VMware Aria Operations Reviews

I use VMware vRealize Operations for troubleshooting, monitoring the storage and network.

VMware vRealize Operations has helped our organization by providing troubleshooting our systems.

The performance for monitoring the VM is very good. Additionally, the solution is flexible.

The solution could improve by having more APIs, customized alerts, and documentation.

In the next release, there should be better integration with microservices.

I have used VMware vRealize Operations within the last 12 months.

The stability is very good.

VMware vRealize Operations is scalable.

We have one team in my organization that uses this solution.

The VMware support is very good. I had a great experience with them, they are the best.

I have used Grafana and Prometheus. Each solution has its use case, you need to know what use case you have to know what solution would be best.

I have previously worked with VMware, the installation was not difficult, I did not have any problems.

We have our partial script to repair and deploy the solution in the environments quickly.

I did the implementation myself.

We have a three-person team that handles the maintenance of the solution.

VMware vRealize Operations has very useful technology. We can deploy it on Amazon, but we didn't use the solution on the cloud yet.

I rate VMware vRealize Operations an eight out of ten.

We use VMware vRealize Operations (vROps) for IT administrators to monitor our environment.

I have found the reporting tool, capacity planning, and reports for performance monitoring the most valuable features.

VMware vRealize Operations (vROps) should improve instant monitoring. Currently, the monitoring is on an interval of five to ten minutes, if I want to know what is happening now I cannot.

I have been using VMware vRealize Operations (vROps) for approximately four years.

After three years of using the solution is started to have some operational issues. I was using version 6.5 or 6.7 and we had to restart the solution for it to function well. I believe the new version has fixed the issues we were facing.

The scalability of VMware vRealize Operations (vROps) is limited. It should be open to any platform and handle hybrid deployments. For example, on-premise and cloud at the same time.

The technical support has been good in our experience.

The installation is a medium level of difficulty.

The price of the solution is expensive.

VMware vRealize Operations (vROps) is a good tool that users can use for reporting purposes, forecasting, performance analysis, and in-depth troubleshooting. It is very useful.

I rate VMware vRealize Operations (vROps) an eight out of ten.

It was helpful in identifying the CPU, memory, and space utilization, which was very much important for us. We needed alerts when the utilization increased a lot, and we were able to inform the customers that we have a particular problem that could be the root cause of the problems that they might face later. They were then able to take some preventative measures in advance, which reduced a lot of problems.

It was very useful for regular monitoring, disk utilization information, and root cause analysis. It was also helpful in identifying why a specific issue is happening or why an error is occurring. 

It enabled us to be more proactive in anticipating and solving problems. We could know beforehand about the machines that might be at risk for high utilization. 

Alerts and monitoring were most valuable. It was also pretty user-friendly and interactive. I was able to generate good reports in PDF and HTML formats, which was really helpful.

The visibility that it provided for our infrastructure was pretty good. The snapshots were also useful.

vROps did a lot of monitoring, but in one case, we had to use Log Insight instead of vROps because vROps was not able to install the agent to enable us to have multi-monitoring. I don't exactly remember the case, but it involved monitoring all applications.

It wasn't exactly proactive. It was supposed to, but there were a lot of delays. It could also be because of our infrastructure and the way our network was set up. If vROps could be more proactive, that would be nice. It is nice to have the information beforehand, but when there is downtime, it takes a lot of time for us to be able to see an issue in real-time, which becomes a bit challenging. If there is a way to improve the data collection for the whole vCenter that would be nice because data collection takes a lot of time.

I used VMware for around five years, from 2015 till January 2021. Except for vCloud Director, I've used most VMware products such as vSphere client, Log Insight, and vRealize Automation.

It was pretty stable. I didn't find many errors while deploying the application and after the deployment.

Our environment didn't scale much, so I cannot comment on its scalability.

We had four vCenters. One was in Santa Clara, US. One was in Beijing, China. One was in Manheim, Europe, and one was in Singapore. We also had test centers, and we integrated vROps for testing there. We had one in King of Prussia and one in Switzerland. So, majorly, we had four vCenters for the production environment, and these vCenters worked with around 4,000 virtual machines.

