VMware Aria Operations Reviews

The most valuable features of VMware vRealize Operations (vROps) are capacity and performance management.

VMware vRealize Operations (vROps) can improve the Layer 3 hypervisor VM infrastructure because we do not manage other applications. We need a package, which is too expensive. We would like to manage native VMware applications, VMware native components, hypervisor, and storage, such as vSAN.

I have been using VMware vRealize Operations (vROps) for approximately two years.

The stability of VMware vRealize Operations (vROps) could improve. It can help us to build a dashboard report on a job, but it seems very slow to produce or deliver the dashboards. We are tunning it to make it go fast.

The support provided by VMware vRealize Operations (vROps) is average.

The initial setup of VMware vRealize Operations (vROps) was very minimal.

We are experts and we install VMware vRealize Operations (vROps) on a host, and we import an appliance, such as OVA, and we deploy it.

We have a team of four people that does the maintenance and support of the solution.

I would advise others that VMware vRealize Operations (vROps) is a good tool to manage VMware application components, for sending storage on RPMs. For example, if we have a basic hypervisor or storage based on VMware files, such as VMFS. It is a great tool for that.

I rate VMware vRealize Operations (vROps) a nine out of ten.

There is a newer version available which will have better features.

I was previously working remotely and using vRealize Operations in a virtual environment. Now I'm working in person, so we use vROps to monitor our critical systems. We didn't use all of the product's features. We mainly use vROps for monitoring and automation. In addition to my team, the 20-person management team also monitors this environment, so it's about 30 people in total.

Mainly we are working on the vSphere monitoring, orchestration, and automation.

We are trying to consolidate our data centers, so the monitoring could always be improved. VMware could improve the way VROps forwards critical alerts to Microsoft Teams. I can't give feedback about anything else because we are not using all the features. 

We haven't had any issues with vROps. 

I think vROps is scalable and suitable for our environment.

VMware technical support is good. 

I also work with ControlUp when our customers need a specific metric. We only use ControlUp for that single feature. 

The initial setup isn't complex.

I rate VMware VROps nine out of 10. It's an excellent product for monitoring a VMware virtual environment.

It was helpful in identifying the CPU, memory, and space utilization, which was very much important for us. We needed alerts when the utilization increased a lot, and we were able to inform the customers that we have a particular problem that could be the root cause of the problems that they might face later. They were then able to take some preventative measures in advance, which reduced a lot of problems.

It was very useful for regular monitoring, disk utilization information, and root cause analysis. It was also helpful in identifying why a specific issue is happening or why an error is occurring. 

It enabled us to be more proactive in anticipating and solving problems. We could know beforehand about the machines that might be at risk for high utilization. 

Alerts and monitoring were most valuable. It was also pretty user-friendly and interactive. I was able to generate good reports in PDF and HTML formats, which was really helpful.

The visibility that it provided for our infrastructure was pretty good. The snapshots were also useful.

vROps did a lot of monitoring, but in one case, we had to use Log Insight instead of vROps because vROps was not able to install the agent to enable us to have multi-monitoring. I don't exactly remember the case, but it involved monitoring all applications.

It wasn't exactly proactive. It was supposed to, but there were a lot of delays. It could also be because of our infrastructure and the way our network was set up. If vROps could be more proactive, that would be nice. It is nice to have the information beforehand, but when there is downtime, it takes a lot of time for us to be able to see an issue in real-time, which becomes a bit challenging. If there is a way to improve the data collection for the whole vCenter that would be nice because data collection takes a lot of time.

I used VMware for around five years, from 2015 till January 2021. Except for vCloud Director, I've used most VMware products such as vSphere client, Log Insight, and vRealize Automation.

It was pretty stable. I didn't find many errors while deploying the application and after the deployment.

Our environment didn't scale much, so I cannot comment on its scalability.

We had four vCenters. One was in Santa Clara, US. One was in Beijing, China. One was in Manheim, Europe, and one was in Singapore. We also had test centers, and we integrated vROps for testing there. We had one in King of Prussia and one in Switzerland. So, majorly, we had four vCenters for the production environment, and these vCenters worked with around 4,000 virtual machines.

