VMware Aria Operations Reviews

I use the solution in my company for the virtualization purpose. Basically, the server virtualization is the main purpose. Other purposes are for the cloud part, which is the private cloud. My company has a local telco customer in Pakistan who works on public cloud infrastructure, and they also have VMware Cloud Director product deployed in their environment.

The most valuable feature of the solution revolves around vRealize Operations, which is a good tool. The product is highly reliable, and it is easy to deploy and manage.

There are some challenges with the tool right now after Broadcom's acquisition.

The major challenges associated with the product stem from the fact that after Broadcom's acquisition of VMware, all partners are no longer VMware partners. One has to reapply for Broadcom's partnership, which is a very time-consuming process. Broadcom seems to be confused since it does not have the exact partner strategies that a product needs to have in place. Broadcom does not provide a good pricing mechanism, and it also has some other issues in areas like distribution. Previously, VMware used to use Aptec, an Ingram Micro company. Broadcom has some issues with Aptec, so currently, it does not have a deal with Aptec, and everything is messed up. Broadcom does not have a proper distribution mechanism, so we have delays in getting codes and all that. After so many reminders, once we get the codes, things are still very time-consuming, and the prices are still not good. My colleagues who work with VMware products were opening support cases on VMware's portal, which has now become Broadcom's portal, which does not have enough information like VMware's portal. Although Broadcom has been trying to integrate all of it with its own portal while also attempting the existing VMware portal with the Broadcom portal, the migration does not seem to be successful. Broadcom has missed out on a lot of data, which means that previous service tickets that were generated under VMware won't have any records. You cannot use a learning mechanism from existing information, which makes it a time-consuming process. We have to go back to the existing information from VMware to figure out what the solution is for a problem. With the acquisition of Vmware by Broadcom, we have to do all things from scratch, and all such things are very painful, and customers, partners, and our company feel troubled. Everyone is trying to see how to get rid of the vendor. We are just trying to find an alternate product.

The pricing mechanism is not available here. There are some distribution issues, and there is not enough information on the portal. The migration process from VMware to Broadcom actually messes up a lot of data.

I believe that the scalability area of the product has scope for improvement, and I say this based on the feedback received from my team.

I have been using VMware Aria Operations for ten years or more. My company has a partnership with VMware. My company is a customer of VMware.

Stability-wise, I rate the solution a ten out of ten.

I don't think that the product has any mechanism in the area of analytics.

I rate the tool a ten out of ten.

I rate the technical support a ten out of ten.

Positive

The product's initial setup phase was easy.

The time required to deploy the product is something that varies from one customer's environment to another customer's environment or site. I can say that the product is not a single table that can cure everything.

The solution is easy to maintain.

For a small environment, only one person is required to maintain the product. If the size of the cluster is big, then a few people are required to maintain the product.

I have experienced an ROI from the use of the solution, but the prices are still not much economical.

If one is low price and ten is high price, I rate the product price a ten.

I don't think that the product has any mechanism in the area of analytics.

I rate the tool a ten out of ten.

The most common use case for vROps is to monitor infrastructure. Infrastructure includes, for example, your virtual machines. 

If a customer has an on-premises data center, they tend to integrate their adapters with vROps. This means that if there are any issues, alerts, or anything else that goes wrong with the system, vROps will pick it up. 

It will then use an inbuilt algorithm, depending on the events and alert system that you have configured, to trigger an email. This can help you to avoid a lot of problems in the future. 

For example, if there are a few appliances that are being monitored by vROps and their root directory or any other issues are getting beyond thresholds, say 80%, it will automatically trigger an email. If you have any ticketing system integrated with vROps, it will then trigger a severity one or severity two ticket to the respective team so that they are aware that there is something that might go wrong if it is not looked at on time. 

So, it is basically helping customers to avoid those situations where they might get into any issues or trouble. So, it is monitoring your system. 

