VMware Aria Operations Reviews

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.

For most data center operations teams, it is pretty hard to get a comprehensive view of what’s going on in their IT ecosystem. Virtualization and cloud service abstractions have made cross-platform relationships between different layers of the IT stack more complex. Heterogeneous, hybrid environments are the norm. IT pros have found visibility to be the #1 challenge facing operations teams. VMware Blue Medora management packs aggregate operations data from the leading server, storage,compute and database applications into vRealize Operations for rich analytics and helped to achieve full stack view of the environment.

Using VMware vRealize Operations with Blue Medora TVS helped to centralize data center operations monitoring platform. By adding the True Visibility Suite, its helped to monitor  applications, database, virtualization/cloud, compute, network and storage using one monitoring platform.

All the Blue Medora vROps management packs have features like:

· OOTB dashboards

· Collected metrics

· OOTB Reports

· Alerts and recommendations

· External relationships

· Capacity planning

• Reduced cross-team friction by eliminating MTTI hunts through, siloed infrastructure tools.

• True Visibility customers can see up to 50% reduction in time for root cause
  analysis.
• Cleared up alert storms with built-in policies that disable alerts for your dev environment and other less-critical resources.
• Increased tier I app availability up to 50% by pinpointing problems faster and more accurately with dependency-aware dashboards.
• Were able to drill down to native-tool detail to find noisy.

One missing component was the integration of Log Insight and vRealize Business within vROps. But, with the new version of vROps (v6.5 & v6.6), this requirement was also met with, as the other products in vRealize Suite are now fully-integrated.

More than five years.

As such, no stability issues were experienced from vROps during deployment, configuration, and the collection of metrics and data into the platform. 

The client decided to add an additional node to increase the capacity and resources within vROps analytics cluster so it could support the additional metrics collection process. You can scale vertically or horizontally.

I have received excellent support from VMware & Blue Medora support team.

Yes, Engineered by Blue Medora and validated by VMware, the True Visibility Suite included an extensive knowledge portal and includes 24/7/365 individualized technical support

It was implemented in-house

By using vROps plus Blue Medora TVS you can Maximize Performance, Minimize Investment
Reduce the IT tools, eliminate silos and boost IT productivity by up to 67%.

• Deploy in minutes without additional services or expertise.
• Maintain performance, reduce administration with agentless design.

The True Visibility Suite is available in three editions: Standard, Advanced and Enterprise. 
These packages align with the various infrastructure teams, and offer a convenient
way to pick the best package that applies, without being tethered to just one vendor or
device type.

There were a couple of options that we considered, like Microsoft SCOM and SolarWinds, but the level of monitoring and dashboard visibility wasn’t there.

• Conduct workshops and capture monitoring requirements at a high level; document and understand the customer's requirements. 
• Study the customer’s infrastructure, as it will be useful during the implementation stage.
• Align the customer's requirements, so that all the required systems are monitored in the vROps platform.
• Work out the network firewall rules that are required to configure vROps.
• Use the vROps sizing guidelines and sizing guide spreadsheet prior to vROps deployment.
• Deploy the remote collectors for bigger environments as it puts less load on the analytics cluster.
• Post deployment of vROps, you should create a full-stack relationship dashboard, as it helps to identify issues at various tiers in a typical 3-2-1 type environment.
• Make use of role-based user account management.
• Avoid taking snapshots or backups of vROps nodes during DT window.

Our primary use case is for monitoring as a service for cloud clients, which generates early metrics that can be detected on time and corrected, the added value that this service has delivered a feature in the form of the cloud of the corporation. The administration is very intuitive, however, you must have high knowledge of management of virtualization components. Additionally, service components and licensing topics must be kept up-to-date by verifying the cost-benefit to deliver as a service aggregated that have this service we deliver as a feature in the form of the Cloud of the Corporation.

The tool helped the organization in all monitoring tasks when being delivered as a service for customers helps them to generate early alarm templates, being a cloud service provider is delivered as part of the IaaS to generate memory consumptions processing and storage additionally can be configured parameters such as networking and services that are configured on virtual machines. The counter you have is the license that must be configured in order to have all the games you have, cloud computing.

The tool has many benefits in the monitoring and template functions to integrate with various virtual machine operating systems in the cloud service. Integrations with operating systems are intuitive and easy to install. The most important value is the value it delivers in a cloud service to generate early alerts in cloud services. In short, this is the most granular value that this service delivers to customers, in the administration part you have facilities for the ease of documentation on the web

The database services in the tool as backup services are friendly and can be deployed in the release to production. However, in the new features, I would like to include more online documentation that can help service generate early alerts. A service provider must be generated and coupled to new technologies, as a service provider we have advanced and generated as the advancement of technology, with the help of Nutanix we have learned to identify several tools and compare them. l can help service administrators generate early alerts, for a service provider should be generated and coupled to new technologies. As a service provider we have advanced and generated with the advancement of technology, with the help of Nutanix we have learned to identify several tools and compare

I have been using vROps for five years.

