VMware Aria Operations Reviews

I am working for a company that provides a cloud computing solution in Bangladesh. We are like an AWS or Azure in Bangladesh. We have a huge infrastructure with different data centers and different availability zones. We need to monitor our customers' VMs and their workloads. Many of them are financial companies and big corporations. We use vROps as a visibility tool to do all this. We also use it for planning and for performance monitoring.

In our country, whenever people are using virtual machines or cloud computing, they want reports, every day or week or month, about how VM instances are working. They want to know about the CPU, memory, and data usage. That's especially true for FinTech companies. We generate those reports from vROps. It provides them with relevant information and helps them to better understand things.

The most challenging part of a data center is the monitoring. You have to see how things work, such as particular instances and workloads, what the ideal VMs are, et cetera. It's important to understand cost optimization and performance tuning. If you have that kind of visibility, when you have a large infrastructure with 10,000 or 20,000 VMs, a product like vROps is great for doing all these things in one place.

The solution has helped us to decrease overall downtime. We have segregated things. We have a master replica in a different segment, and it has helped us to do so. In two years, we have had one hour of downtime, in total. vROps helped achieve that.

It has also enabled us to be more proactive in anticipating and solving problems and that has helped to decrease our mean time to resolution by about one hour.

For efficient workload placement, it's great. It's a multi-purpose solution. If you have multi-purpose workloads in your infrastructure you must use this kind of product.

In terms of cost savings, it's about optimization. When you have lots of hardware in your data center you need to optimize it. If you have lots of workloads running, you need to optimize them. With this kind of solution, you optimize your data center. It has helped to optimize our operations by 15 to 20 percent.

In addition, the solution has replaced multiple monitoring tools. It combines a lot of tools. We are still using SolarWinds and Grafana, but our infrastructure is totally built on VMware, so we are planning to use vRealize Operations Manager with everything because it's a VMware product.

One of the most valuable features is the ability to compare between AWS/Azure and the local cloud. When customers deploy something on the local cloud, with the same configuration that would apply to AWS or Azure, we can calculate the estimated cost difference between the local cloud and the public cloud. We do this kind of analysis for optimization and it is one of the best features of vROps. It is an advanced feature that came out in version 7.5.

The most commonly-used functions are easy to access.

When it comes to the visibility the solution provides, from apps to infrastructure across multiple clouds, it is a great product. If you have a VMware infrastructure, or a multi-cloud infrastructure—including AWS or Azure or Hyper-V—you need visibility and dashboards to monitor everything. vRealize Operations Manager, for managed service providers, makes it easier to understand all the scenarios. It's a good product, providing visibility into everything in a single dashboard. It is an amazing product.

They need to improve the capacity and infrastructure planning side of things. Also, I would like to see them integrate more stuff, with more detailed monitoring and different cloud providers.

I've been using VMware vRealize Operations for two years. Initially, I was using version 7, then we upgraded to 7.5, and now it's 8.0.

Out of five, the stability of the solution is 4.5.

The scalability is 4.6 out of five.

Initially, the tech support was not that good, but now it is very good. They've improved.

We were only using vCenter and ESXi initially and then we started using vRealize Operations Manager.

The initial setup of vROps was pretty straightforward, but I have been working on VMware stuff for the last six or seven years. Deployment takes about 30 minutes.

In our data center, we have a NOC monitoring team and we have a system team. Those are the two departments that are using the solution. And it doesn't require much staff for deployment and maintenance.

The value we get from the solution is worth the cost because it enables us to optimize things.

If you have a big infrastructure, you should calculate the cost for those systems. But if you have a small workload, a small environment, don't go for vROps.

We are using Veeam and SolarWinds, but they are not that efficient.

My advice is to take a good look at vROps. When you have a big infrastructure with a large volume of instances, monitoring everything in a single dashboard is very difficult, but with this solution, it's pretty easy. It's like a Swiss Army knife. You can troubleshoot and monitor in a single place. It's pretty convenient.

Overall, this is a very good product. We are using lots of VMware technologies, including Log Insights, VMware ESXi, vCenter, and NSX. There were a lot of improvements with version 8. They integrated AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud. It is improving day by day. If some of your instances are situated in AWS and some are on Azure, and you have to monitor all the systems in a single place, that's where they're improving on things. Now, they are providing the cloud-provider stuff.