I have not used VMware's support for vROps.

This was the first tool that we tried to deploy for monitoring.

I was involved in the initial setup of vROps. It was pretty straightforward. Most of the VMware products are pretty straightforward to install.

In terms of the implementation strategy, we have always followed the documentation provided by VMware.

We tried to evaluate many solutions, such as Prometheus, Dynatrace, Nagios, and PRTG. It was best for us to go with vROps because it is a VMware product, and it integrates best with VMware vCenter.

I would recommend vROps for an Enterprise environment. Based on my experience, it is a great tool to work with. Rather than having a big vCenter and then installing vROps, it is good to have it when you're starting with a vCenter. That's because data collection takes time, and it would become an overhead for vROps. In such a case, you might need a load balancer and multiple vROps. So, I would recommend having a vROps when you start building a vCenter. It will really help in scaling up the environment, and you'll also know if you'll need to replicate vROps or not.

We didn't use it for workload placement because we didn't have the load balancer for that. It didn't help much in decreasing the overall downtime, and it also didn't affect our operations when it comes to overall downtime due to performance issues.

I would rate vROps an eight out of 10.

This year, we introduced the vROps feature to our platform, as part of our infrastructure.

The main use is to provide us with visibility of our environment. It helps with proactively detecting and dealing with issues that may arise, such as problems with our hardware. It provides us with alerts when there are things that we need to perform. For example, it may say that I need to expand my disk space.

From my perspective, the visibility that it provides into our apps and infrastructure is fine. There are no concerns or issues because we only use VMware.

We are currently integrating it with different VMware products including vCenter and Cloud Director. 

This product contains features for proactive monitoring but we do not use it because we have our own monitoring solution. It can do things such as sending an email in response to an event.

The most valuable feature for me is the pre-implemented, existing dashboards. The fact that I don't need to create a dashboard myself is helpful. You have the option to create them but most of the dashboards and reports that we need have already been created.

I have not compared the vROps interface against other similar technology, but with respect to it being user-friendly, I haven't had any issues with it. The most commonly used functions are easy to access.

As somebody who works in operations, the capacity management features are very important. It's a very good product in that regard.

I would like to have more documentation, in the form of knowledge bases, that better explain the technology, related products, and what the capabilities are.

Having an installation guide that assists with installation and integration would be helpful.

I have been using VMware vRealize Operations for approximately six months. We are still in the beginning phase.

To this point, I haven't encountered any issues or had any alerts with this product. As we grow, maybe later it could happen, or we could experience instability in the product, but for now, it's okay.

Scalability-wise, it is good because you can create your own reports. There is no default report, but you can create your own templates or your own reports. You always have the choice of creating a new one or using an existing one.

The infrastructure team is the one that works directly with this solution. As part of that team, we provide VMware features and virtualization for our customers. There are five or six of us on the team.

We have not been in contact with technical support.

Prior to vROps, we did not use another similar solution. We implemented it in order to have as much visibility as possible for resource management. Previously, we only knew about the CPU consumption. Now, we can use the reports to better check the resources.

The initial setup is straightforward. It is just a matter of installing the appliance, setting the IPs, etc, and then performing the integrations between other VMware components. The configuration took approximately two hours.

I completed the deployment on my own.

We did not evaluate other similar solutions prior to implementing vROps.

As we are still in the beginning phase, we have not yet worked with all of the features. For example, I know that it can connect with vROps Log Insight, but we have not integrated it.

Given my experience, I'm not sure at this point whether this solution is applicable to other technologies such as AWS or Azure. However, if the support exists, it is very good because future environments and implementations will rely on multiple technologies. It will not be VMware alone, but rather, it will include AWS, Azure, and others. Support for all of these options is very nice. It appears that VMware has this vision because they already have support for the NSX and NSX-T network technology.

I expect that it will save us money in the future, but still being in the implementation phase, we have not yet had this experience.

My advice for anybody who is implementing this product is to plan for integration with your entire platform and VMware products, such as Cloud Director.