Another stuff, so it is like if you want to have any visual representation of the data, of the performances, or of the data that has gone through in the last hour, last week, you can create a lot of dashboards on that, which is a visual presentation of the data. 

So, it helps you in a long way to monitor and understand your environment.

One of the things that is really valuable is its ability to help you implement security measures into your organization's standards. It helps you to have full control over more than 90% of the hardware and network infrastructure where you are installing vROps, so that you can have granular control over the infrastructure, which is pretty important these days. 

It's deployed mostly on-premises, but you can deploy it on the cloud as well. So, as most customers today are going for hybrid cloud deployment, they need a tool like vROps to give them a standardized, centralized view to monitor their infrastructure across both on-premises and cloud environments. It provides a single pane of glass to see what is going on across the entire infrastructure. 

vROps is a VMware tool, and most of the applications that our customers are running are virtual machines. So, when you have an infrastructure that mostly uses ESXi hypervisors, vROps really help you to have better control over your infrastructure and what is going on. This can help customers to run their day-to-day operations more smoothly. 

Moreover, in the older days, we used to perform health checks and other stuff manually. vROps automates a lot of these tasks, which lowers the burden on the operations team so that they don't have to worry about keeping an eye on each and every sort of thing. Even in the off business hours, when no one is there to take care of any stuff, vROps is still monitoring all of the data, appliances, and everything else. This helps them out in a big way.

The first area of improvement is cost. VMware licensing is always a bit costly. It has never been an open-source tool or something like that. So there are costs associated with that. 

Another thing is that you somehow need to have high-end people to perform the integrations with vROps as well. It's not as easy as it seems to deploy and integrate it with the different systems you want to monitor. 

It is user-friendly, but everything needs some specific skill sets. For example, if you go for even vRealize Automation, it comes as a bundle. So vROps is just one part of vRealize Automation suite. So, we need to know the product before we can start deploying it or start using it. We need to have people who have experience with specific tools before we can use them in our day-to-day operations.

So, for me, based on my experience, costing is one thing, and then there are the integration challenges that our company faces. And along with that, it does take up a bit of resources as well. It is resource-intensive.

I have not been using it directly because I work as an architect. Whenever there is a project for customers using vRealize Operations in their environment, we are the ones who have been designing the infrastructure with respect to vROps. 

So it has been around 12 months or more that I've been associated with projects where I have been helping customers deploy vROps and how to make proper use of this tool.

The stability of vROps depends on the environment that you are using it in. vROps comes as a suite, and when you're using it with other VMware products, such as vRealize Automation (vRA), vRealize Network Insight (VRNI), and VMware Cloud Foundation modules, it is already compatible with those products and is generally pretty stable. 

For example, when you are using it for virtualized workloads or VMware Virtual Desktop, it's very stable.

It is a scalable solution. You can scale it up depending on your configuration setup. 

There are different options for scaling, such as multi-node setups and collector setups. If you need to collect more information from different tools, you can simply add a collector to your environment. 

vROps is a good choice in terms of scalability. Even when you scale it up, it's not a big hassle to put more load into the system.

As an architect, we mostly design vROps implementations. The day-to-day operations are typically the ones that reach out to the support team. So, the support is mainly for people who are managed in the customer environment. 

We provide guidance on which integrations or adapters to use, and how to get the endpoint systems integrated with vROps. But when it comes to support, it's a matter of cost. VMware offers different levels of support, and the enterprise level of support is quite expensive.

If you're looking for a higher level of support, then it comes with a cost.

When I started working with vROps three years ago, the company mostly used vROps. When I joined, I started with the vRealize Suite. And they have different types of monitors. For example, there are different tools for different monitoring purposes. Like, for security, they'll have different tools for log monitoring.

We use vRealize Operations. We use vRealize Automation (vRA). We use VMware Cloud Foundation. That's vCS. And then, we have been using vRealize Network Insight. Then, we have been using Cisco Insight or Cisco FlashStack. These are the few software that I've been working on in the last twelve months. So, different teams will have different tools which are being used.

