VMware Aria Operations Reviews

For most data center operations teams, it is pretty hard to get a comprehensive view of what’s going on in their IT ecosystem. Virtualization and cloud service abstractions have made cross-platform relationships between different layers of the IT stack more complex. Heterogeneous, hybrid environments are the norm. IT pros have found visibility to be the #1 challenge facing operations teams. VMware Blue Medora management packs aggregate operations data from the leading server, storage,compute and database applications into vRealize Operations for rich analytics and helped to achieve full stack view of the environment.

Using VMware vRealize Operations with Blue Medora TVS helped to centralize data center operations monitoring platform. By adding the True Visibility Suite, its helped to monitor  applications, database, virtualization/cloud, compute, network and storage using one monitoring platform.

All the Blue Medora vROps management packs have features like:

· OOTB dashboards

· Collected metrics

· OOTB Reports

· Alerts and recommendations

· External relationships

· Capacity planning

• Reduced cross-team friction by eliminating MTTI hunts through, siloed infrastructure tools.

• True Visibility customers can see up to 50% reduction in time for root cause
  analysis.
• Cleared up alert storms with built-in policies that disable alerts for your dev environment and other less-critical resources.
• Increased tier I app availability up to 50% by pinpointing problems faster and more accurately with dependency-aware dashboards.
• Were able to drill down to native-tool detail to find noisy.

One missing component was the integration of Log Insight and vRealize Business within vROps. But, with the new version of vROps (v6.5 & v6.6), this requirement was also met with, as the other products in vRealize Suite are now fully-integrated.

More than five years.

As such, no stability issues were experienced from vROps during deployment, configuration, and the collection of metrics and data into the platform. 

The client decided to add an additional node to increase the capacity and resources within vROps analytics cluster so it could support the additional metrics collection process. You can scale vertically or horizontally.

I have received excellent support from VMware & Blue Medora support team.

Yes, Engineered by Blue Medora and validated by VMware, the True Visibility Suite included an extensive knowledge portal and includes 24/7/365 individualized technical support

It was implemented in-house

By using vROps plus Blue Medora TVS you can Maximize Performance, Minimize Investment
Reduce the IT tools, eliminate silos and boost IT productivity by up to 67%.

• Deploy in minutes without additional services or expertise.
• Maintain performance, reduce administration with agentless design.

The True Visibility Suite is available in three editions: Standard, Advanced and Enterprise. 
These packages align with the various infrastructure teams, and offer a convenient
way to pick the best package that applies, without being tethered to just one vendor or
device type.

There were a couple of options that we considered, like Microsoft SCOM and SolarWinds, but the level of monitoring and dashboard visibility wasn’t there.

• Conduct workshops and capture monitoring requirements at a high level; document and understand the customer's requirements. 
• Study the customer’s infrastructure, as it will be useful during the implementation stage.
• Align the customer's requirements, so that all the required systems are monitored in the vROps platform.
• Work out the network firewall rules that are required to configure vROps.
• Use the vROps sizing guidelines and sizing guide spreadsheet prior to vROps deployment.
• Deploy the remote collectors for bigger environments as it puts less load on the analytics cluster.
• Post deployment of vROps, you should create a full-stack relationship dashboard, as it helps to identify issues at various tiers in a typical 3-2-1 type environment.
• Make use of role-based user account management.
• Avoid taking snapshots or backups of vROps nodes during DT window.

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.

VMware vRealize Operations combines multiple VMware components to deliver integrated performance, capacity, and configuration management capabilities for VMware vSphere, physical and hybrid cloud environments.

I have used VMware vRealize Operations for automating the configuration of provisioning various workloads for our ICT Operations staff.

This has reduced the time required to provision the various workloads thereby improving our service delivery as ICT Operations.

This solution provides for easy monitoring of the ICT Infrastructure capacity.

There is Workload Optimization that has new host-based placement, fully automated mode, and a historical view of all the nodes.

The most valuables features are the collection of assets, security, and configuration data settings from each networked virtual environment in the system. This is very key to our decision making.

The introduction of cross-cloud migration is a plus as this improved efficiency for data center staff. 

Certificate Management should be simplified for non-technical staff members.