Overall, this is a good product that is easy to install and use, and integration with other products is smooth. Although we have not used all of the features, it does provide us with good visibility.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.

For our clients, vROps is used for managing their environments, having a single pane of glass, so they can go in and have a view of what's actually going on in their environments. That's especially true when it comes to TCO perspectives. When it comes to the TCO, they get to realize how they can start trimming down VMs that are not working, or cutting down on the resources that those VMs are using. That helps them do better in their environment and to lower their operational costs at the end of the day.

We do have the big enterprises; we've got quite an extensive team that looks after clients. But my clients are SMB clients and are where we see a need for vRealize Operations.

For me and my clients there's a very big benefit from a monitoring perspective. It provides proactive monitoring and helps instantly. It gives you this one dashboard with an overview of everything that you're busy with, within the environment. You can get notifications, on time, to deal with a situation and it also gives you references to what you can do and what you can't do, or what is recommended by VMware. It has links for you to find the resolution to the problem. From that perspective, it's brilliant. I don't think anybody could ever ask for anything over and above that. It's very proactive.

vROps has also enabled us to replace tools. SolarWinds is one.

The capacity planning is one of the most valuable features. That is brilliant. A lot of clients, especially now due to COVID-19, are in a situation where they don't have a lot of money to spend. They're looking at what the best way is to start cutting costs, especially from an IT perspective. A lot of companies look at it from an IT perspective rather than anything else when it comes to business. That's key. 

Also, the integration with Blue Medora is brilliant, especially the way it can let you know if there is a problem in the environment, and various ways to fix the issue.

In addition, for me, it is seamless and easy to get to know. It's quite straightforward and it's a nice product. The user-friendliness is brilliant. At some point you need to just keep kicking and kicking until you get what you really want. But from a user perspective, it's quite straightforward in terms of being able to understand as to what is going on and how to get to specific pages. The first page gives you everything. It highlights everything: your risk, your health, and that kind of stuff, with the dashboard. It is quite easy to use, especially once you've kicked around a little. From there, I don't think you should even encounter an issue.

The integration with vRealize Log Insight is amazing for me. I don't think there's any other monitoring software that I'd choose or sell to a customer. That's especially true now from a vSAN perspective and getting the logging side integrated into the solution. The correspondence and the communication between the two products is great. I would always recommend going down that route.

I've used vROps for about a year.

I have used it a handful of times when it comes to client deployment. But there's time required to get my head in the game with it, because there is a lot when it comes to the product itself. We are going to be installing it in our lab as well, to get more clarity around how it works, especially when it comes to the integration with Blue Medora and those kinds of things.

On a scale of one to 10, I'd say I'm probably a four when it comes to vROps, but I hope that I'll actually get to 10, to be the best in it. It's a very brilliant product. I love it, the way it works, all the functionality. Everything about it is just amazing.

The stability is great. On a scale of one to 10 I would put it at 10.

The scalability is also great. I haven't played with it that extensively but, from my understanding and from what I know, you can scale as much as you need to. As long as you understand the dashboards and how to create them, you should be okay. From that perspective I think it rates quite well.

The initial setup is straightforward. You just download the OBA and—"Bob's your uncle." The installation guide is also very helpful. They give you a step-by-step guide for how to deploy it. If you read the document, you'll be okay from the beginning until the end. You shouldn't have a problem.

If it's just a basic deployment, and if you've already got the OBA, it should only take a good 30 minutes, and that would be a lot. I'm just covering my bases, in case there is anything that may not have been taken into consideration. But plus/minus 30 minutes should be enough to do a basic deployment.

Currently there are five of us in the company who are using the product or who are familiar with the product. From a maintenance perspective, the dashboard does most of the job. One person can have a look at it and there are the rest of the guys on the back-end for support. I don't think it needs 10,000 people looking after the product. The product is an automated, driven process. You just need to look at the dashboard and understand what it says and it should make the job a lot easier. You shouldn't need more than one or two people looking at the product every day.

