VMware Aria Operations Reviews

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.

We have been able to use vROps to optimize our environment and do right-sizing for most of our VMs. vROps has also been able to help us in regards to forecasting and adware procurement. Therefore, we can see our utilization in the next six months and how we have been trending.

The company is multinational. We are still running on-premise with a plan of moving to the public cloud. At the end of the day, it will probably be a hybrid environment.

When it comes to apps and infrastructure, it provides us with valuable insights. 

It has been helpful around capacity planning, which we traditionally did on a yearly basis. However, since last year, I started using vROps to reclaim and save more resources. It has been helpful along those lines.

In the next six months, vROps will hopefully give me an accurate forecast. Also, it will be able to look at my environment and prove some vendor requirements wrong. 

The dashboards are interesting. We have been able to use the dashboard to monitor the environment. There is also a newer feature where we can share dashboards with people. We don't necessarily have to give them access to vROps. That has been great.

The optimization and performance are helpful.

If I could integrate with vCenter with vROps, then I could execute more things by managing vSphere from within vROps. That would be great.

I have been using vROps for about a year. We got the license last year, but it could not be deployed until later in the year. 

It is a stable solution.

vROps has helped decrease downtime by 80 percent because it gives me a lot of visibility into my environment. With its performance optimization, we have been able to see things happening ahead of time. It also works concurrently with some other monitoring tools. For example, I am also using VMware Skyline, which has helped to drastically reduce downtime. 

I haven't had any downtime this year.

If I see the infrastructure grow enough, then I will scale up.

I am the only one using vROps within the organization.

The VMware technical support is helpful.

Before now, we did not really have a tool for capacity planning. This is the first tool that we have used. It has been great.

The initial setup was straightforward. The documentation is online, so I was able to deploy it before the training. The deployment took me three weeks. 

We don't have a test environment, so everything that I deploy has to go straight to production. However, when deploying vROps, I knew that it would not break service nor cost me downtime, so I decided to give it a shot.

I did the deployment. Going through the documentation, I was able to get different options, picking the one that suits my environment.

If you are not that familiar with the deployment and how to do it correctly, then you may need an expert's advice or intervention at some point in time. You should be able to find your way around 75 percent of vROps. Overall, the solution has been great for someone who is technical.

Make sure you get the right advice and documentation for the deployment. So, if a person or customer is unable to deploy on vROps, then they should get the right expert to assist them with the deployment. Because if you have the wrong deployment, then that might put you in a mess and you might not get the value from vROps. If you are going to implement the solution, do it the right way.

At the moment, I am the only person managing vROps.

It is worth its cost. With VMware, you always get your value for your money. 

vROps has saved us a lot because it has reduced our procurement costs. Usually, we would have a rise in procurement costs at the beginning of the first quarter. We haven't seen that going into 2021.

The solution has a huge cost. If we could just have one license covering everything that vROps can do, that would be great. I would prefer it this way.

We need a separate license for vRealize Log Insight, which has not been integrated. However, it's something I'm looking forward to using.

We did not look at any of their competitors.

We are still running vROps in parallel with some products that we are currently using. However, I am seeing the opportunity for it to take over from our other tools in the future.

From what I have read, it is a great tool that you can use across multiple clouds.

We are planning on implementing VMware's Tanzu solution along with vROps for Kubernetes monitoring/management in Q1 2020. I am currently familiarizing myself with it because I know it's something that I will be deploying pretty soon.

I would rate this solution as a nine out of 10. 

We provide solutions related to VMware, Docker, and Kubernetes for banking data centers. 

We use this product to monitor virtualization infrastructure and different resources that we use in our project. We implement vROps into data centers that are working together to develop vROps solutions with different interfaces. One of them is Dell EMC Adapter which is added to vROps to monitor and collect various logs related to Dell EMC storage. We also add another plugin to monitor HP.

We host around 1,200 to 1,300 virtual machines. Our data centers have more than 50 physical servers.

Before using vROps, we used SolarWinds and ManageEngine, as well as Cisco NCM, to monitor different resources in our infrastructure. But we established a new project for customers and unified all the monitoring solutions in just one platform, vROps. vROps helps us to predict many issues and problems that we may face in the future. It helps us to optimize many configurations because we have good visibility into resource usage.

Because we can predict many issues and problems, we can solve them and provide options for our customers to change configurations and optimize their environments. We are able to fix problems in advance. That helps us to decrease the amount of downtime in a given month. After using vROps, in the second year we were able to offer our customers a new SLA at 99.97 percent. That has proven to be a great benefit for our company.

It is very efficient. By using vROps we have fixed many problems. In terms of the efficiency in operations, monitoring team members are very satisfied because they have dashboards to monitor specific resources and details.

Once we started using vROps, we were able to change out servers and replace them with new versions because we could detect different problems related to the old resources we were using in our environment. With Cisco NCM, you can't detect these problems. Using vROps enables us to detect problems related to the hardware and the issues that arise from hardware error.

