VMware Aria Operations Reviews

We use it for the monitoring and maintenance of the virtual environment. We have about 3,000 VMs. We use it for capacity management. We use it to help applications. We've got it separated out by the applications in each one of the VMs. It really helps to get our infrastructure team visibility into the virtual environment, so that they can troubleshoot issues and detect problems. What we've done is taken it a little further out, deploying it out to give visibility to the application team so that they can see their environment.

It's getting the visibility for all the different layers. From the application team to the infrastructure team, they need visibility into the operation of the environment, and driving that visibility and troubleshooting to what we call "fell fast" – “fell fast” and recover, or back out and recover. Giving us that capability in alerting and mechanisms, which is not there now.

We deployed Vblock 720s, and I’d like vROps to further integrate with them. I know it pulls the data from Vision, but further integration of Vision would be really good.

We have increased our tier 1 environment probably 70 to 80%. There have been very minimal sev 1s over the last two years by deploying this and putting it all in place.

We can scale up and scale out very quickly based on the demand of the business, and it has met those needs. It has not slowed down as we scaled up and out.

We have mission critical support with VMware, so we use those guys constantly.

In 2014, we had two data centers full of physical environments and we, as a company, made a decision to go virtual first. As we started looking at all of our refresh plans and our long-range plan, we saw we had all of the dollars tied up in refreshing the physicals. We started looking at the virtual environment and we partnered up with VCE. We bought two Vblock 720s and then we put ExtremeIO and VMAX on it for storage.

I manage the group that set it up. The grouping by application was pretty complex, but as far as bringing it in and getting the foundation set up, it was fairly simple.

ROI’s very good. Ultimately, based on the business case that we did, we spent 20 million dollars and got 50 million dollars return on investment.

We didn’t really look at any other vendors because we wanted it on a stable tier 1 environment, so VMware is what we made a decision on.

Put your critical workloads on enterprise software.

The most valuable features are the ability to look at performance metrics historically, and the capacity planning where we can see waste in our environment. Primarily, that's what we're using it for now. A company as big as us, we tend to over-provision. That's based on application requirements. Sometimes politics can be involved with that. We use vROps right now as a way to show application teams how much their server's working and how little it's working, so we can potentially take that stuff back.

It has helped the company function when we run reports. Every once in a while, we'll get complaints from our end users that an application is slow. The vendor gets on a phone call with us and says, "It’s your VM environment." They'll call us up and say VMware is slow. We use vCOPS to look at the analytical data of those VMs in question. We can show them: If you're having issues at this time, we don't see any CPU usage, we don't see a CPU usage increase, we don't see a memory increase, we don't see it needing more memory, we see low disk activity. We'll show those graphs to them in an email. Once we show them that, they typically back off.

Personally, I’d like to see improvement in its usability. As an IT professional, we're tasked with having to jump between various platforms. A tool like vCOPS, from my experience, requires a little bit of a higher learning curve. I believe they can work on that. For example, with reporting, it does a whole bunch more stuff that we don't even use it for right now. You have to put time in to learn all of that, such as creating the dashboards, all the widgets and so on. It's a high learning curve at first, and difficult to learn. You have to put in a lot of time with it. That could take years for some people at their company.

I would like to have the ability where, for example, you bring up clients into your environment for the first time. There should be an option to have all the alerts go into that. You turn the alerts off in vCenter and have them go through vCOPS. That would be a big help for me, personally.

It's available. However, we run into issues where it gets very slow, where you try to log in, you can't log in; or, if you log in and you search for an item, it doesn't take you to the right window. We've had issues with integration with the web clients; if you search for a VM in the vSphere web client, there should be a link to vCOPS. That link does not work for us right now.

We also had an issue where it just stopped working. The disk filled up, so we had to call VMware support. They had to clear out some temp files or something like that.

I think that's where the slowness, for us, comes in. As we add more VMs and similar items, it seems like it's slower, but at times it could be fast. I don't know if that's another bug.

Our environment is roughly 1,500 virtual machines and across 60-70 hosts. We've experienced that, as time goes by, it seems to be getting slower.

We call technical support whenever it's broken.