I have not used VMware's support for vROps.

This was the first tool that we tried to deploy for monitoring.

I was involved in the initial setup of vROps. It was pretty straightforward. Most of the VMware products are pretty straightforward to install.

In terms of the implementation strategy, we have always followed the documentation provided by VMware.

We tried to evaluate many solutions, such as Prometheus, Dynatrace, Nagios, and PRTG. It was best for us to go with vROps because it is a VMware product, and it integrates best with VMware vCenter.

I would recommend vROps for an Enterprise environment. Based on my experience, it is a great tool to work with. Rather than having a big vCenter and then installing vROps, it is good to have it when you're starting with a vCenter. That's because data collection takes time, and it would become an overhead for vROps. In such a case, you might need a load balancer and multiple vROps. So, I would recommend having a vROps when you start building a vCenter. It will really help in scaling up the environment, and you'll also know if you'll need to replicate vROps or not.

We didn't use it for workload placement because we didn't have the load balancer for that. It didn't help much in decreasing the overall downtime, and it also didn't affect our operations when it comes to overall downtime due to performance issues.

I would rate vROps an eight out of 10.

Our private data center has been built on VMware technology. We are using vSAN and we use vROps as a monitoring solution to monitor the full stack, from applications to hardware. That includes the servers and Cisco switches.

The solution is deployed on-premises in our private data center.

It enables us to monitor the full software-defined infrastructure from the app level to the hardware level. This is the main benefit for our organization.

When there is an issue at the disk level in vSAN, vROps gives us an alarm that the issue is happening on particular disks. Other solutions cannot give this type of alert for vCenter. Even vCenter cannot give that type of information. That's what makes this feature valuable for me.

The visibility it provides from apps to infrastructure is very good, compared to other monitoring solutions in the market. We have used other solutions, and we are still using them, but for monitoring your VMware infrastructure, vROps is very good.

vROps is user-friendly, but configuration is a little bit hard. It is also hard if you want to customize it for your data center, especially without VMware training. The user interface should be improved so that a new user can easily configure it for his own use.

I have been using VMware vRealize Operations for the last four years.

The stability is good enough to monitor private and hybrid clouds. Even though we are using very few of the features of vROps, it is very good. It is very useful for a cloud provider that is managing large-scale VMware technology for their cloud. It is good monitoring and operations software for them.

It is highly scalable.

We are already in the middle of a project to increase our infrastructure and we have included vROps in that project.

Customer support is good, but the main problem is that VMware support is very costly compared to other organizations' support. When you purchase a VMware product, such as vSphere or vROps, the license is perpetual, but you also have to purchase the support service for a number of years. The support service pricing is very high compared to the license, and compared to competitive vendors.

Before vROps, we were using SolarWinds NPM. The primary reason we switched was that we were looking for a solution that would give in-depth monitoring capabilities for VMware infrastructure.

The initial deployment of vROps was straightforward. We deployed ESXi, vCenter, and then vSAN. After that, we deployed vROps on-premises to monitor our VMware vSAN cluster. There was nothing special or complex about it.

It took four to five days to deploy vROps.

We have three people who are using and managing vROps and we are monitoring about 500 virtual machines with the solution.

We used a third-party integration partner that is certified by VMware. I felt that they were not well-trained on vROps.

The value we get from vROps is fine, but it would be better if the support cost were lower.

We did not look into other solutions because, at that time, we already had our VMware infrastructure. vROps is the best option for monitoring VMware infrastructure.

If your infrastructure is VMware-based, meaning you are using vSphere, vSAN, and vCenter, and if you are a large-scale cloud service provider, you should consider vROps as your monitoring and operations solution.

I use it for monitoring and capacity planning.

I work with the solution's dashboards to monitor capacity. There are many functions in the tool and I have worked with a lot of different kinds of data from vROps. It's a great tool to work with.