The initial setup is quite easy and straightforward.  The majority of the time, implementing vROps is not time-consuming. 

However, if you are migrating from one vROps version to another, you may need to take care of a few things, such as downloading the new configuration and other necessary changes. But overall,  vROps implementation is pretty simple.

So, besides the license overall, you have to pay for the type of support you want. With the license, there is a support cost as well.

Typically, people don't just purchase vROps individually. It's usually part of a larger suite, like the vRealize Suite, which is expensive. So, the suite includes vROps along with other software. 

If a company purchases vCloud Foundation (vCF) or vRealize Suite, vROps comes with it. vCF and the vRealize Suite have been acquired or purchased by large customers who have the financial resources to support the licensing costs. 

For example, I've seen many banking sectors using vROps when they purchase vCS. Recently, I worked on a design for a major European bank, and they were using the entire suite. 

So, no one really goes for the individual product because its value is significantly higher when it's part of the suite. So, there are many customers who use it, but the number of people who use it within a team depends on the company. For example, service-based companies that support multiple customers may have different needs based on the number of customers they support. They may train or onboard more resources to use vROps, depending on their requirements.

The main reason my company goes with VCS is that they already have a current VMware setup. When people go with the VCS suite itself, suppose you have a VMware virtualized network and VMware workloads running on one platform. 

For the network, you may be using different switches, and for storage, you may be using different SANs. So, with this approach, you have to pay different vendors because you're not relying on the same vendor for everything. 

And whenever something goes wrong, you have to open different tickets, which can be costly and time-consuming. So, people go for VCS mostly because they are getting everything in one single setup.

VMware has your networking, your virtualization, vSAN storage, vRealize Automation for automating workloads, vROps for monitoring, and VRNI for monitoring specific networks. So, it comes as a bundle, and it's pretty easy for companies to know that if they buy everything from the same vendor, it streamlines their processes. 

It also leads to operational efficiency because they are dealing with one vendor. And then, when you have two different products bundled in a suite from the same vendor, compatibility is never an issue. That's one of the main things. Because if you have different vendors and products, there is always uncertainty about whether upgrading one product will be compatible with another product from a different vendor. 

And if we look at what VMware has done recently, every year they have validated design guides. So, through that, we'll have everything within that guide, which one is compatible with which, which doesn't work with which, and if there are any limitations with any releases. So, we get everything in one suite. 

So, that's the reason most people go with them because they can foresee their future development in terms of hardware, in terms of their workload, or in terms of their business.

First of all, I would always suggest you go for vROps initially and always go for a temporary trial license. That way, you can check your VMware or any workload stuff you have, how your trial license works, and how it works with your production environment. If you have any workloads that you're going to manage through vROps, always go for a trial license first. Don't straight away go with the production license.

Also, always try to use different workloads, different metrics, and different configurations. This is because it also depends on the specific data center you have and the different products you're using. Ensure you are trying to integrate or get the alert generated for most of the products you are trying to integrate with vROps. A POC (Proof of Concept) kind of thing is always required before you go for the production license.

During the trial period, you can see how your dashboard looks, how the alert system is working, if it's not working, and if it's really meeting your security considerations as well. So, these are the things before you fully decide to go for the production license. Always take a trial license integrated with your current setup, which you have appliances and tests on, before you even decide to go ahead with it.

Overall, I would rate the solution an eight out of ten. The reason is that there are many new advancements coming into the market that are AI-enabled. VMware really needs to do more when it comes to preventing alerts. For example, many security tools use algorithms to detect alerts and give you a whole scenario of the reports that show how you can prevent this action from repeating again. These are a few things they absolutely need to work on more.

Also, security has been a boom for companies in the last few years, and considering how important security is, there have been a lot of tools that do the rating. So, it is more integration-friendly if the current tool can be used for any integrations in any environment, which is something VMware is not yet that efficient at. But I would still give it an eight because most of the workloads currently being used are virtualized ones, VMware workloads. For them, it's perfect.