Overall, the value you get from a vRealize is definitely worth the cost.

vROps is a bit expensive and that's a reason that small clients say, "No, I don't think we need this." From a pricing perspective, it is quite steep. But "expensive" is relative, depending on what you need. Others might say, "It is expensive, but I think we can use it to better our environment." It is quite an expensive product. But if you really require something, you'll do it anyway.

The main difference between vROps and the SolarWinds solution is the integration to the VMware stack in its entirety, and the opportunity to integrate it with different product sets, like Blue Medora. That makes it quite a different solution compared to SolarWinds which, as far as I know, doesn't have that type of integration. Maybe there is something new along those lines with SolarWinds and I just haven't looked at it, but I've never seen those types of integrations when it comes to SolarWinds.

When we speak to clients about it they often say, "I'll think about it." I think the best thing for them to do would be to actually use it, with the 60-day trial. They should play around with the tool and then come back and say, "This is what I can do in the product." That way, they would see what the product is about. I'd rather they experience something than somebody else telling them about it. Clients have access to VMware. They can download the solution from wherever they are and then start playing with it. They need to see what it can do and realize, "Wow, what an amazing tool." They need to see the benefits of the tool. It's the best monitoring tool. It is expensive, but expensive is relative. It's a matter of the client having a play with the tool and realizing what an amazing tool we have.

My clients are quite small so when they do use it, it's when I'm with them. They don't understand what the product does. For me it's a big thing, but for them, it's neither here nor there. They say, "We'll deal with it when we can. We'll look into it whenever we've got the time." It's never the situation where I've come back and my client is saying "Wow, that is brilliant!" They say it's brilliant when I do it but they don't go back and start utilizing the tool. So I don't really always get the feedback that I desire.

One of my colleagues is busy with a deployment at one of our clients and he's also doing the Blue Medora integration. I talk to him on a daily basis just to get an update, and he's amazed at what vRealize can do. From that perspective I think that we're quite happy with the product.

It's typically used for our interactions with our software engineers, especially when we are configuring or assigning resources to them. It is the way we get the virtual machine to be right-sized. They usually ask for more resources than they need and with this tool I can manage the resources.

There was a system with a Docker cluster that was having really bad issues. A server would go down and the machine would move to another server, in this case a virtual machine, bringing down the whole cluster. Thanks to vROps I was able to closely check the resource usage to spread the load, so instead of having three servers we moved to a more stable solution using eight servers.

vROps has helped to decrease overall downtime by about 20 percent.

In addition, we work here with a five-year budget and we need to have a really good forecast to design solutions because those solutions must last for five years. It's not easy to increase the resources of a solution in the middle of this five-year cycle. So vROps helps a lot in seeing how the load is increasing over time. In that way, I can forecast for more than a two-year period and do so for five years, at least.

The most valuable feature is the ability to check the right-sizing of a machine because that way I can assign the real resources that are needed.

It's also user-friendly. One of the things that I really like are the ready-to-use dashboards. You can get them from a dashboard marketplace where dashboards are contributed by other people. You can use them in your facility without any problem, and some of them are really useful.

The solution also provides proactive monitoring. It's good to have a baseline of how the machine is normally working. After that you can check if it has gone beyond this baseline. If something goes away from this baseline, it usually means you have a problem and you need to fix it.

There is room for improvement when it comes to the integration with Active Directory. Sometimes I need to log in to the application using my Active Directory account, instead of using the regular admin for vRealize Operations. If I want to deploy this tool to more users, I need that.

I used vROps a lot about two years ago and I started with it again about two months ago. I'm the person who designed the whole VMware solution at ALMA Observatory and I support all of it and administer the VMware platform, among other things.

It's quite a stable solution. I have never had a problem with the solution. Every time I want to see something or check something, it's always there.

I have not needed to call VMware for technical support for this solution.

We did not have a previous solution. We only used the typical solution in vCenter for checking performance.

I wouldn't say that vROps replaced a lot of other tools but that's because there aren't too many products that are similar to vROps.

We were already customers for vROps, but at first we were not using a lot. Then we needed to do an upgrade and it was not an easy path to follow. But in terms of the setup and configuration, it was straightforward and much better than the old versions. The last version I used was v4 and, compared to that, it was completely easy.