There is a need for revamping the reporting and improvement on Dashboard to include statistics, which can be used by Finance people on capacity management.

There is a need for improving integration with other hybrid virtual environments. 

The soultion is very stable.

The solution is very scalable. 

The technical support is superb.

We did not use another solution prior to this one.

The initial setup was moderately complex.

It is a mix, where we use our own trained staff with the help of local VMware Partners. The partners are well equipped and have high expertise. 

A lot can be realized in terms of efficiencies, including improved service delivery. 

There is a need for training so as to get qualified staff to set up the environment.

The initial costs are a bit on the higher side but the licensing is flexible. 

We evaluated third-party solutions such as RackNap.

We use this solution to see what we have inside of the virtual environment. We can see the compute nodes and what issues it has. We can also see the networking, data storage, all the recommendations, the issues, and the compilation as well.

This solution has helped to improve my organization because we use it for reporting when management wants to know what we have in the data center in our virtualization environment. We can just send the reports over the vRealize Operations and it will tell how much we consume in our environment. Also, it can alert us as to what resources we need to buy for the next financial year.

When you open the vRealize Operations, usually it will alert you what the misconfiguration is in your environment and that misconfiguration can cause failures in your environment. It alerts you with more than one type of alert like, blue, red, critical, just a warning, and with a daily solving for issues that prevent a lot of downtime. For example, it will alert you if you have thin provisioning and what's overcommitment in your storage. It will alert you that you are consuming most of the storage and that you will have a coming failure. This helps you to move forward before the downtime happens. 

For the cost saving, it has a feature that will tell if you can provide computer resources to a better machine that isn't being used so you can retrieve back those resources and provide it to another department. It will enable you to efficiently use the resources that you have, more than just wasting the resources of the department. You can retrieve it back, and you will get all of the suggestions from reports in the Operations manager. You will save a lot with it.

The most valuable feature is the feature that alerts you when you have any issues or when you may face any upcoming issues. It can alert you within the day or two days before. It can also help you if you want to scale your environment. It will give you a scalable plan to scale your storage or the compute nodes. You can give it the percentage you want to scale it and it will guide you to have the resources for that.

Usually, we use it for reporting when the management's asking us, without any technical output, they want to know what we have in the data center in our virtualization environment. We can just send the reports over the vRealize Operations, and it will tell how much we consume in our environment.

It is user-friendly. As it's a management product, you usually don't have downtime. It will not impact anything.

They can change the interface for the 6.7 vSphere that would make it more simple and more friendly. I think changing the interface of the operations manager would be good. It's friendly to use right now but it would simplify it more.

It's stable. We don't have any bugs or any issues with it.

VMware always gives us the best support. They are friendly to talk to and they understand the real impact of what's happening. They try to get into the issue as one of your team. They also fit into your working hours to solve your issues. 

We installed it with a partner, Epsilon ITs. It was a very simple installation. We did not request an advanced team. 

We measure ROI by seeing the graph of our investment in the data center for the computer resources, as well on the storage. We see the graph starting to lower because we start reusing the resources that we provide to the other departments. If we have a scale of 30% for every three years, it becomes twenty or fifteen.

I would give this solution a nine. One for the future improvement. 

I would recommend it, and especially if you have a huge environment, it will easily give you a complete view of what's inside and what configuration is in it. 

Our primary use case of this solution is to use it as an operations tool.

It hasn't improved our organization, we have monitoring in place already, too much overlapping monitoring because wasteful operationally.  Also, the learned behavior thing at first sounds like a great benefit, but when an alert is triggered just because a VMs behavior changes, like for example it uses more network than usual and crosses a threshold but isn't really taxing the underlying infrastructure, well it essentially creates a scenario where admins are logging in to address the alert, but its there really isn't anything wrong.  This stuff should be simple and not overly complicated, and in my opinion the product has become overly complicated over the years. 

Reporting is a fantastic tool. It's a great tool for generating reports on different things, and for historically looking at performance metrics to help solve performance problems in an application stack. There are some great uses for it, but I think that VMware needs to take a step back and simplify it a little bit more, without trying to bombard us with everything they can possibly think of. Some of the stuff isn't important, and it's not operationally useful.