For the last issue, it was pretty straightforward. It was a documented issue, so hopefully it's a bug and it gets released in a fix.

Actually, at that time, nothing else existed. We, at the time, really fought to get that in the house.

Initial setup was straightforward; you just import the OVF file. Give it a name, IP, and so on; connect it to vCenter and you're all set.

We did not evaluate any other products.

Always look at the competition first, obviously. That's part of our job. PoC it first. Make an informed decision after that.

vROps provides visibility into the environment and be able to, from a really quick look, see the health of the environment, and find bottlenecks or issues with an environment; and also to predict the future state of the environment or virtual machines that are over-committed or under-committed, whether we need to increase or decrease resources. That's the most important.

We also use the newer automation features, and the increased integration with DRS for workload balancing and scheduling. One of the pieces I would like to use more is vRealize Orchestrator, which is part of the automation solution for vRealize.

For example, a lot of times developers normally ask for virtual machines to be oversized, meaning that probably from the vendors, they have requirements for a certain amount of CPU and memory. A lot of times they require, say, 12 CPUs and 64GB of RAM. After they require this, will we have a way to prove that they are not using all those resources? The way to prove it is by using vROps to keep an eye on the utilization for a month. After that month, we what the true resources the VM uses. Then, based on that, we talk to the developers and we can resize the virtual machines.

It probably has also shortened outage times. There was a really widespread issue in our environment; most of our larger systems were not responsive. I was able to log on to vROps and I saw that it was a storage problem that somehow got reflected on other systems. That saved us a lot of time because it was really creating a problem for us.

We have also saved on the CPU and memory side, although not on the storage side.
With its performance management, we saw things speed up. Fine-tuning the VMs helped improve the overall performance for the environment.

Definitely something that I would like to be included is more interactions with the multiple vendors, and to be the single management tool or monitoring tool. To be able to manage the storage or network; basically, to integrate with more management tools. For example, for our networking, we use HP OpenView, and then we have a ticketing system to generate alerts and so on. We would like to see more integration on that, with those systems.

It is stable. We haven't had any problems with it.

Our environment is definitely growing, but I will say that we've designed the architecture for what we were looking for. At this point, we didn't go above or further up.

We have used technical support sometimes. It could be a little bit challenging. A lot of times when we got support, the first person that is working on the ticket probably is not that knowledgeable. Sometimes, we didn't get the answers or the problem solved in a timely fashion, so we needed to escalate. Sometimes that escalation process or escalation person is able to fix the problem basically.

We previously used multiple vendors. There were probably four or five vendors. We evaluated vRanger. We evaluated Veeam’s management piece.

We decided to go with vROps basically because for the other vendors, monitoring and managing the virtual environment was a problem, but it was part of a larger problem, their enterprise solution. On the other hand, to get the small piece for VMware, we should get the bigger piece for everything else that we probably won't use.

Initial setup was straightforward. It wasn't that complex.

It is definitely a really reliable solution that completely integrates with VMware.

Our primary use of it is for loading purposes, whether it be for memory or CPU loading, how much storage consumption. There's a large paradigm shift that everybody's had at this organization, going from physical to virtual. They all think, "The software says I need 16 GB RAMs, I need 16 GB RAMs when it's virtualized." When in reality they really don't. We've started things off and it's been really difficult for people to adjust to that, because we start off with 4 GB, which is our standard VM size. We'll use vCOps to see if it's actually being stressed from a memory or a CPU standpoint, if it needs more CPU or more memory. In most cases, we show that it's not; when we go back, we find out there was either a badly written query, maybe it's I/O bound or something, or network bound, those kinds of things. It's helped us to keep the sprawl from happening.

I think it streamlines the tech side of things, where people are doing the troubleshooting. We've got three tier levels. It didn't help the tier 1 folks too much because they don't have access to it. But the tier 2 folks, they do, they use it as a tool to see if indeed there's something wrong or if it's a specific application as opposed to the virtual machine. Things along that nature. It definitely helps from a troubleshooting standpoint.