The deployment, even though I was doing other stuff, took one or two days.

I don't think the solution saves us money, but with it I can better say how the money is spent.

We provide services to our scientists. I can say, "I will provide you with 20 virtual machines, 20 TB of disk, bandwidth, and I know it costs X. The biggest impact is the way I can see where the resources are that we are using. That makes it worth the cost.

The pricing is a little bit expensive.

Licensing is an issue because there are always changes, and by that I mean cost increases. And that's not only for vROps but for VMware, vSphere, and all the products that are involved.

I used Turbonomic a long time ago, but only as a test.

The implementation is easy. You just need to assign resources to install all the virtual machine requirements, but the process is straightforward. My biggest advice is to check the dashboard marketplace because you can find dashboards that are useful to you too. The dashboards are produced by the community. They are free, although some of them need container packs that you need to pay for, or you may need a licensee to use some of them.

We have been able to use vROps to optimize our environment and do right-sizing for most of our VMs. vROps has also been able to help us in regards to forecasting and adware procurement. Therefore, we can see our utilization in the next six months and how we have been trending.

The company is multinational. We are still running on-premise with a plan of moving to the public cloud. At the end of the day, it will probably be a hybrid environment.

When it comes to apps and infrastructure, it provides us with valuable insights. 

It has been helpful around capacity planning, which we traditionally did on a yearly basis. However, since last year, I started using vROps to reclaim and save more resources. It has been helpful along those lines.

In the next six months, vROps will hopefully give me an accurate forecast. Also, it will be able to look at my environment and prove some vendor requirements wrong. 

The dashboards are interesting. We have been able to use the dashboard to monitor the environment. There is also a newer feature where we can share dashboards with people. We don't necessarily have to give them access to vROps. That has been great.

The optimization and performance are helpful.

If I could integrate with vCenter with vROps, then I could execute more things by managing vSphere from within vROps. That would be great.

I have been using vROps for about a year. We got the license last year, but it could not be deployed until later in the year. 

It is a stable solution.

vROps has helped decrease downtime by 80 percent because it gives me a lot of visibility into my environment. With its performance optimization, we have been able to see things happening ahead of time. It also works concurrently with some other monitoring tools. For example, I am also using VMware Skyline, which has helped to drastically reduce downtime. 

I haven't had any downtime this year.

If I see the infrastructure grow enough, then I will scale up.

I am the only one using vROps within the organization.

The VMware technical support is helpful.

Before now, we did not really have a tool for capacity planning. This is the first tool that we have used. It has been great.

The initial setup was straightforward. The documentation is online, so I was able to deploy it before the training. The deployment took me three weeks. 

We don't have a test environment, so everything that I deploy has to go straight to production. However, when deploying vROps, I knew that it would not break service nor cost me downtime, so I decided to give it a shot.

I did the deployment. Going through the documentation, I was able to get different options, picking the one that suits my environment.

If you are not that familiar with the deployment and how to do it correctly, then you may need an expert's advice or intervention at some point in time. You should be able to find your way around 75 percent of vROps. Overall, the solution has been great for someone who is technical.

Make sure you get the right advice and documentation for the deployment. So, if a person or customer is unable to deploy on vROps, then they should get the right expert to assist them with the deployment. Because if you have the wrong deployment, then that might put you in a mess and you might not get the value from vROps. If you are going to implement the solution, do it the right way.

At the moment, I am the only person managing vROps.

It is worth its cost. With VMware, you always get your value for your money. 

vROps has saved us a lot because it has reduced our procurement costs. Usually, we would have a rise in procurement costs at the beginning of the first quarter. We haven't seen that going into 2021.

The solution has a huge cost. If we could just have one license covering everything that vROps can do, that would be great. I would prefer it this way.

We need a separate license for vRealize Log Insight, which has not been integrated. However, it's something I'm looking forward to using.

We did not look at any of their competitors.

We are still running vROps in parallel with some products that we are currently using. However, I am seeing the opportunity for it to take over from our other tools in the future.

From what I have read, it is a great tool that you can use across multiple clouds.

