VMware Aria Operations Reviews

I am currently using vSAN and VMware. I work with vSAN, vCenter, and vSAN cluster in vCenter with a three-node cluster running vSAN and vSphere. I need to renew the contract, which is excessively expensive. I am also trying to implement a disaster recovery solution based on VMware, and the costs are prohibitive and impossible to follow. For this reason, I am evaluating Proxmox at this moment.

My experience with VMware has been good from a functionality point of view. The interface is intuitive for me, though at the beginning when I started working with it around ten years ago, it was somewhat difficult. Over time and with extensive experience using it, I have learned the system well, which is why it now feels intuitive to me.

However, the costs are now exceeding my budget.

The primary issue is the pricing, which is very expensive for my company's budget. We cannot afford to pay such a large fee. We are not Microsoft or BMW; we are a small company.

As a small company, I have no power to negotiate directly with VMware. Perhaps larger companies have more opportunity to contract directly with VMware, but I do not have that leverage. The only path I can follow is to change solutions.

Net.spA is a company working in the field of waste management. We are not a technological company, so we do not have a large margin to justify purchasing and maintaining the VMware infrastructure at current costs.

I have never experienced any downtime or lost connectivity. While VMware was not a mature product fifteen years ago, it has improved significantly and is by far much better today.

Scalability depends on the size of the enterprise. In my opinion, for enterprises having the same size as mine, there are zero scalability issues.

I worked with Proxmox around fifteen years ago, and it worked well.

I have no other integrations.

I would rate the implementation team a nine because I give a ten to no one, by principle.

VMware Aria Operations was part of my experience.

My experience has been good from a functionality point of view, but the costs are now exceeding my budget. The costs are prohibitive and impossible to follow. The pricing is very expensive for my company's budget. We cannot afford to pay such a large fee. We are not Microsoft or BMW; we are a small company.

I am not going to migrate to Red Hat. I think I made a mistake in choosing VMware.

I have VMware as a product, and I am now evaluating changing it and moving away from it. I want to introduce Proxmox in this company for another reason: it is a European solution. I do not particularly favor the "America first" approach. My overall rating for this product is nine out of ten.

I am using VMware Aria Operations for virtualization.

VMware Aria Operations is being used for virtualization.

It's hard to say which features of this product are most effective in automating IT operations, but VMware was the first solution twenty years ago when Microsoft did not have similar solutions.

VMware Aria Operations has positively impacted incident response times, making it easier to solve problems with virtualization.

I have seen cost savings from using VMware Aria Operations, specifically related to virtualization.

There were challenges with VMware Aria Operations; the first problem was hardware compatibility.

I don't think there is major room for improvement apart from hardware compatibility, and I don't currently recall if there are other problems with VMware Aria Operations.

I have been using VMware Aria Operations for more than twenty years.

There is maintenance for VMware Aria Operations, but there are not many problems.

The support of VMware was good. I would rate technical support around eight or nine.

Positive

Twenty years ago when I started with VMware, there were not many other solutions. There was only VMware, as Microsoft Hyper-V was just at the beginning.

The approximate installation time for VMware took approximately one week.

Two people were involved in the installation.

I am working with VMware Aria Operations.

I would recommend VMware Aria Operations to other users.

On a scale of 1-10, I rate VMware Aria Operations a nine.

My primary use case for VMware Aria Operations involves observability and planning for the infrastructure. I focus on infrastructure planning, using the single pane of glass for monitoring all my environments and performing a deep dive into metrics to verify what's happening.

The valuable features of VMware Aria Operations include the single pane of glass for all my environments, which allows a deep dive into the metrics. This capability enables me to explore each element of the infrastructure and verify the situation, which is essential for infrastructure planning and observability.

Stability is a significant area that needs improvement as I experience frequent disconnections and interruptions in data collection. 

Additionally, the configuration of some collectors is cumbersome. Improving the thoroughness of the documentation would also be beneficial, though there are market resources that cover these documentation gaps.

I have been using VMware Aria Operations for three years.