There are some features that we would like it to monitor outside of the virtual world. For example, networking and appliances. I know that there are some adapters that you can add that will help with that, but it doesn't give you that full picture of the organization. It's hard to bridge across multiple domains and things of that nature.

I think what's missing is what we haven't deployed yet, things such as Infrastructure Navigator, which goes by a different name now. Part of the reason I attended VMworld 2016 is to bone up on the newer vROps, actually the entire vRealize Suite; see how best we can migrate them over.

I think a single pane of glass for everything would be most useful to me.
I think it would be nice if, when you actually found an issue somewhere, by clicking you can actually go in and fix the issue. I think that probably happens on later versions, I know our version we don't have that capability.

We've had stability issues with the underlying PostgreSQL database; it's very chatty, it fills the logs up, it fills the drives up. We have to go in and shut it down, resize the database drives. It would be nice to be able to do that on the fly, as opposed to having to shut the system down and use manual Linux tools to expand the partition sizes and stuff.

I can't really address scalability because we deployed it for what we wanted already. We're not going to grow. Scalability I don't think is an issue for us. We deployed it for what we wanted. It's not something we've addressed.

I have used technical support a couple of times. They were helpful. They pointed me to the issues, the database issue I mentioned elsewhere.

We didn't have anything that was monitoring the virtual infrastructure.

Initial set up was straightforward. We follow the PDFs that you get from VMware; pretty straightforward.

We looked at SolarWinds and we looked at a Veeam product.

vROps fit better. It just fit better for what we were doing. The other ones didn't. You had to install agents on all of the VMs. We didn't just want to do that.

Plan it out, because a lot of IT guys want to bring it up, install it, see what's going on, and then they realize, "I need to build it this way now, instead of that way." Do the research ahead of time, plan it out and size it properly from the outside.

The most valuable feature is probably the analysis, the capacity remaining, what is going on inside of the clusters and with the virtual machines, so you can see the capacity planning. You can tell if something needs CPU, you can tell if it needs memory, and whether it's based on actual demand. I personally like that feature very much. I'm responsible for making sure we have capacity.

It's definitely improved the way that we buy hardware, for sure. Before, you just see a cluster look strange; we didn't know. The differences between allocation and demand has really helped us be much more efficient in the way we buy hardware and how we run our clusters.

vROps has definitely helped us avoid outages, in the sense of not overloading our clusters, and running them into the ground. We just really started setting up the alerting and going through that. We found we had some data stores that kept running out of space, and no one was really keeping an eye on that. We had the native VMware monitoring, but that was just going to some person's mailbox. We set that up. That's been pretty good so far. Mostly, I feel like we're just scratching the surface of what this tool does.

It has also been a huge help with capacity management and with performance management. We've just implemented some of the automation. We have things set up so that if a VM is screaming for CPU capacity, or memory capacity, it is automatically added in. That, so far, has been great. We're still testing it out, but it's going to be great, I think.

It hasn’t helped us save that much on storage. We eat storage like nobody's business. Storage is one reason why I recently attended VMworld. I wanted to look a lot into the virtual SAN features.

I would like it to be a little bit easier to do some things to make dashboards, or it might just be my ignorance of the product. I feel like I know a lot, but there's so much more. I would like more wizards to be able to do some of the simpler things, and to try and make it speed up. I'm looking forward to it. We're going to start installing some of the plug-ins and doing some other monitoring. I would like this tool to take over all of our monitoring. We have SiteScope, we have Nagios; we have all of these things.

Another thing I would like is the ability to see inside Linux guest OS without Attunity or something like that, or the ingenuity that you need to have with that.

The stability's good. I find it to be a little chuggish sometimes; it can be very slow. Other than that, we've never had a problem with it being unstable or going down. It just gets really slow sometimes.

We haven't really tried to scale yet. We might not be using it in the best way. We have a bunch of vCenters; so a bunch of different vROps instances. Instead of scaling out, we tend to build new data centers, but so far, it seems like it's a powerful tool.

We don't use technical support for it. We use our TAM at times to tell us how to do things, because you really need a college degree to run vROps. So far, we haven't had to open any support at all for vROps, specifically. Lots for VMware, but not vROps.