With vROps, we have had the opportunity to increase our capacity. After vROps was installed on our infrastructure, we were able to view the impact that VM lag could cause in our environment and how we could modify such impact. It has helped us increase performance.

vROps has helped to decrease overall downtime. For example, when we planned capacity for new infrastructure, vROps was used to analyze the new projects that we needed to deploy. In some of those cases, there were many VMs to deploy and we didn't know what impact those VMs might have on the infrastructure, in terms of CPUs and memory. vROps helped us understand the particular impact of the new VMs. It reduced overall downtime by about 30 percent.

Using the solution for capacity allocation and management has also helped us to save on hardware costs, by about 20 percent.

Overall, it's a good platform and it's important to us for maintaining our environment. The challenge in maintaining our environment is made much easier with vROps. The tool provides us with the ability to respond to the causes of problems with VMs or the environment and this is power in our hands. For us, it's a powerful tool when it comes to IT infrastructure.

The monitoring features are great. I have gotten great value out of the data collected by the tool. The monitoring provides us with the ability to respond to the causes of problems with VMs or the environment.

The capacity planning is also very good because it gives me an opportunity to make a reasonable plan for increasing my infrastructure. It fills important functions for both monitoring and capacity planning.

The visibility it provides from apps to infrastructure and across multiple clouds is also great because it's a tool that aggregates a lot of data, both on-premises and in the cloud. It aggregates everything in one tool, which helps you to analyze the performance and the capacity of the infrastructure.

We have integrated vROps with vRealize Log Insight as well. We generally use vRealize Log Insight to identify, through the logs, what is happening with the VM or the infrastructure. The integration with vROps means we can look deep into the cause of a problem. The tools work very well together. vRealize Log Insight provides us with many tools and many ways to solve our problems.

I've been using VMware vRealize Operations for about five years. I have had the opportunity to work with vROps since version 6.57, and I have started working with version 8, which is the latest version. I have installed vROps for two companies.

It provides great stability, when you follow the recommendations.

As for scalability, if you follow the VMware documentation, you can have a great solution.

We have about 500 VMs in our production monitoring. Right now it is on-premises only. We intend to start using cloud, and vROps can be the tool to monitor the cloud environment.

We have had a good experience with the support for the vROps tool, although we haven't had to use support too much.

We did not have a previous solution.

The installation was straightforward. It followed VMware principles that result from working with vCenter and VMs. It's easy to implement.

At a maximum, it takes 20 to 30 minutes to set up, but the configuration can take one or two hours. Building deep reports can take even longer.

The tool is user-friendly, but you need to study to learn about the many features that the tool offers. It is not a tool that you can just start to work with when it comes to capacity planning. You need to study the documentation. But for monitoring, you can start using it right after installation because the data is easy to understand.

Overall, the value is worth the cost because it's a tool that connects with our VMware infrastructure very well. It's a solution that our provider, VMware, developed for VMware itself.

The cost is simply something we need to pay. We can't evaluate the price because we use a VMware environment, so it makes sense to use a VMware monitoring tool. 

We use vROps in our VMware environment, but we have Zabbix to monitor other environments. It's a challenge to consolidate all that into one tool. I don't know if that will be possible, even in some months or years.

I recommend following the vROps documentation and, in some cases, it may be necessary to use a VMware partner.

This year, we introduced the vROps feature to our platform, as part of our infrastructure.

The main use is to provide us with visibility of our environment. It helps with proactively detecting and dealing with issues that may arise, such as problems with our hardware. It provides us with alerts when there are things that we need to perform. For example, it may say that I need to expand my disk space.

From my perspective, the visibility that it provides into our apps and infrastructure is fine. There are no concerns or issues because we only use VMware.

We are currently integrating it with different VMware products including vCenter and Cloud Director. 

This product contains features for proactive monitoring but we do not use it because we have our own monitoring solution. It can do things such as sending an email in response to an event.

The most valuable feature for me is the pre-implemented, existing dashboards. The fact that I don't need to create a dashboard myself is helpful. You have the option to create them but most of the dashboards and reports that we need have already been created.

I have not compared the vROps interface against other similar technology, but with respect to it being user-friendly, I haven't had any issues with it. The most commonly used functions are easy to access.