We are planning to deploy Kubernetes in our data centers, because Kubernetes is a very new technology, but in our country it is not that popular yet. We will look at integrating that kind of offering later.

Previously we integrated this solution with vRealize Log Insight as a trial. But later on, we stopped using vRealize Log Insight because we were using Splunk for analytics. vRealize Log Insight is a different product. When you have a lot of stuff in your data center and you need to archive and manipulate things, you need to use different tools. vRealize Log Insight is not useful for our use case.

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 two key features of VMware Aria Operations. The first one is job automation, which helps me to automate tasks and streamline operations. The second feature is capacity utilization analysis. It provides reports and insight into the real capacity utilization of VMs over the past six months.

Its job automation features and reporting capabilities are unique and valuable.

After the automation, the code changes are implemented as well as CPU changes in VMs, which require a reboot. Enhancing automation features without interruption would be beneficial.

I have been using this product for six months now.

The stability is almost perfect. I would rate it nine out of ten.

It offers excellent scalability capabilities. I would rate it nine out of ten.

We experienced a delay in their assistance, which was ultimately attributed to the unavailability of an engineer. Consequently, the troubleshooting process was prolonged and took approximately fourteen days to resolve. I would rate it eight out ten.

Positive

We previously used Microsoft Hyper-V, but it doesn't provide the stability nor as many valuable features as VMware Aria Operations.

The initial setup was easy. I would rate it nine out of ten.

The deployment process took about two months and few people to complete. It involved migrating all components from Microsoft Hyper-V system to VMware Aria Operations. The implementation of the solution was facilitated by CRU.

It is an affordable solution that doesn't require any additional costs. I would rate it five out of ten.

I would rate it eight out of ten.

We mostly use vROps for troubleshooting and forecasting. We take some reports from previous months and years for capacity and future planning.

We mostly use it for infrastructure. I know there are many packages for different apps from other vendors, but we mostly use it for VMware infrastructure. It gives us a good look inside our infrastructure, mostly in terms of capacity and reporting.

We have benefited mostly from capacity planning. During some days of the month, we have huge traffic and workloads on our systems. So, we take the previous month's reports and see the month-to-month growth so we can plan next year's capacity planning.

We have integrations with other monitoring systems, so we mostly use vROps for troubleshooting.

We mostly create our own alarms and dashboards. We use the metrics in vROps with these dashboards. 

It is efficient and easy to manage. We can find what we need from the software's interface.

We did an integration with vROps and Log Insight. We use Log Insight mostly when troubleshooting and creating some alarms to send us notifications

Lately, the chargeback site has improved, but it could be simpler. You need to create your own dashboards. It should be simple to get a virtual machine and break down the compute and storage costs.

It is not real-time. It takes samples every five minutes. Therefore, we are not using it for real-time purposes.

I have been using it for more than five years.

The stability is pretty good. Besides upgrades, we don't have issues with it. There are some issues during upgrades, but I think that is normal. Sometimes, we have some errors during upgrades where we have to start over or fix some things.

Scalability is easy. You can create other vROps machines and add them to the system, making it run like a cluster. It is easy to add more depending on your requirements. 

We have a couple of thousand VMs in our environment. 

About 10 to 12 people in our team are mainly managing vROps demand. From time to time, it changes but other departments also use it. They don't have administration permissions on the system, but they can create their own views, dashboards, and alerts. So, many people are using it,

At my last company, we changed our monitoring system from another tool to vROps because we were not getting actions from it. Therefore, we decided to change it to vROps. Because vROps is a VMware solution, it was easier to integrate and use.

I have used two other monitoring systems. However, I didn't use them for a long time. One was very simple, doing basic monitoring, and the other was a Microsoft tool. They both have many pluses and minuses.

vROps is mainly for virtual infrastructure. The other solutions are for both physical and virtual LAN infrastructure. 

The initial setup was not that complex. It was easy to set up and integrate.

The initial setup was just a couple of virtual machines, so it was a very basic installation. It was very fast. However, the implementation of the infrastructure takes months because we need to see how the system works, then decide what to monitor and report. This takes at least a couple of months.

We talked with VMware to set up a straightforward installation of the vRealize suite: Log Insight and vROps.

vROps has helped to decrease overall downtime by about 10%. We have many other monitoring solutions. This solution is just a part of our underlying infrastructure.