We are planning on implementing VMware's Tanzu solution along with vROps for Kubernetes monitoring/management in Q1 2020. I am currently familiarizing myself with it because I know it's something that I will be deploying pretty soon.

I would rate this solution as a nine out of 10. 

We're trying to use it for automation purposes, the automation of the process of consolidating hardware. We've had it installed for about 18 months and there's so much more we know it can do, but it's doing everything we know how to do with it right now.

The new features in v6.7 are going to bring a lot of our use case to fruition for us. Right now, we just don't have enough insider training to make that a reality. That was one of the reasons for coming here, to VMworld 2018: To improve our knowledge and figure out exactly what we could do with it. The sky's the limit now. Everything I see in 6.7, we're so looking forward to using it.

There was a course today on optimization and it was absolutely fantastic because everything that we want to do, using tags for SQL licenses and optimizing the hosts; for tiering - we have tier-1 servers, tier-2 servers, and test - so to be able to organize those and keep them on the host that they're supposed to be on, goes a long way. We have a very, I won't say untrained staff, but a young staff and to automate this process so that they can't make the mistakes - or if they make a mistake - it goes a long way towards helping with that.

What we've taken from VMworld is going to help us to push it to the next level.

We can also see things happening before the users do, which is huge. There's nothing worse than getting 50 tickets from the user community and you didn't even know that something was going on. If we start getting the alerts because we've got SLAs and the like on CPU and memory and disk I/O, those are already in place. Now, we know before the users.

Its most valuable features are the automation and the preventive nature that's built into it. For example, for the younger techs who are doing things in vCenter, you can change their security so they can only do certain things, but that doesn't negate them from migrating a production server into test, while keeping them from doing something that they just shouldn't do, storage-wise or CPU-wise. We all make that mistake of, "Oh, I'm going to just give this server 20 CPU," and then all of a sudden you have no resources on your host. This prevents that.

You put the rules in place. You take all of vCenter's built-in items and you've got one pane of glass for the policies: DRS policies, SRM policies, all of those things work well with vROps.

We're on the 6.0 version, so it does lack a little bit of that intuitiveness. You have to have some experience with VMware to get around inside of it. That's one of the reasons that I've loved what I've seen so far with 6.7. We've already downloaded the installation remotely and we're just waiting to get back home so that we can actually do our upgrade. That's the first thing we're doing Monday is upgrading to 6.7.

Stability - never an issue. We haven't had any problems at all.

Regarding scalability, it has done everything for us. Our first install of operations was with about 20 blades and we're now up over 100. It has grown with us. We add licenses, it takes on the new logs and everything else that it needs to. We can go in within a couple days and we already see the benefits of adding those additional hosts. The user interface shows us the information we want to see from them in the dashboards.

We have not used vROps technical support, but VMware support has been top-notch. Any time we call, they take care of it. They take ownership, which is great.

We didn't have anything in place, we were just vCenter. But with vCenter, you don't get the alarms and alerts in an intuitive fashion and you don't have the organization that you have with vROps. It goes a long way with that one pane of glass.

It has provided us some cost savings for the high-capacity and our ability to manage that. We haven't seen the benefits for the users because we don't have enough experience yet. And I think that's what 6.7 is going to allow us to take to the next level.

Across all of our clusters from test through tier-1 and tier-2, we were way over-provisioned. We weren't taking on the features of over-committing and things along those lines, so I went from 45 blades or 45 hosts, down to 35, and I was able to just shut the other 10 off. When it came time for a hardware refresh, I no longer needed those 10, I no longer needed to get support on those 10. Ten blades at $20,000 a piece, that's a $200,000 savings. In its simplest form, that's huge, especially in the healthcare industry, where they're constantly chopping our budgets. So that $200,000 in the course of 18 months helped me.

Install and do an evaluation and you'll be looking for licensing within a few days of your installation. It won't take the whole 30 days to figure it out.

My rating of eight out of 10 is strictly the result of my own experience with version 6.0. If I had to do rate version 6.7 - and I don't even have it installed - I would probably give it a 10.