As somebody who works in operations, the capacity management features are very important. It's a very good product in that regard.

I would like to have more documentation, in the form of knowledge bases, that better explain the technology, related products, and what the capabilities are.

Having an installation guide that assists with installation and integration would be helpful.

I have been using VMware vRealize Operations for approximately six months. We are still in the beginning phase.

To this point, I haven't encountered any issues or had any alerts with this product. As we grow, maybe later it could happen, or we could experience instability in the product, but for now, it's okay.

Scalability-wise, it is good because you can create your own reports. There is no default report, but you can create your own templates or your own reports. You always have the choice of creating a new one or using an existing one.

The infrastructure team is the one that works directly with this solution. As part of that team, we provide VMware features and virtualization for our customers. There are five or six of us on the team.

We have not been in contact with technical support.

Prior to vROps, we did not use another similar solution. We implemented it in order to have as much visibility as possible for resource management. Previously, we only knew about the CPU consumption. Now, we can use the reports to better check the resources.

The initial setup is straightforward. It is just a matter of installing the appliance, setting the IPs, etc, and then performing the integrations between other VMware components. The configuration took approximately two hours.

I completed the deployment on my own.

We did not evaluate other similar solutions prior to implementing vROps.

As we are still in the beginning phase, we have not yet worked with all of the features. For example, I know that it can connect with vROps Log Insight, but we have not integrated it.

Given my experience, I'm not sure at this point whether this solution is applicable to other technologies such as AWS or Azure. However, if the support exists, it is very good because future environments and implementations will rely on multiple technologies. It will not be VMware alone, but rather, it will include AWS, Azure, and others. Support for all of these options is very nice. It appears that VMware has this vision because they already have support for the NSX and NSX-T network technology.

I expect that it will save us money in the future, but still being in the implementation phase, we have not yet had this experience.

My advice for anybody who is implementing this product is to plan for integration with your entire platform and VMware products, such as Cloud Director.

Overall, this is a good product that is easy to install and use, and integration with other products is smooth. Although we have not used all of the features, it does provide us with good visibility.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.

We have a large, enterprise-level VMware virtual infrastructure. We use vROps for private cloud monitoring. We are using vROps for capacity management and audit monitoring. If there is any issue within the infrastructure, within the thresholds, vROps will capture them and trigger alerts. The triggered alerts are sent to our ticketing tool, using the REST API, and the ticket is created according to the priority. The respective first-level teams will handle those incidents.

The incidents we deal with are mainly in things like capacity management. Over a period of time, the virtual infra keeps growing. We measure when we are going to hit the entire capacity and we will always set thresholds 30 days ahead of hitting capacity. vROps will alert on that, and we can procure more hardware proactively and we can keep increasing the capacity well in advance.

VMware has released a feature called Continuous Availability (CA). We have HA within the data center and the CA is across the data centers. We use both services. For most of the infra we are using HA, meaning within a given data center, we have a master and master replica and multiple data. Based on the growth of our virtual infra, or if there is any new deployment, we'll keep increasing our data nodes. It can do analysis and give you beautiful reports. Those reports are very useful for management. What is the status of our memory and CPU? What was the utilization of infra like in the last 30 days? How many workloads were deployed? What are the future requirements? With a simple click we can generate the reports.

It certainly helps us to decrease overall downtime. While we have cluster-level resiliency on the vSphere end, vROps provides an alerting solution. On top of that, we can use workload balancing. vROps will sense that there are multiple clusters running, some that are more utilized and some that are under-utilized, and it will report that to us. If you use it to balance, it will automate that back to the virtual infra, and it will do all the migrations automatically. Workload balancing is a great feature from vROps. Without vROps, we had 80 to 85 percent uptime. With vROps, we improved that at least 10 percent and we are close to 98 or 99 percent uptime.

