VMware Aria Operations Reviews

Our private data center has been built on VMware technology. We are using vSAN and we use vROps as a monitoring solution to monitor the full stack, from applications to hardware. That includes the servers and Cisco switches.

The solution is deployed on-premises in our private data center.

It enables us to monitor the full software-defined infrastructure from the app level to the hardware level. This is the main benefit for our organization.

When there is an issue at the disk level in vSAN, vROps gives us an alarm that the issue is happening on particular disks. Other solutions cannot give this type of alert for vCenter. Even vCenter cannot give that type of information. That's what makes this feature valuable for me.

The visibility it provides from apps to infrastructure is very good, compared to other monitoring solutions in the market. We have used other solutions, and we are still using them, but for monitoring your VMware infrastructure, vROps is very good.

vROps is user-friendly, but configuration is a little bit hard. It is also hard if you want to customize it for your data center, especially without VMware training. The user interface should be improved so that a new user can easily configure it for his own use.

I have been using VMware vRealize Operations for the last four years.

The stability is good enough to monitor private and hybrid clouds. Even though we are using very few of the features of vROps, it is very good. It is very useful for a cloud provider that is managing large-scale VMware technology for their cloud. It is good monitoring and operations software for them.

It is highly scalable.

We are already in the middle of a project to increase our infrastructure and we have included vROps in that project.

Customer support is good, but the main problem is that VMware support is very costly compared to other organizations' support. When you purchase a VMware product, such as vSphere or vROps, the license is perpetual, but you also have to purchase the support service for a number of years. The support service pricing is very high compared to the license, and compared to competitive vendors.

Before vROps, we were using SolarWinds NPM. The primary reason we switched was that we were looking for a solution that would give in-depth monitoring capabilities for VMware infrastructure.

The initial deployment of vROps was straightforward. We deployed ESXi, vCenter, and then vSAN. After that, we deployed vROps on-premises to monitor our VMware vSAN cluster. There was nothing special or complex about it.

It took four to five days to deploy vROps.

We have three people who are using and managing vROps and we are monitoring about 500 virtual machines with the solution.

We used a third-party integration partner that is certified by VMware. I felt that they were not well-trained on vROps.

The value we get from vROps is fine, but it would be better if the support cost were lower.

We did not look into other solutions because, at that time, we already had our VMware infrastructure. vROps is the best option for monitoring VMware infrastructure.

If your infrastructure is VMware-based, meaning you are using vSphere, vSAN, and vCenter, and if you are a large-scale cloud service provider, you should consider vROps as your monitoring and operations solution.

I use it for monitoring and capacity planning.

I work with the solution's dashboards to monitor capacity. There are many functions in the tool and I have worked with a lot of different kinds of data from vROps. It's a great tool to work with.

With vROps, we have had the opportunity to increase our capacity. After vROps was installed on our infrastructure, we were able to view the impact that VM lag could cause in our environment and how we could modify such impact. It has helped us increase performance.

vROps has helped to decrease overall downtime. For example, when we planned capacity for new infrastructure, vROps was used to analyze the new projects that we needed to deploy. In some of those cases, there were many VMs to deploy and we didn't know what impact those VMs might have on the infrastructure, in terms of CPUs and memory. vROps helped us understand the particular impact of the new VMs. It reduced overall downtime by about 30 percent.

Using the solution for capacity allocation and management has also helped us to save on hardware costs, by about 20 percent.

Overall, it's a good platform and it's important to us for maintaining our environment. The challenge in maintaining our environment is made much easier with vROps. The tool provides us with the ability to respond to the causes of problems with VMs or the environment and this is power in our hands. For us, it's a powerful tool when it comes to IT infrastructure.

The monitoring features are great. I have gotten great value out of the data collected by the tool. The monitoring provides us with the ability to respond to the causes of problems with VMs or the environment.

The capacity planning is also very good because it gives me an opportunity to make a reasonable plan for increasing my infrastructure. It fills important functions for both monitoring and capacity planning.

The visibility it provides from apps to infrastructure and across multiple clouds is also great because it's a tool that aggregates a lot of data, both on-premises and in the cloud. It aggregates everything in one tool, which helps you to analyze the performance and the capacity of the infrastructure.

We have integrated vROps with vRealize Log Insight as well. We generally use vRealize Log Insight to identify, through the logs, what is happening with the VM or the infrastructure. The integration with vROps means we can look deep into the cause of a problem. The tools work very well together. vRealize Log Insight provides us with many tools and many ways to solve our problems.

I've been using VMware vRealize Operations for about five years. I have had the opportunity to work with vROps since version 6.57, and I have started working with version 8, which is the latest version. I have installed vROps for two companies.

It provides great stability, when you follow the recommendations.

As for scalability, if you follow the VMware documentation, you can have a great solution.

We have about 500 VMs in our production monitoring. Right now it is on-premises only. We intend to start using cloud, and vROps can be the tool to monitor the cloud environment.

We have had a good experience with the support for the vROps tool, although we haven't had to use support too much.

We did not have a previous solution.

The installation was straightforward. It followed VMware principles that result from working with vCenter and VMs. It's easy to implement.

At a maximum, it takes 20 to 30 minutes to set up, but the configuration can take one or two hours. Building deep reports can take even longer.

The tool is user-friendly, but you need to study to learn about the many features that the tool offers. It is not a tool that you can just start to work with when it comes to capacity planning. You need to study the documentation. But for monitoring, you can start using it right after installation because the data is easy to understand.

Overall, the value is worth the cost because it's a tool that connects with our VMware infrastructure very well. It's a solution that our provider, VMware, developed for VMware itself.

The cost is simply something we need to pay. We can't evaluate the price because we use a VMware environment, so it makes sense to use a VMware monitoring tool. 

We use vROps in our VMware environment, but we have Zabbix to monitor other environments. It's a challenge to consolidate all that into one tool. I don't know if that will be possible, even in some months or years.

I recommend following the vROps documentation and, in some cases, it may be necessary to use a VMware partner.

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.

Our primary use case is for monitoring as a service for cloud clients, which generates early metrics that can be detected on time and corrected, the added value that this service has delivered a feature in the form of the cloud of the corporation. The administration is very intuitive, however, you must have high knowledge of management of virtualization components. Additionally, service components and licensing topics must be kept up-to-date by verifying the cost-benefit to deliver as a service aggregated that have this service we deliver as a feature in the form of the Cloud of the Corporation.

The tool helped the organization in all monitoring tasks when being delivered as a service for customers helps them to generate early alarm templates, being a cloud service provider is delivered as part of the IaaS to generate memory consumptions processing and storage additionally can be configured parameters such as networking and services that are configured on virtual machines. The counter you have is the license that must be configured in order to have all the games you have, cloud computing.

The tool has many benefits in the monitoring and template functions to integrate with various virtual machine operating systems in the cloud service. Integrations with operating systems are intuitive and easy to install. The most important value is the value it delivers in a cloud service to generate early alerts in cloud services. In short, this is the most granular value that this service delivers to customers, in the administration part you have facilities for the ease of documentation on the web

The database services in the tool as backup services are friendly and can be deployed in the release to production. However, in the new features, I would like to include more online documentation that can help service generate early alerts. A service provider must be generated and coupled to new technologies, as a service provider we have advanced and generated as the advancement of technology, with the help of Nutanix we have learned to identify several tools and compare them. l can help service administrators generate early alerts, for a service provider should be generated and coupled to new technologies. As a service provider we have advanced and generated with the advancement of technology, with the help of Nutanix we have learned to identify several tools and compare

I have been using vROps for five years.

Technical support is excellent.

We did evaluate other solutions. 

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.