Technical support is excellent.

We did evaluate other solutions. 

VMware vRealize Operations combines multiple VMware components to deliver integrated performance, capacity, and configuration management capabilities for VMware vSphere, physical and hybrid cloud environments.

I have used VMware vRealize Operations for automating the configuration of provisioning various workloads for our ICT Operations staff.

This has reduced the time required to provision the various workloads thereby improving our service delivery as ICT Operations.

This solution provides for easy monitoring of the ICT Infrastructure capacity.

There is Workload Optimization that has new host-based placement, fully automated mode, and a historical view of all the nodes.

The most valuables features are the collection of assets, security, and configuration data settings from each networked virtual environment in the system. This is very key to our decision making.

The introduction of cross-cloud migration is a plus as this improved efficiency for data center staff. 

Certificate Management should be simplified for non-technical staff members.

There is a need for revamping the reporting and improvement on Dashboard to include statistics, which can be used by Finance people on capacity management.

There is a need for improving integration with other hybrid virtual environments. 

The soultion is very stable.

The solution is very scalable. 

The technical support is superb.

We did not use another solution prior to this one.

The initial setup was moderately complex.

It is a mix, where we use our own trained staff with the help of local VMware Partners. The partners are well equipped and have high expertise. 

A lot can be realized in terms of efficiencies, including improved service delivery. 

There is a need for training so as to get qualified staff to set up the environment.

The initial costs are a bit on the higher side but the licensing is flexible. 

We evaluated third-party solutions such as RackNap.

We use this solution to see what we have inside of the virtual environment. We can see the compute nodes and what issues it has. We can also see the networking, data storage, all the recommendations, the issues, and the compilation as well.

This solution has helped to improve my organization because we use it for reporting when management wants to know what we have in the data center in our virtualization environment. We can just send the reports over the vRealize Operations and it will tell how much we consume in our environment. Also, it can alert us as to what resources we need to buy for the next financial year.

When you open the vRealize Operations, usually it will alert you what the misconfiguration is in your environment and that misconfiguration can cause failures in your environment. It alerts you with more than one type of alert like, blue, red, critical, just a warning, and with a daily solving for issues that prevent a lot of downtime. For example, it will alert you if you have thin provisioning and what's overcommitment in your storage. It will alert you that you are consuming most of the storage and that you will have a coming failure. This helps you to move forward before the downtime happens. 

For the cost saving, it has a feature that will tell if you can provide computer resources to a better machine that isn't being used so you can retrieve back those resources and provide it to another department. It will enable you to efficiently use the resources that you have, more than just wasting the resources of the department. You can retrieve it back, and you will get all of the suggestions from reports in the Operations manager. You will save a lot with it.

The most valuable feature is the feature that alerts you when you have any issues or when you may face any upcoming issues. It can alert you within the day or two days before. It can also help you if you want to scale your environment. It will give you a scalable plan to scale your storage or the compute nodes. You can give it the percentage you want to scale it and it will guide you to have the resources for that.

Usually, we use it for reporting when the management's asking us, without any technical output, they want to know what we have in the data center in our virtualization environment. We can just send the reports over the vRealize Operations, and it will tell how much we consume in our environment.

It is user-friendly. As it's a management product, you usually don't have downtime. It will not impact anything.

They can change the interface for the 6.7 vSphere that would make it more simple and more friendly. I think changing the interface of the operations manager would be good. It's friendly to use right now but it would simplify it more.

It's stable. We don't have any bugs or any issues with it.

VMware always gives us the best support. They are friendly to talk to and they understand the real impact of what's happening. They try to get into the issue as one of your team. They also fit into your working hours to solve your issues. 

We installed it with a partner, Epsilon ITs. It was a very simple installation. We did not request an advanced team. 

We measure ROI by seeing the graph of our investment in the data center for the computer resources, as well on the storage. We see the graph starting to lower because we start reusing the resources that we provide to the other departments. If we have a scale of 30% for every three years, it becomes twenty or fifteen.

I would give this solution a nine. One for the future improvement. 

I would recommend it, and especially if you have a huge environment, it will easily give you a complete view of what's inside and what configuration is in it. 

Our primary use case of this solution is to use it as an operations tool.

It hasn't improved our organization, we have monitoring in place already, too much overlapping monitoring because wasteful operationally.  Also, the learned behavior thing at first sounds like a great benefit, but when an alert is triggered just because a VMs behavior changes, like for example it uses more network than usual and crosses a threshold but isn't really taxing the underlying infrastructure, well it essentially creates a scenario where admins are logging in to address the alert, but its there really isn't anything wrong.  This stuff should be simple and not overly complicated, and in my opinion the product has become overly complicated over the years. 