The solution is not very stable. It often disconnects from the environment or stops collecting data, leading to challenges.

I find VMware Aria Operations to be quite scalable for my needs. On a scale of one to ten, I would rate its scalability as an eight out of ten.

My interaction with customer service and support has been positive overall. After the acquisition by Broadcom, their responsiveness decreased slightly, however, they remain in the top 25% of vendors. I would rate them quite high.

Neutral

Within operations management and monitoring, I did not use other solutions before VMware Aria Operations.

The initial setup of VMware Aria Operations depended on how it was deployed. It was not overly difficult, but it required more planning and complexity than starting a basic application. On a scale from one to ten, I'd rate the setup difficulty at a four or five.

The pricing and cost of VMware Aria Operations increased significantly after Broadcom acquired VMware. However, these cost considerations are outside my scope as an IT architect.

I advise potential users to read the implementation and user documentation thoroughly and be aware of any issues listed online. Additionally, hardware integrations with other vendors, such as Dell, may present challenges. 

Overall, my rating for VMware Aria Operations is seven out of ten.

Positive

The primary use case is within the banking sector, where I utilize VMware Aria Operations for dashboards, logging, and automation. It helps me manage and monitor various operations and environments within the bank, focusing on maintaining crucial data center activities securely.

The most valuable features of VMware Aria Operations include its excellent monitoring capabilities. It allows me to perform deep monitoring and logging of the entire environment, providing a quick alarm and warning system through email. These features help me in efficiently managing virtual machines. The solution also offers easy access to VMware KB articles for problem resolution, ensuring quick access to troubleshooting information.

One area that needs improvement is the solution's connectivity and integration with other products, such as IBM and Huawei servers and storage. Enhancements in these areas would allow me to have better overall management within a single platform.

I have been working with VMware Aria Operations for three years.

I find the stability of VMware Aria Operations to be impressive, rated as a stable nine out of ten.

I consider VMware Aria Operations to be very scalable, earning a high rating of nine out of ten.

I rate the customer service and support for VMware very highly, at nine out of ten.

Positive

The initial setup of VMware Aria Operations is straightforward, with multiple products within VMware having an easy installation process.

Overall, I would rate the setup as a nine out of ten.

Pricing involves purchasing an ESXi Enterprise Plus license, which includes VMware Aria Operations. This makes the cost complex to determine individually.

For organizations with large data centers, like those in petroleum or banking, I highly recommend VMware Aria Operations. It provides comprehensive monitoring capabilities across the entire data center on a single page. The biggest advantage of VMware Aria Operations is its deep monitoring and efficient alerting system, which offers detailed notifications. 

I would rate the overall solution nine out of ten.

We use Aria Operations for hosting our retail environment at remote locations, and for hosting our internal systems.

We have an established environment with VMware solutions, which has been very robust and reliable.

Ease of use and the ability to do what I need to do is very easy. I know where to look, find issues on the configurations, or add services and hardware changes. We use Veeam for snapshotting.

Pricing is the only concern I have.

We have been using Aria Operations for more than five years, however, I don't know exactly how long ago I started. It's likely we have been using it for ten years.

Our environment is very robust, and I haven't had any issues. It's probably at ninety-nine percent stable.

Scalability depends on the hardware we throw at it. If more is needed, we throw more resources at it. I rate it as extremely scalable.

Support used to be better. It has lost some of its effectiveness. If we had an issue, we could call in the morning and get an answer by the afternoon. Now the response time has increased.

Positive

The installation is easy. It's an image file run over the internal management component of the hardware. One person is enough to install it.

One person is enough to install the solution.

The return on investment has diminished because of the shift to a subscription model.

Pricing is a concern as it seems to be on the expensive side. The return on investment is harder to calculate now due to the subscription model.

We are currently using VMware and investigating the possibility of moving to Hyper-V.

I need to normalize any information that might give people too much information about how we operate.

I'd rate the solution nine out of ten.

I use VMware Aria Operations in my company for monitoring the virtualized environment along with vRealize Operations (vROps).