I used to use the old version, and I liked the old version before it was rebranded. The interface was more intuitive, it was more familiar with traditional vSphere client type interfaces. When I deployed the most recent version, I logged in and I was shocked that I didn't know where to go to do what I wanted to do. The whole interface is an information overload, it just bombards me with messages, warnings, and alerts. When I follow through on the majority of these messages, I realize that I'm really just wasting time because they're not real problems.

There's a time to live metric that keeps flashing all the time saying things like "Your cluster is only going to have 45 days left before this resource is going to run out." It's not true. It simply doesn't happen. We could run our clusters with these warnings for another two years. I'm not happy with that. I don't want to be warned just because one VM deviates a little bit from what it would be doing on a normal basis. I'll only want to be alerted when that specific VM causes a genuine problem within the physical infrastructure, where it's going to create some sort of bottleneck of performance for a larger number of VMs collectively. There's x amount of bandwidth on a physical network interface card as the traffic flows over it. It's not really ever gonna be a bottleneck until that card itself becomes saturated. I don't want to see an alert about a VM that's running over a network card when the card itself isn't saturated. 

These are things that bother me about the product: information overload, too many warnings that are false alerts. After a while, when I see these things all the time I don't want to act on anything anymore. I don't want to log into the product because I know that when I log into it I'm going to see too much stuff that's just going to waste my time.

It is stable. 

We don't scale very quickly in our environment and we only have fixed licensing to a specific product. Even as we add new hosts and classes, we only use that particular product against the assets we are licensed to use it against. We acquired the VRealize operations bundle in a large purchase, as part of a solution for our SAP environment. It actually monitors all the hosts and VMs associated with our SAP infrastructure.

OK

We use foglight, and I have to admit vrealize is way better, but we really don't spend much time in either product.  We haven't switched we use both to manage different assets

The initial setup was very simple. We have a relatively small environment we were running it against and we didn't have to plug multiple components. We just employed everything all at one server VM stack.

in house

Cant' really say there is one, you buy it, you spend money on it, but it doesn't really allow for a return on your investment, it only burns more of your operation teams cycles just to learn it and use it, and respond to the alerts it creates.  Bottom line, if you size your infrastructure correctly you don't need this.  If you want to stack VMs on the host to its tipping point, good luck no matter what you monitor with.   

The pricing and licensing structure of this solution weren't so bad. Although the larger scales become more expensive because it's a per-socket model and that's the way VMware prices its stuff out. This particular product could benefit from a different model like a per-VM count rather than a per-socket count. We bought it as part of a bundle and we got a good deal on it. 

We have another solution from Dell EMC called Foglight, and it's way worse. vRealize is ten times better than that product. Although they both leave us with too much nonsense to bother with.

I would rate this solution a six.

We use vRealize Operations to monitor and do capacity planning for our clients. We integrate into our architecture's environments. Mission-critical on IBM clouds was announced and so we use vROps quite extensively in all of this architecture.

This solution is intuitive and user-friendly. They improved a lot with the latest release to vRealize Operations, like the dashboards, for example, and the way it works. Now it feels much more user-friendly than it was before.

vRealize Operations offers a clustering feature so you can have a cluster for multiple appliances. It is a master in replica. For example, in case your master goes offline your replica will take over so you will not lose your data, dashboard, reports, and everything you have set up.

vRealize Operations is a really cool tool. It can give you a real and deep overview of your infrastructure, capacity, mutualization, forecasting future, and what you need to plan for. It also has monitoring alerts. It's a pretty good tool, I personally really like it.

This product, of course, has room for improvement. A feature that I would like to see is one that allows you to deploy clusters within multiple geo-locations. At this point, this is not supported and I think it would be really nice to have clusters across two data centers in scenarios when you have storage vSAN.

It's really scalable. You can scale all of the vROps if you have NSX in your infrastructure and you want to deploy something as agents in your segmentation, you can deploy this agent and then you can still get the specific network segment.

Their technical support is great. Of course, they can be better but they're great.

The initial setup can be straightforward depending on what you want to achieve. Overall the deployment of the vROps cluster is pretty straightforward. You set DNS records, set the IP address, then just click deploy and go through the wizard.