It has also increased VM density on particular clusters. Based on the memory assigned to the workload, the density on the cluster varies. If we have 50 VMs on a particular cluster, but the resource allocation is greater there, that cluster is heavily used. If we have a second cluster with 100 VMs, but each VM is assigned less memory and CPU, we cannot say that the density of the first cluster is only 50 and the second cluster is 100 VMs. It will calculate based on the demand and allocation model of capacity and resources to the workloads.

With vROps we have saved on hardware costs by at least 5 percent.

In addition, in general, if I want to see the logs for a particular object, I need to log in to vRealize Log Insight and search by framing a query. But because it is integrated with vROps, when I go to the cluster tree, if I click that object and click on the logs, it will automatically provide the output. It is very simple and I don't need to log in and frame the query.

The "what-if" analysis capability is important to us. We can create a report for possible failures. What if we lose one host or two hosts? And if we add two hosts, how does that affect our resources? Or if there is a new project and we need a certain amount of workloads deployed, how many hosts do we need? With the existing capacity, if we add that many workloads what will our remaining capacity be? We can do capacity analysis with this tool.

Policy tuning and the SDDC Management Pack for health monitoring are also important.

It gives us visibility into the virtual infrastructure, and even the physical infrastructure, and into the workloads running. We have visibility even at the level of the appliance services. We can monitor everything. We can also create dependency reports, so if a service is down, it will not impact things. It gives us those dependencies brilliantly.

When it comes to policies, they need to fine tune things to make it easier. It is a bit difficult setting up policies.

We have been using VMware vRealize Operations for six years. We started with version 6.x. We keep upgrading and now we are running on the latest version, 8.1.

With the HA feature it was a stable product, but with the new service, the Continuous Availability, we have seen some issues and we are not recommending that. We are re-deploying that infra to high-availability. CA is a great feature, but we see some issues with our infra, so we are using HA. As soon as we got that new CA feature we implemented it and we learned that it creates a lot of issues for our infrastructure, but it is working fine for other customers. VMware tried to help us and their solution was to move to the HA.

But stability-wise, it's good. It won't create any issues. If there is an issue, just a simple services restart will fix them. We've mostly seen that disk space consumption increases when we keep provisioning and expanding. But that works fine and the product's stability is very good.

We can scale up the infra without any downtime. There have been no issues. 

If there is any issue, they will pitch in and help, based on the severity. They're very helpful and very knowledgeable. We get good support from them. No issues. Their support has been brilliant.

We started applying vROps in parallel with the inception of our VMware infra.

The solution is very user friendly. In one step it is ready to deploy. We don't need to configure anything on the OS level. You just deploy it and power-on. We only need to configure in, vCenter, which infra we are monitoring. When we start to onboard, it's very simple to manage. Anybody can deploy and configure it. It is easy to deploy. There are a lot of publicly available articles that we can refer to. There was a great article on end-to-end setup.

Based on the virtual infrastructure size, we decide which appliance size is needed. Do we need to go for tiny, medium, large, or extra-large. The decision is based on our environment's capacity, how many objects we have within the virtual infra. We first deploy the master, then the master replica, and then the data nodes. We can run with one master node, but if we deploy master and replica and data nodes, it gives us more resilience. So even if we have a failure on the master, the master replica makes it a high-availability solution.

Deployment takes just 15 minutes, and we can have vROps up and running in 30 minutes.

There are five members on our team and everyone has knowledge of vROps. Everyone is certified. There is no segregation of roles. Everyone takes care of the entire product life cycle, whether it's upgrading, troubleshooting, or streamlining. We use it day in and day out. Our key job is tracking of vROps' health and alerts-monitoring, to make sure it's running fine. It's part of our daily work.

They forecast our pricing based on the objects we deploy, but I'm not involved much with that. The licensing part is a bit complicated.

We have not evaluated other solutions since this one is from VMware itself. We prefer to use the proprietary solution.

It provides proactive monitoring, but it is not a real-time monitoring. It is polling every five minutes. If there is an issue in the first minute, but polling happens at the fifth minute, there is a gap of four minutes. It will capture that failure and alert in the fifth minute. It is more reactive monitoring, in that sense. But at least we know there is an issue.