Reporting is a fantastic tool. It's a great tool for generating reports on different things, and for historically looking at performance metrics to help solve performance problems in an application stack. There are some great uses for it, but I think that VMware needs to take a step back and simplify it a little bit more, without trying to bombard us with everything they can possibly think of. Some of the stuff isn't important, and it's not operationally useful.

I used to use the old version, and I liked the old version before it was rebranded. The interface was more intuitive, it was more familiar with traditional vSphere client type interfaces. When I deployed the most recent version, I logged in and I was shocked that I didn't know where to go to do what I wanted to do. The whole interface is an information overload, it just bombards me with messages, warnings, and alerts. When I follow through on the majority of these messages, I realize that I'm really just wasting time because they're not real problems.

There's a time to live metric that keeps flashing all the time saying things like "Your cluster is only going to have 45 days left before this resource is going to run out." It's not true. It simply doesn't happen. We could run our clusters with these warnings for another two years. I'm not happy with that. I don't want to be warned just because one VM deviates a little bit from what it would be doing on a normal basis. I'll only want to be alerted when that specific VM causes a genuine problem within the physical infrastructure, where it's going to create some sort of bottleneck of performance for a larger number of VMs collectively. There's x amount of bandwidth on a physical network interface card as the traffic flows over it. It's not really ever gonna be a bottleneck until that card itself becomes saturated. I don't want to see an alert about a VM that's running over a network card when the card itself isn't saturated. 

These are things that bother me about the product: information overload, too many warnings that are false alerts. After a while, when I see these things all the time I don't want to act on anything anymore. I don't want to log into the product because I know that when I log into it I'm going to see too much stuff that's just going to waste my time.

It is stable. 

We don't scale very quickly in our environment and we only have fixed licensing to a specific product. Even as we add new hosts and classes, we only use that particular product against the assets we are licensed to use it against. We acquired the VRealize operations bundle in a large purchase, as part of a solution for our SAP environment. It actually monitors all the hosts and VMs associated with our SAP infrastructure.

OK

We use foglight, and I have to admit vrealize is way better, but we really don't spend much time in either product.  We haven't switched we use both to manage different assets

The initial setup was very simple. We have a relatively small environment we were running it against and we didn't have to plug multiple components. We just employed everything all at one server VM stack.

in house

Cant' really say there is one, you buy it, you spend money on it, but it doesn't really allow for a return on your investment, it only burns more of your operation teams cycles just to learn it and use it, and respond to the alerts it creates.  Bottom line, if you size your infrastructure correctly you don't need this.  If you want to stack VMs on the host to its tipping point, good luck no matter what you monitor with.   

The pricing and licensing structure of this solution weren't so bad. Although the larger scales become more expensive because it's a per-socket model and that's the way VMware prices its stuff out. This particular product could benefit from a different model like a per-VM count rather than a per-socket count. We bought it as part of a bundle and we got a good deal on it. 

We have another solution from Dell EMC called Foglight, and it's way worse. vRealize is ten times better than that product. Although they both leave us with too much nonsense to bother with.

I would rate this solution a six.

We use vRealize Operations to monitor and do capacity planning for our clients. We integrate into our architecture's environments. Mission-critical on IBM clouds was announced and so we use vROps quite extensively in all of this architecture.

This solution is intuitive and user-friendly. They improved a lot with the latest release to vRealize Operations, like the dashboards, for example, and the way it works. Now it feels much more user-friendly than it was before.

vRealize Operations offers a clustering feature so you can have a cluster for multiple appliances. It is a master in replica. For example, in case your master goes offline your replica will take over so you will not lose your data, dashboard, reports, and everything you have set up.

vRealize Operations is a really cool tool. It can give you a real and deep overview of your infrastructure, capacity, mutualization, forecasting future, and what you need to plan for. It also has monitoring alerts. It's a pretty good tool, I personally really like it.

This product, of course, has room for improvement. A feature that I would like to see is one that allows you to deploy clusters within multiple geo-locations. At this point, this is not supported and I think it would be really nice to have clusters across two data centers in scenarios when you have storage vSAN.

It's really scalable. You can scale all of the vROps if you have NSX in your infrastructure and you want to deploy something as agents in your segmentation, you can deploy this agent and then you can still get the specific network segment.

Their technical support is great. Of course, they can be better but they're great.

The initial setup can be straightforward depending on what you want to achieve. Overall the deployment of the vROps cluster is pretty straightforward. You set DNS records, set the IP address, then just click deploy and go through the wizard.

I would rate this solution somewhere between a seven and eight. Not a ten because there's always room for improvement.