We are using the tool for monitoring purposes, creating reports, storage utilization, CPU utilization, and RAM utilization. We use the tool for capacity planning in our infrastructure.

For capacity planning, we have to create a view, and then we have to create some particular VMs. The tool is beneficial for capacity planning, such as in the area of CPU utilization.

If, on a particular VM, we have more computing resources, then we can monitor IT operations for a particular fifteen days. With the tool, we can reduce the computing resources on particular VMs, and it is the type of monitoring we have done using the tool.

It would be good if the tool gives more monitoring features like the ones offered by the other monitoring solutions, especially in areas like dashboards. Using critical alerts on the email also gives the same information on the dashboard for particular data to L1 team members so that they can continuously monitor particular VMs with VMware Aria Operations, but if the host goes down, it just goes down. If the host goes down, such information is not sent to the user via email. We have just been notified about such incidents via VMware vCenter, but when we are off duty, the issues should be sent via email to us.

I have been using VMware Aria Operations for six months. I use the solution for my data center. I use VMware Aria Operations 8.6.

It is a stable solution. Stability-wise, I rate the solution an eight out of ten.

The solution's technical support is responsive. I rate the technical support an eight to nine out of ten.

Positive

For cost savings, we use the tool to create a three-month capacity planning plan. For capacity planning, we can manage our storage or compute resources for our VMs. The tool is a cost-effective product in my company.

The analytics capabilities have improved the analytics operations. In my company, the analytics is managed by L3 and L4 teams. The L3 and L4 teams in my company asked me to create a particular view for the VMs. The L4 team manages the analytics part.

For operational productivity, we don't we don't have to go with another open-source tool or another product like SolarWinds for monitoring purposes. We are in the banking sector. I mostly use the tool in the banking sector. In the banking sector, banks do not use open-source products. They just have some license of the product. The tool is cost-effective, particularly from a licensing perspective for monitoring purposes.

My company is not going with the AI part for now.

I recommend the tool to others.

I would not recommend the tool to those working on open-source products like Zabbix. Open-source products give you a report, but it is not accurate. Other companies offer features like dashboards and alerts, but we do not go with such tools. We use VMWare Aria Operations. We are mostly given the banking sectors or companies that do not use open-source products.

I rate the tool a five to six out of ten.

I use the solution in my company for monitoring and capacity management.

The solution's most valuable feature is a native product from VMware itself, so it tightly works with VMware products. Using events in VMware Aria Operations, we can easily automate tasks by integrating with vRO workflows.

The only area of concern when using the integration features is when we want to forward the logs from VMware vRealize Log Insight to Apache Kafka. Apache Kafka is an enterprise solution for data management. We cannot forward the logs to Apache because we cannot find the right solution.

Currently, whatever our company raises goes to GSE. The technical support person has to start from scratch, so he doesn't have the knowledge on the HSBC side. There are a lot of issues. There is probably a need to sort the account management layer only. Account management strategy is an area of concern where improvements are needed.

I have been using VMware Aria Operations for more than ten years. My company is a customer of the tool.

My company did not experience any stability issues with the tool. The tool is 100 percent stable.

My company did not explore the solution's scalability.

In terms of scalability, the tool has clustering technology. It has been the clustering technology in infrastructure that makes the tool easily scalable.

My company is never 100 percent satisfied with the solution's technical support. I rate the technical support a six to seven out of ten.

Neutral

I use VMware Aria Operations, VMware Skyline, and VMware vRealize Log Insight.

The product's initial setup phase is straightforward.

My company's SMEs do the product's maintenance.

One person can deploy the solution.

The solution can be deployed in less than an hour.

I don't know if the tool helped with cost savings since it was implemented a long time ago, and back then, we did not convert it to dollar savings.

When it comes to the tool's automation capabilities, my company is not using the native one. Based on the events, we will pick up certain things and integrate them with vRO, and then we will run a few workflows, which is what automation is for us.

I did not see many issues with the product's integration features.

I think the tool usually has patches, especially critical ones. The tool normally sends notifications to customers. There are just regular patches from VMware.