We use the application for capacity analysis and incident or threat analysis. We can fetch out reports and troubleshoot any incidents using it.

The application's capacity analysis feature gives complete insights into how many computing resources we may need soon. It helps us to procure the hardware accordingly.

The UI interface of the application has been stagnant for a long time. It could be improved to provide a good experience for the users.

We have been using the application for ten years.

After the implementation, I never had any issues with the platform's stability.

It is a scalable platform. It has become more user-friendly and supports a broader environment than previous versions. In my earlier experience, I had installed 4000 to 6000 virtual machines and those many hosts.

Along with the product, I am using Log Insight from VMware. Also, I have used SRM in the past.

I have been using different versions of the tool for a long time. Thus, the initial setup process was relatively easy and error-free. It is deployed both on-premise and on the cloud. It took a couple of hours to configure all the prerequisites.

It is a cloud-friendly application. Compared to other platforms, it is more stable, scalable, and easy to configure and deploy.

I rate it a nine out of ten, leaving one mark for more improvements or enhancements.

We were using VMware vRealize Operations (vROps) for analyzing virtual machines and using it by host. We didn't use the solution for costing or optimization around costing. We used it predominantly for troubleshooting.

What I like most about VMware vRealize Operations (vROps) is how it integrates into the vCenter. You'll get a similar hierarchical view of your host, your VMs, your resource pools, etc. I also like the granularity, particularly the fact that you could go pretty deep into the metrics and data retention as well. You could go far back several months to try and plot performance trends, eventually leading up to an issue or post-incident management.

I also like the plugins in VMware vRealize Operations (vROps). I find the plugins good, especially because you could plug those into Dell. For example, there was a way to visualize how your Dell infrastructure is performing. You could build dashboards, even custom dashboards for your operational teams. You could take a look at what was going on and also look into people doing incident management, troubleshooting, etc. You could customize your experience with VMware vRealize Operations (vROps), and I found that good as well.

I also like the UI of VMware vRealize Operations (vROps) because it's nice and very, very fresh.

In terms of what could be improved or added to VMware vRealize Operations (vROps), from my experience, it needs more work in the ITSM space because my company never used it as an IT service management tool.

I've used VMware vRealize Operations (vROps) for about three years, and I've used it for the past twelve months.

VMware vRealize Operations (vROps) is a stable solution. My company didn't have any issues with it in terms of outages, or severity in terms of the issue. From time to time, the solution would act up, but that was down to underlying issues on from my company's side, not from the VMware side. Overall, it's a stable product.

In terms of scaling VMware vRealize Operations (vROps), it's challenging, especially with all of the data you're putting into the solution, so you do need a lot of infrastructure to sustain a pretty big VMware estate, especially if you're looking at the tens of thousands of virtual machines sending data.

Scalability could still be improved in some ways, or you need to think about how to reduce the amount of data that gets sent to VMware vRealize Operations (vROps) that you don't necessarily need or use.

The technical support for VMware vRealize Operations (vROps), or VMware in general, has been good from my experience. Usually the response time is good. The team gets back to you within a reasonable time frame. The technical support team always asks for logs before carrying out an investigation. Sometimes, you want to expedite solutions to your issues or to get somebody on an issue fairly quickly, but you still have to collect logs, zip those up, and then send those to VMware, and that can take time.

I can't remember exactly, but there was a way to send in logs ahead of time to a VMware engineer through VMware Skyline, so the engineer wouldn't need to collect logs as a pre-requisite before starting the investigations. Other than the log expectation, VMware has good support overall.

The setup for VMware vRealize Operations (vROps) was easy. After getting used to it, setting it up was easy enough. It also became easy to navigate and use. How the solution was set up was that it was connected to the vCenter, then the adapters were set up, then you get the data to synchronize across that, and that's okay.

In terms of the pricing for VMware vRealize Operations (vROps), I can't remember exactly how much it costs, but it was included in the VMware vSphere enterprise plus licensing package my company paid for.