Overall, vROps is maturing, year by year. New versions have a lot of scope. We are not fully utilizing it, but if you understand the product features correctly, it will save you a lot of cost and reduce manual efforts. I would recommend it. If someone is looking for virtual monitoring, vROps is the best solution.

I work for a Post Office service and we use this solution to monitor business core assets which help to deliver packages. There are many applications we need to monitor as part of our service and to see their availability. We also use it to analyze and to forecast. Finally, we use it for business reports for sharing the status of memory, CPU, and data storage. The solution is very big in terms of how many variables you can extract.

There are many clusters that are displayed, each solution and its specific application. For example, for our front-end website I can specifically monitor the resources, the memory, the storage it consumes. I can extract this information to create a report for a specific cluster.

Each group of employees has access to reports about specific clusters. You choose the information to add to the forecast from various KPIs. It helps the company understand capacity and to see the information it needs to see regarding the future.

In the country where we operate, we have something called a PDI, a development and innovation program or plan, for looking toward the future and delivering new applications. vROps gave me the information I needed to build a new PDI. It gave me excellent data for that.

Every four years, we have a plan to replace hardware. In our last replacement, vROps helped me to reduce the hardware we needed because we could optimize our solution. We have also saved on power and other data center costs. In that area it has saved us 30 percent.

It has also helped to decrease our overall downtime a lot, because I can see the distribution of memory and the CPUs. I can see if there are issues with storage or the network or CPU. It helps me to plan so that the system is more available.

We have integrated vROps with vRealize Log Insight. With this we can correlate logs between vROps and the ESXi. I have shared this dashboard with a group of people. They can see this information day by day and look for issues and problems in the production area. We can see the relationship between the tracing and the logs from the ESXi and the server, in the same dashboard. We can see what actions are needed to solve problems. That is a very important capability for our company.

For me, the most valuable feature of vROps is its reporting. We use the reports to send information to certain groups within our company to help forecast the use of resources.

It provides a focus on the VMs. At a glance, it shows the applications inside of each VM. The next step would be to use the plug-in, the APM.

The ITIL is very important for helping resolve capacity issues. It helps deliver a lot of information about issues faster.

I've been using vROps for six or seven years.

The solution is very stable. I don't have any problems keeping it running. The maintenance is easy and it's easy to upgrade.

When it comes to maintenance, usually there is a ticket, and the person within our company who is responsible will analyze it. It may be a new upgrade, a new feature, a patch. A person is assigned to it to decide if it's necessary to upgrade or apply the patch. Once it's approved we set aside time to take care of it, but it's generally not difficult.

The scalability is excellent, no problem. In the time we have used it, our environment has grown. We can add more servers, more data. Scaling it is easy.

We have two sites and together there are 276 servers. But thanks to the use of vROps, with each new purchase I buy fewer servers. When we started with it we had more than 300 servers. Now we purchase fewer of them.

For me, the technical support is the biggest problem. I've been working with them since 2016 and in the first years their response was faster than it is today. That is a problem. Also, I need to put together and send them a lot of information. And then I wait one day, two days. The support has been getting worse over the last few years. They need to improve it. Two days for them to respond is a big problem for me.

I realized we needed a solution to monitor our VMs. So six or seven years ago we decided to buy a solution to monitor, forecast, and give us unique dashboards with information on issues such as capacity, and to monitor applications, etc.

The setup is a simple process. In our company we have a system, BMC, which makes it possible to deliver information and to integrate BMC and vROps, using the SDT and VMware. This process, the integration between BMC and VMware took two years. 

We did the implementation ourselves with an internal team.

At the higher levels in my company, such as the CIO, they looked at what the solution delivers and they felt the ROI was faster with this solution.

When we last did a comparison of solutions, the pricing was equal or similar.

Because we are a government company there are compliance requirements. Any purchase has to go through a public process. We have to publish the information in the market. We looked at BMC and CA, and we looked at CA recently.

We tested and did a proof of concept for each of the solutions, not a big test but a simple process; enough to see how they operate. For me, the big difference was that vROps is a VMware solution and is integrated with other products such as vRealize Log Insight and vRealize Automation, and of course, vCenter. And the unique dashboard was also a great addition to our operations.

