Centreon is an all-in-one IT monitoring solution that is a network, system, applicative supervision, and monitoring tool. It is free and open source, and one of the most flexible and powerful monitoring softwares on the market.
The most valuable features of Centreon are preventative maintenance, cost-efficiency, user-friendly dashboard, good reporting and visibility, straightforward layout, anomaly detection, Opsgenie integration, easy setup and monitoring, out-of-the-box reports, and Business Activity feature.
Users like the plugin packs for monitoring equipment, the ability to build an abstraction of service visualization, Centreon MAP dashboard, extraction of information for building reports, support for Linux servers' operating systems, agent-based and agentless monitoring, ability to create a graphic map, flexibility and customizability of reports and dashboards.
Other great features include the ability to create monitored instances, integration with third-party companies, manual configuration, ability to create custom plugins and monitoring queries.
Improvements needed on Centreon include enhancing security through the use of AI, providing more comprehensive and detailed reports with data and charts, offering support in Portuguese, improving network discovery capabilities, implementing better integration with WhatsApp, introducing microservices and advanced clustering options, enhancing auto-scanning and auto-remediation features, simplifying the configuration of customizable reports and dashboards, reducing the time and resources required for configuration, improving documentation with more examples and information, and potentially creating a Centreon community or blog for additional support.
Centreon allows companies to monitor their whole system, resulting in a gain. It anticipates critical problems and helps us avoid expensive shutdowns, which has led to a great ROI.
Centreon offers a free open-source platform, however, customers can pay for premium scripts and plugins to access more advanced functionality. The pricing is based on the number of devices monitored, and there are discounts for larger numbers.
The overall cost is not too high, and the licensing is straightforward. You only need to declare hosts to Centreon one at a time, allowing you to drive infrastructure supervision with a low number of declared hosts.
The pricing model includes everything with no additional costs.
Some users find the licensing model could be improved, as the current model requires purchasing licenses in batches, which may result in unused licenses.
Centreon is primarily used by various organizations for monitoring purposes. One software solutions provider uses Centreon to monitor a client's database, application, and web servers, with the system sending email alerts when issues arise. Another telecom group uses Centreon to monitor all their services.
Some customers have praised the support, mentioning that they respond quickly to issues and someone is always available. They appreciate the fast response times and the professionalism of the technical support team. However, there are also complaints about the lower levels of support, with some customers mentioning that the response times are not great.
The initial setup for Centreon varied in complexity and time required. Some users found it straightforward and easy, finishing the setup in less than a day with the help of a few people. They downloaded the application, set up a virtual machine, and connected it to the server for monitoring.
Others found the setup process to be more complicated, particularly when it came to consolidating and configuring the database. However, they still acknowledged that the documentation provided clear instructions.
The deployment time depended on the size and complexity of the deployment, ranging from a few hours for a simple setup to several days or even weeks for more complex infrastructures.
Having a community around the product was beneficial for finding answers to specific queries.
The solution has received mixed reviews regarding its scalability. Some users rate it highly, stating that the scalability is sufficient for monitoring their client's infrastructure. Others mention that the scalability is acceptable but could use some improvements.
Users generally have positive opinions about the stability of the Centreon solution and consider it reliable. Some users mention that they have not experienced any stability issues since they started using it.
Centreon Features
Centreon has many valuable key features. Some of the most useful ones include:
Centreon Benefits
There are several benefits to implementing Centreon. Some of the biggest advantages the solution offers include:
Reviews from Real Users
Below are some reviews and helpful feedback written by Centreon users.
PeerSpot user Thor M., CEO at a tech services company, says, "The single-pane view provides us a view of all of our network infrastructure, and it is one of the most important tools that we use to see the status of our customers' networks. It provides a nice benefit when it comes to helping align IT operations with business objectives. The top-down views, dashboards, and business context reporting are things that are nice to have because you want to be able to show the customer that everything is working, that problems have been addressed, and that you're providing value.”
Thomas C., Managing Director, Canada at Eva, comments, “The most valuable feature of the solution is the flexibility, the ability to integrate all kinds of equipment. As long as something has an IP you can monitor it. What we try to achieve all the time is not only saying a company's system is available, but to give additional data on the performance of the equipment. So the flexibility is what matters the most to us, where we can script everything. Centreon has a lot of Plugin Packs, meaning they support, by design, a lot of devices. And on top of that, we have the ability to add our own scripts and do whatever we want and display the data as we want in the central dashboards.”
Marcilio L., President at ITS Solucoes, expresses, "The dashboards are valuable because they ease troubleshooting and viewing. It becomes easier to locate the source of a problem... The dashboards make it easier to communicate with our clients. They don't want to see the alert console, they want to see a beautiful dashboard representing their network and their business and to watch it in case something is wrong in their environment."
Florent Q., Network Engineer at a computer software company, mentions, "The most valuable feature is that we can manually configure everything we need. After it comes inside the interface of Centreon, you can display it. Because the interface is quite user-friendly, you can manually configure the configuration very deeply, which is very pleasant and useful because you can monitor and see everything on your service list, dashboard, or MAP. The most useful feature for me is that you can create your own plugin and monitoring query."
Airbus, Bollore, BT, Canal Plus, Kuehne Nagel, Limagrain, LVMH, Oberthur Technologies, Orange, Darty, Addax Petroleum, Plastic Omnium, Auchan, Valeo, Saint Gobin, Clarins, Hugo Boss, JC Decaux, French Government (Defense, Justice, Environment, Agriculture), OptiComm, Thales, Zeiss.