After one year of using vROps, we integrated it with vRealize Log Insight and vCenter. vROps and vRealize Log Insight are integrated very well. The integration helps us to gather a lot of event details sent by Log Insight to vROps. The integration between these two products helps us to go into the detail of events. It helps us to monitor problems and detect issues. Then, it provides recommendations to take action and solve problems directly.

One of the most attractive features in vROps is collecting information, logs, and events and, after that, providing proactive predictions about usage of resources. vROps also offers recommendations. For example, in the next two months we might face problems with CPU usage. vROps predicted and forecasted these issues in advance. That's a very useful feature.

In terms of user-friendliness, vROps provides a unified dashboard and you can easily create different dashboards to measure different resources. The UI is very friendly. Our team members are very satisfied with working vROps in comparison to different solutions like ManageEngine and SolarWinds. vROps is very unified and integrates with different solutions.

As a result of using vROps we have easily been able to reduce a lot of unused virtual machines in our infrastructure.

There is room for improvement in asset management and resource usage.

Around two years ago, we installed and configured a vROps project. I'm responsible, as a team leader and the VMware engineer, for different technologies on VMware, like vSphere, vROps, VMware vRealize Suite, as well as container infrastructure.

Because we need high-availability for our solutions and to ensure that our customers have monitoring solutions available, we established a cluster in vROps. vROp provides you a clustering installation for high-availability and sustainability. We had two data centers and we created two vROps that are synced together as Active-Active. If one version is down, the second one is active and provides monitoring.

Because of sanctions in my country, we don't have direct support. We use a partner. Although we can solve most of the issues within our team, we do use our partner for specific problems or issues that we can't solve.

If you study the guidelines, the setup process is very clear. We didn't have any specific problem installing and implementing vROps in our projects. If you have experience in the installation of vROps, there are no problems.

The deployment took about one month. We studied and reviewed the features and implemented a pilot environment in our company. In terms of the specific plan that we provide to customers, we implement vROps and start a one-month period where it is in a test environment. The day after that we move vROps into the production environment.

We make use of just one license for vROps and we don't need other licenses for things like SolarWinds and Cisco NCM.

I recommend implementing vROps by first setting up a pilot environment. You need to become a master in vROps to make the best use of its features. If you don't have any experience with a lot of the features provided by vROps, you can't easily use them, and you can't understand the difference between vROps and SolarWinds and other products.

So I would recommend studying it in detail. After that, you can make use of it, because vROps is a bit complex.

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.

We use VMware Aria Operations for complete visibility of the configurations. It provides us with predictive analysis of the capacity, helping us plan the scalability of resources.

The product has business intelligence features. We can view daily reports of the cloud products.

The product's support services need improvement.

We have been using VMware Aria Operations for more than four years.

I rate the product's stability a nine out of ten.

I rate VMware Aria Operations a nine and a half out of ten.

The technical support services could be better. We need to know the business requirements to get the reports. It is a time-consuming process. Sometimes, we have to search for every detail to make a holistic report.

The initial setup is easy. It can be deployed in any environment. It's a very dynamic product.

It is a very good product. We can download and integrate features from the portal using templates instead of creating them. I rate it a nine out of ten.

We use this solution solely for reporting purposes.

We appreciate that this solution gives accurate reporting.

We would like the default views on the reports for this solution to be improved; at present we have to customize the view before use.

We would also like the option for this solution to be cloud operated.

We have been using this solution for just over one year.

We have found this to be a stable solution.

To our knowledge, this is a scalable product.

The initial setup of this solution was easy.

I would rate this solution a seven out of ten.

We use this solution for creating workflows and managing different clouds. We are system integrators. I'm a project manager. 

This is a very good tool, because we can customize it according to the needs of our customers. It enables automation, and the customization of workflows in a short period of time with the help of our PSOs. It has a user-friendly dashboard. 

I'd like to be able to access some demo sessions to enable a deeper understanding of the product to help our clients because it's quite a complex solution. 

I've been using this solution for five years. 

The solution is stable. 

The solution is scalable.

We have access to the vendor team who assist with any problems we have and we're happy with the support they provide. 

Positive

The initial setup is quite complex although it's becoming easier with each new version. 

VMware offers a suite of products with many licensing options. 

I think this is a good solution and rate it nine out of 10. 

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.

I mainly use VMware vROps for capacity planning, performance tuning, and lower-sized VMs.

VMware vROps' most valuable feature is that it integrates well with our VMware infrastructure, which is helpful for us because we can closely monitor our VMs and their performance.

An area for improvement would be application-level monitoring.

I've been working with VMware vROps for four years.

VMware vROps' stability is good.

The scalability is fine - normally, it comes with analytic and user-interface VMs, but we've combined them as single VMs, so now we can manage our roots with a single VM.

VMware's technical support is good.

We previously used Spectrum but switched to VMware because we already had a VMware environment.

The initial setup was straightforward.

We used a vendor team.

I would recommend VMware vROps for those with a VMware infrastructure and would rate it as nine out of ten.