In the future I'd like to use the plug-in and the APM. In the future, using the APM, things will be better. Nowadays, applications have under-utilization of hardware.

I'm happy with the solution. There are many options for using it because of the features vROps has.

We are using vROps for its monitoring and alerting mechanisms, for the entire VMware environment. We use the analytics and recommendations.

It's a monitoring tool. It is very common, but in my last eight years of using it, what I have seen is that it gives detailed monitoring information for your entire VMware infrastructure. It gives recommendations in terms of resource utilization.

A major part of its functionality now is business cases. I can identify them now, meaning if we migrate to the public cloud, what the business case would be.

In addition, the proactive monitoring and recommendations always help you to avoid unwanted downtime. If I see that a machine is heavily loaded, I can apply the recommendation and balance the load across all the nodes. And if the machine is under-utilized or over-utilized, it will tell you whether to optimize or to increase the resources accordingly. It improves the operational experience as well as the performance.

It automatically places workload on the machines where there is any available capacity or more resources are available. You don't need to worry about that. vROps does it. The workload placement has definitely increased VM density. That is part of the VMware DR solution. It enables you to place things automatically on a machine with less load so that you can increase the density, depending upon the resource availability on the machine.

One of the best features is the monitoring. It gives you proactive recommendations, based on the information that you have. It recommends changes. For example, if an ESX service is heavily loaded, it will tell you to make some changes, such as storage optimizations. Every tool does monitoring, but this one gives you more proactive monitoring, with the recommendations and actions that are needed.

VMware products are user-friendly, there is no doubt. That goes for all their products. I use multiple VMware products and I don't see any difference among the products in that context. vROPs, specifically, is easy to handle, even if you don't know anything about VMware. If you have some experience in monitoring, the tool will definitely be easy to learn and to get hands-on with it.

Also, if you want to migrate to public cloud, it helps with the business case. The tool gives some rough estimates about migrating to the public cloud or to another cloud.

vROPs is integrated with vRealize Log Insight by default, but we don't use it in our company. But it allows you to keep the logs and go back and identify what the performance was like a month back. That can help with troubleshooting because if you know what things were like a month back, and an issue comes in, you can get into performance metrics for that month. All the log data will be available for troubleshooting and capacity management.

Three or four years back, regarding business case data, when looking at migrating to public cloud, we had to feed in the pricing of all the public clouds manually. I don't know whether that information is now available automatically, but that would help.

Similarly, if it could help with calculating on-prem costs, based on their experience, it would help customers determine whether to remain on-prem or move to the cloud.

I've been using VMware vRealize Operations for almost eight years.

The stability is good. They keep updating it with the new versions and new features. So many features have been added and so many different licensing models have come in. Variations are available for data center requirements and remote site requirements. But the product looks very stable.

I've never had a problem with the scalability of vROps. It can scale to any level. I've never reached the maximum of what it can do.

The setup of vROps and Log Insight is very easy. It's not intensive or very complex. I did it about four years back when we deployed it in my previous organization and it was very easy for a standard VMware environment.

The amount of time it takes depends on how big your VMware environment is. There's no benchmark value. If you have a small environment it shouldn't take more than one or two days. But in a bigger environment, the scanning of data takes time because it has to talk to vCenter, pull all the data, wait for all the data to come in, and see if there are any recommendations. But that should not take more than a week and you should be able to see everything, even in a much bigger environment.

To deploy, you need to have a VMware guy and it depends on where the data is being integrated to. If it's only a VMware environment, you need only one or two people, max.

If the deployment is being integrated with some enterprise tools or third-party vendors, you may need to work with their separate teams.

In terms of value, it depends on how you look at it. Is there really any other solution for VMware? I don't think so. If you bring in something else then you have to think about the support matrix, compatibility, and you multiple vendors involved. You go with VMware because of the easy integration and support. It's a big product and it costs, but the value depends on your point of view. If you look at it from a cost-perspective, it's costly. If you look at it from a compatibility/support perspective, it meets all your requirements.

