VMware Aria Operations Reviews

We use it for data center virtualization and management.

I like the fact that the performance is good and that it makes it easy to consolidate all your servers.

If the cost of the license could be cheaper, it would be good.

We have been dealing with this solution for about three years now.

VMware vRealize Operations (vROps) is stable.

It is a scalable solution. We have two clients who are using the product.

The technical support is very good. They get it sorted within the SLA.

The initial setup is straightforward. It took about two weeks to deploy it.

We had a team of one or two engineers for the implementation process.

Our customers who have used it have definitely seen an ROI. Instead of using so many physical servers to achieve the same thing, they've reduced it to five physical servers, and they are able to do much more with those five servers.

The licensing model is annual. Compared to the price of other products, VMware vRealize Operations (vROps) is a bit on the high side. If it could be cheaper, it would be good.

I would absolutely recommend the product and would give it an eight out of ten.

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 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.

I use VMware vRealize Operations for troubleshooting, monitoring the storage and network.

VMware vRealize Operations has helped our organization by providing troubleshooting our systems.

The performance for monitoring the VM is very good. Additionally, the solution is flexible.

The solution could improve by having more APIs, customized alerts, and documentation.

In the next release, there should be better integration with microservices.

I have used VMware vRealize Operations within the last 12 months.

The stability is very good.

VMware vRealize Operations is scalable.

We have one team in my organization that uses this solution.

The VMware support is very good. I had a great experience with them, they are the best.

I have used Grafana and Prometheus. Each solution has its use case, you need to know what use case you have to know what solution would be best.

I have previously worked with VMware, the installation was not difficult, I did not have any problems.

We have our partial script to repair and deploy the solution in the environments quickly.

I did the implementation myself.

We have a three-person team that handles the maintenance of the solution.

VMware vRealize Operations has very useful technology. We can deploy it on Amazon, but we didn't use the solution on the cloud yet.

I rate VMware vRealize Operations an eight out of ten.

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.

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.

We wanted a tool for monitoring the entire virtualization infrastructure. In addition to infrastructure monitoring, a second use case was application monitoring. At the time we were looking, they had a tool called EPOps through which you could do application monitoring. We also heard about some other components, partner integrations for VMware, through which we could monitor the SAP landscape and storage performance.

There was a team of five or six members. Only one member implemented the vROps, but the visibility was provided to all five of the core infrastructure members. They have been able to use the tool effectively to monitor all the applications from an infrastructure point of view.

We also created an application-specific dashboard, from an infra point of view, which was released to end application teams, so that they can then monitor the performance of their applications: How is the CPU and memory? How is the software: working or not working? It is a one-of-a-kind solution where we have onboarded application teams and given them logins for their specific areas.

vROps also provides proactive monitoring, at some level. It's not practical to keep on logging in to the tool to look at it. So you can create alerts and it will alert you if memory utilization is going beyond 80 or CPU utilization is going above 90. It significantly improves the monitoring, because we are able to act on it beforehand, before the system goes down. It has decreased our downtime by 20 percent. We are more proactive in anticipating and solving problems, and it has also reduced our mean time to resolution for infrastructure by about 10 percent.

We also use it for capacity management, for buying new capacity. It has saved us on hardware costs because we're able to plan properly and we're able to buy the necessary hardware. It has saved us around 50 lakh in Indian rupees [about $70,000 at the time of this review]. And because we are not buying as much infrastructure, the licensing requirements and costs have also been reduced. And it has saved us about 5 to 10 lakh [about $7,000 to $14,000 at the time of this review] in power and other data center costs.

For VMware monitoring, it gives a good amount of data, which can be circled back with the IT hierarchy, or application owner, to have a discussion. 

VM rightsizing is another very good feature and capacity planning is something else that I like about it.

In addition, over time it has become more user-friendly. When we deployed, it was only three-years-old. Recently, it has matured enough to monitor cloud infra also, but we have not tried that yet. But it has matured over the time. The GUI has become more user-friendly and it is very lightweight now.

It shows end-to-end visibility for infrastructure: CPU, memory, and all the processes that are running on the server. It will provide you everything. It will provide you some information about applications, depending on the tool capability, but it is not an application performance monitoring solution.

We integrated vROps with vRealize Log Insight, but it was not helpful to me. It was not giving me any good data.

Another area where there is room for improvement is an area which I've not looked at: cloud management and how efficiently it can do it. 

Also, while it is able to do VMware management very effectively, if you have any other hypervisor solution, I don't know how effectively it would work. It should scale to other infrastructure also.

We have been using VMware vRealize Operations (vROps) for the last five to six years now.

The product is more or less stable. We may find a database-related issue once in a year because it uses the open source Cassandra DB, so sometimes that does not work the way it should. 

Also, high-availability within the product is not so good. They have tried to improve it over the time. We have created a two-node cluster where, if one cluster goes down, the other node will take over. Whenever we have tried, it was not that seamless, and we had to involve their support.

It is scalable. It is easy to scale. We also implemented it in a remote location, where we just had to install a remote connector. All you need is good connectivity.

In a given week we were using vROps three to four times. That frequency has been reduced and now we use it about twice a week. I look at it in my role as manager of IT infrastructure and data center. On my team there are three people and they also look at vROps from time to time. They create VMs. They are database, software, and backup administrators. Above me there is our leadership team that also looks at it on a case-by-case basis.

Technical support is very good, no doubt about it. If you raise a very high-priority case, you will get an immediate response. And most of the people are able to solve the problems. You don't have to roll the case over to the next available or superior agent.

We didn't have any tools before vROps, but it provides a single tool for virtualized infrastructure monitoring.

The initial setup was a complex process, and it is still a complex process. There are too many products: the UI, database, and you have to properly size it according to your requirements, otherwise it does not work well.

Our deployment was a one-year project.

We took a full suite of licenses for all the VMs which we had. And that time we had some 600 VMs. We took two types of licensing, advanced and enterprise, where we were trying to achieve our application monitoring in the enterprise licensing. The advanced was used to create dashboards and other kinds of reporting.

Besides this, we used one more product, VMware Compliance Manager, which they have now stopped. That is one area which they have now integrated into vROps, but we have not tried it so far.

We used VMware professional services. Our experience with them was okay. We thought we would implement way further, with VMware onboarding, but it took a year to complete the project.

We haven't really seen ROI. That was not the idea at the time. We wanted a monitoring platform. Return on investment on such a product is also fairly difficult to calculate.

Over time they have changed the pricing and the licensing model. Five or six years ago, when we took it, it was a very good option. Now, I think I have to reevaluate, to be honest.

We looked at SolarWinds and BMC. One of the primary reasons we went with vROps was that we had a large VMware infrastructure. Also, at that time, the dashboards were very good. Also, at some level, it was an agentless solution. In all the other cases you had to install an agent in the end VMs. But because vROps is tightly integrated with VMware, it monitors without agents. That was a factor. Cost was also a factor.

My advice would be to look at it holistically, meaning look at what you want to achieve in the final endgame. Also, evaluate a couple of products to get a feel for them and which product suits you. In addition, create roles within your company, because this needs dedicated attention when you implement it and attention to sustain it. There should also be alignment with an application team or leadership team when implementing this kind of solution.