Right now, with the current acquisition of VMware, maybe not as of now because of the impact on the cost plus the current transition that's one thing is the support. Yeah. So maybe the recommendation will be to have different virtualization technologies such as Nutanix and Red Hat OpenShift.

The tool might have integration features, but we are not using it.

I rate the tool an eight out of ten.

The solution helps to monitor our infrastructure. 

VMware Aria Operations is the leading industrial solution for monitoring VMware infrastructure stacks. It has evolved to provide more insights into customer capacity planning and has become more data-driven. The level of monitoring and the granularity it offers are unmatched by any other product in the infrastructure management market.

Even though I have worked with Microsoft, I would say this is the best tool available. The predictive analytics feature is very useful because it helps customers manage their capacity better by predicting usage and providing guidelines. This feature helps prevent overutilization and potential failures. I have a very positive opinion of it and am optimistic about its continued growth.

Every product has room for improvement, no matter how good it is. For VMware Aria Operations, I think the main area for improvement is its integration with other cloud vendors, like AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud. The integration process is quite complex and often requires VMware personnel's involvement, which isn't always a great experience. So, integration with hyper scalers would be a key improvement.

I have been working with the product for two years and have ten years of experience with the VMware solution stack. 

I would rate the solution's stability an eight out of ten. 

On a scale of one to ten, I would rate VMware Aria Operations' scalability around seven to eight. It handles thousands of users well, especially in mid-scale enterprises, but there can be some performance impacts when scaled to very large enterprises.

I would have rated support higher before the Broadcom acquisition. However, after the acquisition, I felt that support had fallen below par. When Broadcom acquired VMware, they brought a different vision focused on consolidating VMware products and prioritizing on-premises customers. This shift led to a decrease in support. 

Neutral

The tool's integration with other hyperscalers is difficult and not seamless. The solution can be deployed both on-premises and in the cloud. The deployment time varies; if everything is in place and you have good support from VMware, it might take two to three days to set up.

I rate the solution's pricing a seven out of ten. 

I would recommend VMware Aria Operations to others, especially for those working in infrastructure monitoring with VMware environments. It's a top tool for this purpose. Overall, I would rate VMware Aria Operations an eight out of ten.

We use VMware Aria Operations to give the business reports on performance statistics whenever there are issues with latency, or CPU, or memory high utilization. We also use it to interrogate the vCenter space to identify how many VMs have been offline for more than sixty days, as well as the ones that are heavy hitters on the storage side.

VMware Aria Operations helps us to make decisions by comparing workload versus what we are consuming, allowing us to save costs and make recommendations to the business. We use it to ensure that we do not unnecessarily increase CPU, which can have negative impacts, and instead, identify root causes like application performance issues.

The most valuable features of VMware Aria Operations include monitoring CPU, memory, and storage.

Improvement is needed in alerting. If Aria could send alerts when a specific system or VM is using excessive resources, we could consult the storage team to address the problem proactively.

We have implemented VMware Operations Manager for about five years, and we have recently upgraded to VMware Aria Operations.

I would rate the stability of VMware Aria Operations a ten. It is a very stable solution.

I find it to be a scalable solution, and I would rate it a ten.

The customer service and support rates a nine. Since the migration from Dell to Broadcom, we have faced some challenges, but overall, the support is good.

Positive

We did not use any other product similar to VMware Aria Operations.

The initial setup was managed by our team, with one individual primarily responsible for the upgrade and installation.

The implementation was done by our in-house team. A specific individual, Kevin Spacey, took the lead on this project.

VMware Aria Operations helps us manage and save on costs across our various departments, providing a return on investment by allowing us to avoid unnecessary upgrades and ensure resource efficiency.

From my perspective, the pricing is fair. I would rate the licensing cost an eight out of ten, indicating it is somewhat affordable for business.

We conducted a POC with Microsoft virtualization in the past, but ultimately chose VMware.

I would recommend VMware Aria Operations to other organizations and banks. It provides real-time insights and is beneficial for troubleshooting, especially for those operating in a virtual space.

I would rate it a ten out of ten.