We were just using the native tools that come with VMware; basically, the reports in there. We looked at some other solutions. Honestly, vROps used to be something else, and I found that to be a crappy monitoring tool, but when we started implementing this, when they came out with the modern day version of vROps, it was just great. I think it came in one of our deals, so we implemented it. We said, “Oh hey, this is awesome.”

Setting up the infrastructure behind it was a little bit challenging, trying to figure out what we needed for horsepower. It wasn't overly complex to set up. Again, we had a TAM at the time, and he was great. He just worked with us through the whole thing. The implementation of it went really well.

There was another vendor on our short list, but I don't remember their name. I had someone come in and do a demo of some kind of VMware monitoring tool.

When selecting a vendor like VMware, my most important criteria is going to be, how good is the support? Obviously, cost comes into play. We strongly consider what the Gartner Group says; where the vendor appears in the Magic Quadrant; where they are in the market.

Definitely take a look at it. Go to training, for sure.

I find it to be a very powerful tool. There's a lot of information. I like the way that it's set up. I like the little videos that are inside, so when you're trying to figure out what you're doing. It's very easy to try and navigate. There's a lot to learn, but I feel like it's not overwhelming. You can take a piece at a time, and build on it. It's a great tool so far.

The most valuable feature is the single pane of glass to see everything in your infrastructure and know when you're running low on resources, and things are over-provisioned and under-provisioned and so on. Whereas, without it, you are relying on scripting and other things like that. From that perspective, it has been a big help.

The biggest issue we have with it, honestly, is the interface, it's very unintuitive. To really know how to get the most out of it, you almost need a course; it's very complicated. While we think we know a lot about it, I bet you there is stuff that we haven't tapped in to yet. I think they could have made the interface a little bit more intuitive for the user to be able to understand things without having to go to a course.

I took a lot of points off my rating because vROps is not intuitive; because that to me is huge. I have a lot of stuff to manage and I don't want to have to figure out every one to the nth degree. I shouldn't be expected to be a next-level expert on this particular product just to be able to get basic functionality out of it; that's what I feel like the issue is with this one.

We have been using it for a couple of years. We used it back when it was vCOPS, two years ago.

It hasn’t been consistently stable. We've had a couple of glitchy issues with it; nothing major, but it hasn't been 100% easy to live with. I don't know why that is; maybe because it's a newer product. It just seems like it’s not as mature as it could be.

We haven't had to scale it, so I guess I can't really address that, as we haven't gone down that road.

I have found VMware support to be somewhat lacking. It's hit or miss. Sometimes we'll get somebody who really knows what they're talking about and they'll be able to resolve our issue really quickly; other times they keep requesting log files until we're blue in the face and they never come back with anything, after we provide all of this data to them. It's hit or miss; I feel like it depends who you get on that day. It's been spotty to be honest.

When I’m deciding on a vendor, I really like to work with companies that are accessible; you call a support line, you're not hassled with, "Give me this license number," and we'll send you on to the next guy. I want to call up and get somebody on the phone and talk to them, the first person I talk to. VMware has sometimes been like that for us and then sometimes not. That's what I look for. I look for responsiveness, communication. I don't want to be only communicating over email; I like to talk to people. It seems like in the technical support industry that is become less and less favored as a communication mechanism; it's more email and so on.

Honestly, we saw it on the VMware website and it caught our interest. We hadn't necessarily been looking for it because we had done a lot of scripting for our monitoring and that kind of work. We downloaded it, tried it out and said, "Hey this thing’s actually pretty useful." That's that.

Take a class. I think there are videos we watched online, where people were going through some features and so on. If you try to just understand it right out of the box without reading a lot or going online and looking at something like that, you might have some troubles with it. But I definitely think it's good to have; it's certainly better than not having a solution in that area.

The most valuable feature is the stress ratings of the different servers, with recommendations of how big a server should be. Being able to pull historical data is pretty nice too.

It's nicer for our customers, because if they say the server is slow, we can actually look and see if it really is slow or if it's their application, or figure out what's going on.

