The problem was that I wasn't using anything and I was going all over the place in VMware and vSphere to try and figure out issues. I also wanted to see ahead of myself; what was coming down the chain and vROps allows that. It gives me a short-term and a long-term view of my environment.

Initial setup was pretty easy. I just ran into a problem involving a previous version or two versions behind, called support and it was solved.

I think there were other vendors on my shortlist, but I really didn't get into it.

When selecting the vendor, and not the product, the most important criteria would be support. That's really big. And how the vendor presents itself – you know, presenting itself, the company, and presenting the application or software that they're selling to us.

Give it a shot.

Earlier versions were working fine and helping a lot, but the latest version simplified the management view. I can get to the view I want much easier. That's why I gave it 4.5 stars; probably, previous versions would be less than that.

For me, since I have a background in the network engineering discipline, the most valuable feature is probably the content modules that come along with the software program, in regards to the Juniper and the SolarWinds plugins for it.

It gives us added visibility on our environment on a real-time basis.

I'd probably like to see a little bit more detail when you go through the drill-down menus, in regards to stats, and maybe the way the data is arranged could be a little bit more cosmetically appealing.

Also, compared to other software that I've used, it could be a little bit more streamlined in regards to the user interface, and the granularity of the data it provides could be increased a little bit more.

As far as stability, it's pretty good.

We haven't had any problem with scaling it.

I personally haven't used technical support. My fellow engineer has, and I don't think he's had many problems dealing with technical support in regards to vROps.

We did not previously use a different solution. We were heavily invested in VMware technologies, so it only made sense for us to go with something that was in line from that particular vendor, VMware, to properly monitor the environment.

There were no other vendors on your shortlist at the time. We weren't looking at anything else, as far as I know.

If they're heavily invested in the vSphere product line, vROps is definitely a product they can't go without.

The most important aspect in regards to selecting a vendor like VMware would basically be the solutions that they provide, whether or not if they actually work, if it can be adopted successfully.

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%.