Because we are a valued customer, we got a good discount from VMware on the pricing. What they offered and what we have gotten as a return on our investment are reasonable.

Every VMware product is a licensing challenge. It's always costly. It's based on processors. From a technical side, the product is very good. The challenging part is always the licensing.

They should have some kind of alternate pricing models. They have a simple model, CPU-based. They should do something to make it more reasonable there. And they have too many variations. I think there are three different models that depend on different form factors. They should make it easier. With three different versions—standard, advanced, and enterprise—it's confusing.

This tool gives us everything we need. I don't see any alternatives to it.

We don't use VMware's Tanzu solution along with this solution for Kubernetes monitoring and management, but we have had discussions with the VMware team about it. It is still in discussion.

Leaving the issue of cost aside, I would rate vROps at eight out of 10, in terms of the technical side, integration, and support.

It's typically used for our interactions with our software engineers, especially when we are configuring or assigning resources to them. It is the way we get the virtual machine to be right-sized. They usually ask for more resources than they need and with this tool I can manage the resources.

There was a system with a Docker cluster that was having really bad issues. A server would go down and the machine would move to another server, in this case a virtual machine, bringing down the whole cluster. Thanks to vROps I was able to closely check the resource usage to spread the load, so instead of having three servers we moved to a more stable solution using eight servers.

vROps has helped to decrease overall downtime by about 20 percent.

In addition, we work here with a five-year budget and we need to have a really good forecast to design solutions because those solutions must last for five years. It's not easy to increase the resources of a solution in the middle of this five-year cycle. So vROps helps a lot in seeing how the load is increasing over time. In that way, I can forecast for more than a two-year period and do so for five years, at least.

The most valuable feature is the ability to check the right-sizing of a machine because that way I can assign the real resources that are needed.

It's also user-friendly. One of the things that I really like are the ready-to-use dashboards. You can get them from a dashboard marketplace where dashboards are contributed by other people. You can use them in your facility without any problem, and some of them are really useful.

The solution also provides proactive monitoring. It's good to have a baseline of how the machine is normally working. After that you can check if it has gone beyond this baseline. If something goes away from this baseline, it usually means you have a problem and you need to fix it.

There is room for improvement when it comes to the integration with Active Directory. Sometimes I need to log in to the application using my Active Directory account, instead of using the regular admin for vRealize Operations. If I want to deploy this tool to more users, I need that.

I used vROps a lot about two years ago and I started with it again about two months ago. I'm the person who designed the whole VMware solution at ALMA Observatory and I support all of it and administer the VMware platform, among other things.

It's quite a stable solution. I have never had a problem with the solution. Every time I want to see something or check something, it's always there.

I have not needed to call VMware for technical support for this solution.

We did not have a previous solution. We only used the typical solution in vCenter for checking performance.

I wouldn't say that vROps replaced a lot of other tools but that's because there aren't too many products that are similar to vROps.

We were already customers for vROps, but at first we were not using a lot. Then we needed to do an upgrade and it was not an easy path to follow. But in terms of the setup and configuration, it was straightforward and much better than the old versions. The last version I used was v4 and, compared to that, it was completely easy.

The deployment, even though I was doing other stuff, took one or two days.

I don't think the solution saves us money, but with it I can better say how the money is spent.

We provide services to our scientists. I can say, "I will provide you with 20 virtual machines, 20 TB of disk, bandwidth, and I know it costs X. The biggest impact is the way I can see where the resources are that we are using. That makes it worth the cost.

The pricing is a little bit expensive.

Licensing is an issue because there are always changes, and by that I mean cost increases. And that's not only for vROps but for VMware, vSphere, and all the products that are involved.

I used Turbonomic a long time ago, but only as a test.

The implementation is easy. You just need to assign resources to install all the virtual machine requirements, but the process is straightforward. My biggest advice is to check the dashboard marketplace because you can find dashboards that are useful to you too. The dashboards are produced by the community. They are free, although some of them need container packs that you need to pay for, or you may need a licensee to use some of them.