I would rate this solution somewhere between a seven and eight. Not a ten because there's always room for improvement.

We initially rolled vROps out for environment health and for the ability to look at the abilities to stabilize the environment. We've actually been able to take advantage of it also with resource reclamation which was a big selling point for leadership. 

The sandbox is a good example of how this product has improved my organization. We had our development team asking for more resources. With vROps, we were able to go in and show them specifically that they weren't consuming these resources. We needed to be able to take these back but during peak times the resources can be given back automatically by the system, in a proactive manner without causing any kind of downtime or any kind of an issue with loss of work.

The resource reclamation is the most valuable feature. We've had issues with our sandbox environment, and reclaiming these resources. Since, it's become a major selling factor in expanding the environment and expanding the client base for vROps.

I have found this solution to be intuitive and user-friendly. Every version that has come out has been better than the last. I am extremely happy with the product.

So far, we've managed to build what we were missing, and that's what one of the nice features with our product. The flexibility with it that was missing in previous versions, is now the ability to go in and define the base variables of our environment so that we can tweak it as we need to, take back what we need to, and give what we need to. 

With our environment right now, stability is the one sticking point. There hasn't been a great deal of handholding in between the different versions, so we've run into problems with there being what I would call "more than just the average change between versions" and it's caused a loss of data for us in the past. 

This solution is most definitely scalable. We've already gone back to the drawing board and specifically designed it from the ground up to be scalable with the size of our environment moving forward.

Technical support has also been a pain point for us. We've had mixed support issues in the past with vROps on stability issues with downtime. Overall, it's gotten better but there still could be some improvement on the GSS side with that.

Having too many monitoring tools is a typical IT problem and the advantage with this solution was that this was giving us the ability not only to check the health of the environment and give operations team a heads up dashboard in order to see the health of the environment, but also have the options for resource reclamation which was a major selling point.

One of the issues that we've had in between the versions is that the set up for it has gotten a little bit more difficult. It doesn't always tell you right away that you'll need to do something different with this version versus a past version which has become an issue. It's now something that we're aware of. From what I've been hearing today, the new setup should be relatively simple in comparison.

We implemented this completely from the ground up, all the way back to one of the older versions. We've used it for the last several years, going through and learning each new version of the product. 

We've had a demonstrable increase in value directly related to the actions of the product.

We also looked at VMTurbo and there were a few other ones for resource reclamation but as soon as we found out that vROps in the newer versions was able to be a little bit more robust, it was the clear selling point.

I would rate this solution an eight. 

Our primary use case of this solution is that it helps us to monitor and troubleshoot our VMware environment.

This product has improved my organization because it has helped us with monitoring and troubleshooting our VMware environment.

The most valuable features would be that it helps you drill down the problems to the bottleneck of where it is which saves us time. We have to give time back to business and we cannot spend hours trying to figure out what happened.

I definitely find this solution to be intuitive and user-friendly. It's integrated with vCenter, so I think it is a good product.

This solution solves our problems. But every time I think it's perfect I come here and they add something new. 

It is stable.

We are from Portugal, so we are small environments, mostly SMB companies, but yes I think it will adapt to any kind of infrastructure.

Technical support is good, once you pass the first level. They know the product like no one else, so they always solve everything. 

We had some monitoring tools, PRTG and some of the stuff from SolarWinds, but it is integrated with everything from VMware. Everything is virtual so, I think it is the way to go.

The initial setup was very easy. We do not have a huge environment, we have eight ESX hosts, so it was pretty straightforward. It was easy to do.

Normally we have a partner or a VMware reseller that helps us implement the solutions.

We have seen ROI because the time we take to solve problems has decreased a lot, so that is the way we give back to the company in the investment.

We have tested some other solutions and they are not as integrated and as easy to manage. I would advise someone looking into this solution that one vendor is always a better option than three or four.

I would rate this solution a nine because normally I wouldn't give a ten. We do not have any problems with the product. It solves our problems. We now know if something is on the console and if there really is a problem. Before this, we had a lot of false positives. It digs into the problems and then at the end it just drops it.