VMware Aria Operations for Applications Reviews

We primarily use the solution for KPI metrics. We use the aggregation of metrics, and get alerts about the numbers behind the data that we have.

Being able to have a dashboard of key items for a few departments and teams in our company have improved our organization. The solution provides the relevant metrics that I need to monitor our systems and the environment. The log space and log aggregation KPIs help us to have a better way to see where we're at in terms of threshold monitoring. 

The most valuable aspects of the solution are its ease of use and its ease of implementation.

Authentication is probably there already, but if it isn't, it should be added. Integration should be in there. They could make it more easy to plug-in data so that a nontechnical person will be able to use it, like accountants or finance people. That way they don't have to ask us.

The solution should integrate AI elements. Instead of opening a file with a template and filling things out, have the AI ask questions, and then let it fill it out. 

The stability of the solution is good. I've never heard of anyone saying "It failed." There's no problem. It's there, just like any other cache application. You don't have to maintain it in your data center. I don't even think much about the stability because I know the solution can handle it.

I've never used the solution's technical support.

We previously used Splunk. We did not want to put more load on our existing monitor systems. Also, putting metrics into it was not within the reach of a lot of people. It requires a little bit more experience and knowledge to do it in Splunk. Wavefront is much easier in this regard.

We wanted to bridge the experience gap by seeing the right dashboard. When we were trying to come up with a solution we had a project to have a single pane for monitoring. That was three years ago. Then we implemented Wavefront.

The reason for the implementation came down to cost and usability.

Wavefront gives us the complexity we need, instead of spending time coming up with a nice dashboard from some other means, or just creating and coding our own app.

The solution enables you to run your microservices to optimize the application. The people that are responsible for our microservices appreciate that. When we talk about microservices, just the ability to help in log analysis is a big plus. It's been a while since I saw the company's microservices dashboard, but there are some reports from Wavefront that help in giving them a better view of business processes.

The chart or dashboard creation processes are very easy. It gives us the ability to just plug and place things.

There's a very little learning curve for the solution. It's easy. Any technologist should be able to see how beneficial it is and how manageable and easy it is to use.

For smaller companies, the solution should consider the cost-factor and offer some better deals. For me, as a technologist, I like things when they work. I don't want to be maintaining my own scripts, or my own in-house applications. We don't have time to develop in-house applications nowadays anyway. We're just wasting our time. The traditional model is gone and Wavefront is right there with modern companies in delivering solutions to them. Basically, you have an entire company doing engineering for you. If I were a company or a technologist that has been given a chance to do something like this, I'd go for it. I hope the entry cost gets better for smaller to mid-sized companies such as where I work.

I would rate the solution eight out of ten.

We do not use this solution directly. Rather, we provide a platform for people to run it. We are the virtualization engineers, and we interface with this solution.

Our experience is with a private cloud deployment.

Using Wavefront, we have been able to reduce the complexity of our pipeline.

Our mean time to remediation has been reduced.

The implementation is a long process that should be improved.

The application scales well.

During the implementation, the internal processes take longer for us than the actual application. This includes the storage, provisioning and all of the resources required to actually run the application.

My suggestion for anybody who is implementing this solution is to have all of the requirements ahead of time. That way, it can increase the time to market.

People are very pleased with the implementation.

I would rate this solution a seven out of ten.

Our primary use case for Wavefront is for metrics alerting. We use the SaaS offering.

Wavefront's monitoring tools and visibility into public cloud platforms are competing with the best out there. It helps us monitor our services and it gives us the alerting capabilities we need. We have, however, not used their prebuilt dashboards in terms of incident resolution yet.

I believe that the SDK-based approach in terms of its capability and adoption by developers is the right way to go because I think it is easier for developers to pull in an SDK and instrument decode and get the data and the telemetry that they need.

I wouldn't say that the solution reduced the complexity of the pipeline, but it certainly helped us get the data that we have in a single place.

We also plan to use the solution's new chart customization and dashboard customization soon. We also plan to test it for microservices-based deployment soon.

The features I find most valuable is the querying and alerting capabilities because it enables us to write enriched alerts that are meaningful for our developers to respond to.

In the new version, I would love to see more prediction capabilities. It would be great if one could see the alerts get a little more enriched with information and become more human-friendly instead of the technical stuff that they put in there. I think those would be really awesome outcomes to get.

I would also like it if alerts were easier. It's really easy to drown in alerts. So what the developers of Wavefront could do, is to correlate different types of alerts to bring a much more enriched incident. That would be an interesting thing to look at. Predicting a problem beforehand could also be improved since Wavefront has all the data of metrics in its store. I would like to know if something is wrong so that I can go and look at it. I would like to use the AIML approach to predict problems for the user other than the users trying to figure out what the problems are themselves. I would love to see a change in that direction.

The solution is very stable.

I believe that Wavefront is able to scale to our needs. So far it helps us with our footprint.

We have our own customer service team, which helps us resolve issues as and when they arise, so we are pretty happy with that model.

I was not part of the initial decision-making process as to what made us choose this solution, but I think the issue we had, was that we were trying to bring visibility into our applications and this was one of the tools that was out there that could help us get to our goals. So far, the solution's learning curve has been pretty high. I think with the new experience it may be lower, but for anybody new, that was the biggest challenge that we faced.

I would advise others to test Wavefront and see how it works for them. I don't want to rate the solution, because I feel neutral about it.

We primarily use this solution for monitoring and customer demos. We have a hybrid cloud deployment with Amazon.

This solution allows me to have true visibility for any metrics when it comes to my cloud, and private. It allows me to move workloads between the two of them.

The most valuable feature of this solution is the way you can monitor multiple environments including cloud, hybrid cloud, and private cloud. We also like the way you can do the right sizing.

The monitoring and visibility into public cloud platforms are actually very good. You don't have to manage any infrastructure for the monitoring, as everything is provided for you. On AWS you can monitor everything from S3 to EC2 instances.

The pre-built dashboards are great for incident resolution. They help me to troubleshoot because of the metrics that they provide.

I would like to see integration with Kubernetes cluster and APIs so that you can manage the entire stack.

This solution is a software service (SaaS), so we do not have to manage it. 

Scalability does not really apply because it is provided as SaaS.

We did use another solution prior to this one, but I realized that I do not want to manage infrastructure anymore. This one is cloud-based and logs the analytics and stuff like that. I can just access them from anywhere.

The initial setup is pretty straightforward, based on the instructions.

We implemented this solution in-house.

The fact that you can come to a solution faster because everything is within one dashboard automatically gives you ROI.

If I were to compare the cost of this solution to a traditional one, I think it's a consolidation of price, where everything is in one, versus having separate applications modules for the same thing. It achieves the same outcome, pretty much.

We considered solutions by Cisco in addition to this one. We were already a VMware customer, which is why we chose this product.

Using this solution has helped to reduce our mean time to remediation because it helps to pinpoint where the bottleneck or the root cause of the problem is.

This solution allows us to monitor microservices based on ports and stuff like that. You can see when those ports die and know where the problem is.

We have used the chart and dashboard customization features, and they are pretty easy to use if you know your metrics. The customization makes it easier to visualize what you are already looking for. They help me get to the root cause faster.

In terms of easy, medium, or hard, I would say that the learning curve for this solution is medium.

This solution will give you a single pane of glass for everything, and centralized monitoring. However, it is still not a very mature product. Is has been out for two years and is not fully baked-in.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.