We mainly use it for memory and CPU performance monitoring and management; that is what we're most concerned with. It has helped speed things up. We've had a couple systems that people just accepted as being slow, until we got this tool and it started saying, "Hey, you need to give it more memory." We got in contact with the customer, increased the memory, and now it's great. In the past, the feeling was, "I don't know man. It's just your problem."

Out of, maybe, the 500 servers we have, it has helped about 20 of them, performance-wise.

We also like to use it for troubleshooting. Someone will say the server's slow, and it's nice to be able to give them the data to say, "No, it's not. The problem is somewhere else." I don't know how you would measure that. It's very helpful for that.

We use it for historical data and so on. We do have a couple of custom alarms, which are nice. We monitor things such as old snapshots and so on with it.

I'd like to see some more options with outage times, where you can set different parameters. It seems like you can only set one right now, so you have to make all these groups and do some workarounds. It would be nicer if they made that easier.

The maintenance windows items were kind of painful. Group management is a little cumbersome. I just really wish I could say, "I have outages four times a month, and this is what they are." Right now, you can only say, "I have one outage." In order to have more outages, I have to have four groups, each with different outages. It's a whole ordeal.

Dealing with the technical support the first time for that internal CA certificate, was quite painful. Once we figured it out, it was easy, but I kind of wish they had documentation on how to do it, rather than the solution being call technical support and they'll walk you through it. That's why I have not given it a higher rating.

It’s pretty stable. We haven't had any issues with it going down or anything. We just had minor GUI issues with it, but they got resolved.

I don't know about scalability. We only have one and it seems to be doing the job just fine.

Technical support was good. I'd give them 8 out of 10.

They wanted us to use it to try to track down some overprovisioned and underprovisioned servers. We've had a great relationship with VMware. They had a product so we grabbed it.

When selecting a vendor such as VMware, for me, the most important criteria is dealing with technical support, how good they are. If they're technical support is terrible, I won't be as eager to go with them. I also look at how stable the product is. If I never have to call tech support, then I'll totally buy all their stuff, but then, if I do have to call tech support, I want them to be good.

Initial setup was straightforward. The only issue we ran into was replacing the certificate on it with an internal certificate. It was pretty painful, but once I got support on the line, we figured it out.

We wanted to start with VM Ware. If it wasn't great, we would have moved on. It's been great.

It's a great tool. You should buy it.

Capacity planning: Seeing where the hot spots are in our enterprise and where we're running out of computing resource capacity and what we need to address at a glance.

It's helped us be more proactive rather than reactive.

I also use it for performance management. We've used it a lot of times to justify to other teams that own VMs whether or not their VMs are oversized or right-sized. We've been able to reclaim capacity by using data from vROps, so that's been very helpful. Being able to reclaim capacity means you can run more efficiently.

It might have indirectly helped us avoid outages through making sure that we have capacity.

They could look at some of their competitors and take some lessons there on, for example, having vROps be a little bit more interactive with your vCenter and actually apply changes for you, and be more proactive in utilizing the resources that you have.

It's really good at monitoring, but it's not fantastic at helping you resolve issues. It sometimes seems overly complicated to figure out what's wrong. If you're troubleshooting a problem, it can get pretty complicated to figure out where to go, where to look, and give you that information easily.

It's very stable. I haven't had it go down unexpectedly or anything.

I haven't had any problem with scalability. We're not a huge shop. I have about 1,000 VMs and about 80 hosts, and it, I'm sure, can handle a lot more than that.

I have used technical support. I actually have a case open as I’m giving this review. It's unresolved, after about a week and a half, so it’s not great. I think they released some modules for vROps that don't quite work right. There's some particular cases for the SQL plug-in. It's not working as advertised and they're trying to figure it out.

We were using SolarWinds, which was a pretty good product. vROps got kind of bundled with another VMware solution, so the price was right. You need something to monitor your enterprise. You can't be looking into every cluster and every vCenter that you have; then you have stuff everywhere. Centralized monitoring was really why we switched.

It was a pretty simple setup. It just takes a while to gather useful information out of it. They even say it's about 30 days before you can actually really do anything with the information coming out of it.

VMTurbo was on our short list at the time.

When selecting a vendor like VMware, the most important criteria is whether it works.