I've mostly used VMware vRealize Operations (vROps).

My rating for VMware vRealize Operations (vROps) is seven out of ten.

My advice to others who want to start using VMware vRealize Operations (vROps) is to use its full capability. It doesn't just do analytics and cost optimizations. It can do a whole lot more. You should use it in depth and try to integrate it into other IT processes. For example, my company only used a third of the full capability of VMware vRealize Operations (vROps) over the time I was on the team. I would recommend it to anyone, specifically to explore what it can do and then work out how it can benefit you. People should also pay attention to scale as well, because the bigger your estate, the more instances you will need to sustain that scale. Just pay attention to upgrading VMware vRealize Operations (vROps) as well because that's also a journey to upgrade instances, in particular maintenance and lifecycle management.

My previous company had a partnership with VMware. It had an enterprise license agreement, which means it was getting different services and different products from VMware.

This solution is mainly used for the orchestration of servers and for obtaining reports such as utilization reports or load reports.

In decision making, it is very useful to have a nice dashboard. We have also integrated with QlikView, which is an analytic tool.

vRealize has a very nice dashboard.

It integrates well with other products such as those from Oracle.

It would be good to have more detailed reports and more details on the dashboard.

I've been using it for five years.

It is a very stable product.

It is scalable as well. Our system administrators and data center administrators use this product.

VMware provides 24/7 online support, and I would give them a ten out of ten.

Positive

The initial setup is very easy because VMware provides 24/7 online support to us. Everything is much easier for us, because of their support.

The deployment took about one to two days. You would need one or two people, such as IT managers, for deployment and maintenance.

We used a third party team for the deployment.

We have licenses on a three year basis. Licensing costs are much higher, but given the stability of the solution, it is a reasonable price.

It's a stable product and is recognized worldwide. It is much more expensive than other products, but it is stable. Therefore, I would rate it at eight on a scale from one to ten.

We use the solution to monitor the capacity and performance of virtual machines.

The solution's best feature is capacity and performance monitoring. Using it, we can generate reports for each virtual machine.

They should make the report-generating feature user-friendly and customizable. Also, they should add automation features to store or delete the files in the database.

We have been using the solution for six years.

It is a stable solution, and I rate its stability as an eight.

We have two or three solution users in our organization. I rate its scalability as a six or seven.

The solution's customer support team responds quickly. Although, it depends on the severity of the issue.

I rate the solution's initial setup process as a six. It takes a week to deploy it.

The solution is costly. Its overall cost is around $900,000. Thus, we have only purchased its license for operations. We paid around $800,000 for four years.

I advise others to buy the solution only if they have a large environment and multiple clusters. It is not a beneficial investment for small businesses. I rate the solution as a seven.

I use VMware Aria Operations for logs in my company. I just use it to manage the logs and to see what is happening in the security logs. VMware vCenter is used to deploy virtual machines.

I specifically use the tool for logging and looking over the various traffic flows happening within VMware. It is easy to track and see what is happening where, and it can easily figure out solutions if there are any problems inside VMware's access management tools.

As VMware is moving to Broadcom, I feel the support is becoming really bad. There are some areas VMware needs to look into, specifically regarding the connectivity provided by the tool. My company has been facing the aforementioned problem with Aria Operations, and I think it has been more than two months now, and still VMware hasn't found any patches for it. My company is not able to figure out what exactly the problem is with the tool. I am not sure if there is some problem because of the movements. I think that in terms of where the customer experience lies, I feel I have had a bad experience for two or three months, and it keeps on happening, which is impacting my production. I am not sure if VMware is able to find a solution with the product I use or if there is some other problem. There are some current issues with the support provided by Broadcom, making it an area where improvements are required.

I have been using VMware Aria Operations for three years. I am a customer of the product.