Log Insight has had a good effect on our overall troubleshooting. We have a huge infrastructure and can't always individually monitor it. We also did some automation for alerts.

The value that we get from vROps is okay. It could be cheaper.

I would recommend doing a PoC before using it. You can get a trial license for 30 or 60 days, so you should test it in your environment before implementing it. You should have some hands-on practice because it may not fit with your environment.

The solution is a little bit complicated to use at the beginning. When you get how it works, it is simple. You can easily make or use dashboards, notifications, and alarms.

vROps capacity allocation and management has helped us save on hardware costs, unneeded licenses, power, or other data center costs. It is not the only solution or system that we use for these purposes, but it helps.

I would rate this solution as an eight out of 10.

Our primary use case is to make sure we're getting the best value out of our on-prem hardware in terms of matching against vendor specifications to actual operation and performance.

This solution has improved my organization because we have it mainly based on our production units. We'll have about 400 guests running through it, across around 40 nodes and it just helps us to lower balance, see where the pinch points are and really keep us 24/7.

The most valuable feature is the insight into how our infrastructure is actually working and the kind of performance that when users say there is an issue, it gives some insight into finding out what's going wrong with it. It's because we have it mainly based on our production units.

I absolutely think this solution is intuitive and user-friendly. My team spun it up, we've got it through our ELA agreement and it was up and working in a matter of hours.

I would like to see them get a holistic view of the organization, not just focusing on the server and the state that it's running on but to widen that out from the end user all the way through. It's a key critical part but actually, it needs to bring outside of that, then to the networking elements and the inter-dependencies that are in hospital solutions.

This solution is a hundred percent reliable. I suppose it's only as reliable as our own infrastructure that it sits on but it is absolutely stable. We've had no outages from spinning this up and it's monitoring our upstate daily.

Scalability is a little bit unknown as we move into the cloud technologies because this is all about on-prem. From what I am seeing around the show today it's the next generation if it's got a place to help us with our infrastructure. 

Their technical support is absolutely fantastic. They are either a click away or a phone call away and are really responsive.

We were using the technology and it was just burning up too much physical resource, so having this gives that reassurance factor that we can size things appropriately. Investing was a very straightforward process.

The initial setup was extremely straightforward; download the product, install the product, put a key on it, add the host to it. Absolutely very straightforward.

We are not particularly measuring ROI but in terms of the level of investment that we've made into our infrastructure, we've probably got an extra 12 to 18 months worth out of what we purchased three years ago.

We didn't look into other options. We very much get to where VMware house is part of our strategy, it was just a natural fit into our infrastructure.

I would rate this solution a seven or an eight. We are starting to see the benefits and we are starting to use its recommendations and starting to tweak it down. We still need somebody to look at this data, analyze it, and make decisions. Once some of the automation orchestration goes in, then it will move up again up to a nine or something like that.

Its primary use case has been to give us a proper view of what is happening at an infrastructure level. This is why we opted for the product.

We have more than 137 locations across India. We started using it at a central location where our data center is located and it expanding it to locations. 

There is a lot of manual effort involved when drilling down into problems and determining where they are coming from. With this solution, we are able to see where problems are happening quickly and improve turnaround time, which matters to us.

The dashboard: I like that we receive an overview from it of what is happening in our environment.

The solution is somewhat intuitive and very user-friendly. It has interactive sessions which can then be built into reports.

It is quite stable. If you are putting up an infrastructure, it takes about a week to analyze it, then it starts giving you a results.

It is quite scalable. We have started using it in one location, then sending to another and another. Right now, we have 11 locations.

The technical support is great. 

For example, we opened a case because we were not sure on the best practices on how to put this up this solution, and the tech support helped us.

We did not previously use another solution. This is the first solution that we have used of its kind.

While the initial setup was somewhat straightforward, there is some complexity. Going forward, I would like there to be more clarity in the process. Because to complete the setup process, our team had to open up a case with the technical support, and they had to guide us through the process.

The solution helped us to reduce time to troubleshoot issues, improved our quality of service to our users, and it provides cost savings for high capacity utilization. Our manpower costs have been reduced due to the automation in conjunction with the usage of the dashboard.

As we continue to implement it across multiple environments, it reduces costs as well.

I always recommend this solution.

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor:

• Brand name
• The vendor's skill set
• The technical support.

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.