VMware Aria Operations Reviews

I guess the faults, the alerts, are the most valuable feature; being able to see what could become a problem when I'm running out of virtual machine capacity, and definitely the faults, as far as whether there any issues with the VM storage, any performance issues. I mostly use it for CPU contention, memory contention, as well as latency, obviously; to correlate latency between data stores and virtual machine latency, virtual machine disk latency as well.

I have a dashboard now; I set up dashboards for the help desk team. They are able to look at the dashboard and see right away if there's a VM issue, or whether it’s an actual guest OS issue or an application issue. I think that's the easiest. That's the best feature that I've gotten out of it, as far as the organization is concerned. They are able to understand the information they're seeing.

I was able to sell some custom dashboards to the community. I was able to download some of the dashboards that they have and it's like a help desk central type of a dashboard, where you can drill down to the VM that you're having issues with, and it'll tell you right there and then if there's memory, CPU or a storage contention problem. That's the easiest thing to go by.

I would like to see better built-in policies, so when you deploy an environment, you are able to apply policies that are more realistic for a production environment. That would definitely be a nice release.

They do have some policies now centered around a production environment; maybe easier to make exceptions with where, if you have an alert, you can say, "Don't worry about it. It's an exception. Don't notify me again about this issue.", instead of having it come back up again after a few months. That would be nice.

Once I figure I know this is not a real issue, maybe I can flag something saying, "This is something I know about. You don't need to notify me again about this." Or maybe say "This can be an exception to this rule.", without needing to change the whole policy around, just for that one VM. Maybe there is a way of doing that, I don't know, but I haven't figured it out.

I've had no issues with stability, to be honest; it's worked really well.

We only have two sites on which we use it, so we have two of the servers deployed. So far, for our needs, the scale is fine. It's a web-driven menu just like the web client, so it's kind of sluggish sometimes when I'm down in to certain menus, but overall it's not so bad.

I have not used technical support since this release. I have used it in the past when it used to be called vCloud Operations. When it was vCOps, that's when I had more issues with it. I had to call technical support. But now that it's vROps, no, I've had no issues.

It’s the first-use solution I've used for VMware.

I was the one to set it up. The new setup environment's pretty straightforward. Setting up the alerts, definitions and actions were kind of tricky because there's a lot of false positives. A lot of things it alerts you on are not really problems, so you have to go in and tweak the policies around to see the actual real issues. Sometimes the notifications can be too aggressive, where it notifies you of almost every little thing that can possibly be wrong but in reality, it's not an issue. That tweaking does take a while to get figured out. It's an ongoing process. I'm still doing it to this day. It takes a while.

Maybe after the fact, we looked at VMTurbo a little bit, but that was already after I'd purchased vROps. So it wasn't very realistic as far as going after that product. We also have Veeam Availability Suite, which comprised the same functionality as well. That's because of the way we purchased Veeam for our backup environment. The Availability Suite just came with the backup environment. The vendor gave it to us that way. We don't really use it too much. It seems like Veeam is a nice product as well.

Definitely look into your other products, along with vROps as well. We were short on time, so we made a decision when we should have probably researched more. See what's out there. See how well it compares to other products. I'm sure there are other products that'll do just as well. That would be my number one recommendation. Try to do a PoC with multiple products.

See what fits best for your environment, and what fits best for your staff as well. If you have a dedicated VMware guy, maybe vROps is great. Or maybe, if you need that level of trainability, vROps is great. If you want something right out of the box that just works and just tells you the high-level information and the kind of nuts and bolts of what's wrong with your environment, without having to do too much modifications or tweaking, then maybe something out there is maybe better.