The stability of the product is something that depends on how much work a user has with the tool. If you have a very good experience with the tool, then you can do things in a very good procedure. The tool's initial deployment went well with the support from VMware. VMware's support is really good, but because of Broadcom there are some problems. Initially, the new product's implementation and deployment went well with the support from the solution.

Scalability is easy in VMware Aria Operations. The only things you need to manage are the backups and how much expansion you want with the tool. If you take a product from Microsoft or VMware, both work really well for an initial three or four years. Adding something new would mean taking a different approach, and that would depend upon the company's expansion.

My company uses just one function of the product, which is specific to our environment. There might be some other functionalities in the product that might help with certain enhancements in the area of logs, but we don't have the exact scenarios for which we can use the tool's certain functionalities.

If I specifically talk about VMware's support, then the support offered is very good, especially if I don't consider VMware's integration with Broadcom. I rate the tool's support a nine out of ten. I am not sure if I can comment on Broadcom's support services since it is still in the initial stages.

Positive

VMware vCenter is used to deploy virtual machines.

VMware solutions are easy to install. There are some available steps to install the tool and if we follow the steps, I think it is a good solution to work with for anyone.

The tool doesn't take much time to deploy. I am not sure of the time required to deploy the product because our company uses the solution for a specific function, so I believe that it might also have some other functions. The functions my company uses for logs are very easy to deploy since, just after connecting the solution, it starts getting all the logs.

It is an easy solution to use, and you need to invest in it only one time by looking at your personal usage and expansion plans. Getting a machine and everything within the solutions and bringing in the tool where you have some availability shortage need to be done only once, after which you can expand it instead of buying a fresh machine for A certain period of time, which can be an expensive affair. A product starts from the day you create a machine in the cloud solution. The solution also provides users with some features and facilities that are specific to the licensing models you have from the tool. Considering how much and what type of licenses you have, the cost might be reduced. For expansion purposes, you don't need to think about new tools because you already have the solution you purchased from VMware. With whatever expansion scope is available in the tool, it is easy to expand the solution to a few more servers. If you are going with other solutions for expansion purposes apart from VMware, then there is a cost involved. The tool is easy to use, but from the cost perspective, there might be a huge difference between other tools and VMware. You have to invest less in cloud solutions because you pay as you work with the tool. You can deploy one machine and then deploy another machine tomorrow. With VMware, you need to invest just once, after which expansion options are already available in it.

If we talk about the cloud solutions that are available in the market, I think that instead of collaborating with VMware and Microsoft or with some other solutions, VMware should focus on providing good cloud solutions. VMware should not take advantage of any other products in the market to provide the cloud version of its products since its pricing might change. For people who don't want to move away from VMware, it can be a pricey product. If you compare the prices of VMware and the cloud solutions along with the components that you may use, I feel that it may be costly.

There is no specific maintenance required for the product, and usually you get an advance notice if something like that is required. It is up to the user to schedule the maintenance as per their timeline.

I have not specifically faced any challenges in managing the solution in our virtual environment. Earlier, there were some problems with the tool.

If the product is able to fulfill your requirements, then I would say that VMware is a good product for you.

I rate the tool an eight out of ten.

Our primary use case for the solution is troubleshooting and performance monitoring.

It has allowed us to identify problems sooner and helps us with problems and issues.

The troubleshooting and performance monitoring features are valuable.

Administration and growth can be improved. For instance, if we're a large organization, the metrics continue to get collected in this environment and continually fill up, so we need to expand the cluster. Hence, more resources are always required.

We have been using the solution for five years and are currently using version 8.62.

The solution is stable.

The solution is scalable to a degree. The problem is that it goes back to the solution or management packs. The more you collect, the larger you need to expand the environment. Approximately 12 to 24 people are using it in the organization.

We previously used Densify.

The initial setup was straightforward.

We implemented it through a vendor team. Two to three people are required for deployment.

We have seen a return on investment.

I do not have information on the licensing costs.

I rate the solution an eight out of ten. The solution is good, but administration and growth can be improved.