Centreon Reviews

Our primary use case is for our customers and us (S&L). S&L is service provider for our customers. We use Centreon for our own monitoring, but mainly, it is used for our customers. We support our customers to build up monitoring with Centreon, monitor their infrastructure, obtain a view of their environment, and know about problems before they really matter. Because if you have some architecture, then you can react. If you don't react, you will have real problems in the future. To prevent this, you can use Centreon, as one of many examples. 

If you have different functionalities, like a mail flow or production hall, that you need to take care of, then you can visualize those into a map, and you will be able to see on the map where your real problem is. E.g., you have a big hall with different access points where need to locate the signal of disconnected access points. Then, you can currently see it on the map. It's not that complex, because you can easily take a look at the map and see it where the location is of the faulty device.

It is decentralized, which is better, because you can reduce the load from a single system. Also, you get a better view because it's more independent. Then, for the management, it's nice because they have one central system. With that, they can manage all the other systems, as well. This means they don't have to configure each system by system. They can configure it from one single interface.

We use Centreon to monitor the server and network devices. It also provides reporting that informs our capacity planning with regard to storage on the server disk. We use it on-premises. We have a central server and around 14 monitoring pollers on the remote side that report to the main server.

I'm the monitoring administrator, so I set up some dashboards for my colleagues and users in the IT department that are customized to provide the information they want to see. They want to look at network devices and create a map of the equipment that allows them to see usage and if something has broken down. 

Centreon's ability to model IT service maps has been crucial for us. It enables us to get a quick look at our business needs. Centreon can measure the service performance to show if everything is working well. 

We have our own private data centers that are set around the world. They post our solutions to our customers. We have a NOC that monitors the applications and services of each server. The primary use is of the solution is to trigger incidents and to resolve issues before the customer notices.

We use Centreon as a base for almost all of our monitoring, and we use it to trigger instances. We work with ServiceNow. We shifted from the open-source, old, unsupported version of Centreon to the new version. We use the built-in plug-in which Centreon has, the monitoring plug-in, the specific component plug-in. We didn't even have to write the check and maintain the check, we were able to use what Centreon had. That's one thing that it improved in our organization.

We have used it from the beginning, so I can't really compare it to anything before. But when we first installed the UI, it allowed us to see the big picture, to understand what's critical and what's not critical, and to build more and more checks, more and more output, and more hosts for it. It's scalable. Centreon allowed us to do it without having to look for another solution.

We have about 10,000 alerts a month coming from Centreon. For us, especially compared to other systems, it gets us the information for a specific alert: What is alerting on the server, what's working or not working. The number of clicks which we need to do to get that information is significantly lower. If you have an alert on server A, in another solution, you have to search for server A, and then search for what's not good and what's good. In Centreon, it takes one or two clicks, one or two transactions, done by the NOC user, to get that information. When you're talking about doing that 10,000 times a month, that's a significant reduction in the amount of work.

It's flexible for infrastructure monitoring. We can write our own checks. It's based on Nagios, and it's fully open-source. We do prefer to use the plug-ins, because then we don't have to maintain them. But we can write anything regarding server level and application help, ourselves. We have the flexibility.

We're a software solutions provider using Centreon to monitor a client's database, application, and web servers. The system sends an email alert when something goes wrong. 

Currently, we only have one customer using Centreon. Our client is a global automobile manufacturer headquartered in Europe. Our customer was already using Centreon when we started working with them. They approached us about upgrading and perfecting their system. We've also pitched this solution to another car manufacturer based in Germany. 

Centreon helps us monitor our client's systems in real-time using fewer people. Our client is happy with the product because it helps them cut costs. Everything is automatic. Centreon helps measure service performance by modeling IT service maps for critical IT workflows. 

The primary benefit is prevention. Centreon helps us identify and address issues before the system goes down. It reduces related costs by about a third. 

We are a provider of the Centreon solution and a reseller as well. We also use it internally to monitor our offices around the world.

We also have a NOC for our customers hosted in Azure and AWS.  We provide Centreon EMS as a SaaS solution to monitor the infrastructure (or applications) of our customers. 

As a reseller/integrator of Centreon, we deploy it on premise for our customers as well.

We try to provide a 360-degree view of the infrastructures. In that context, the feature we most benefit from is the dashboards. We build specific dashboards using the integrated tool called Centreon MAP. It allows you to draw your network for a site or to draw an application and how it works with all the components, as if you were drawing in Microsoft Visio. The diagram is dynamic and, underneath the it, you can put metrics and data that is directly pulled from every infrastructure or application components.

In terms of Centreon's versatility for connecting to any system, as long as the device has an IP, it's fairly easy to interconnect with anything. You can perform basic monitoring, or you can look for more specific KPIs on any kind of equipment by using a combination of SNMP, API and scripts. For our NOC operations, we easily deploy a poller in our customer's environment that securely connects to our central servers. Making it really easy to add new customers to our NOC.

In addition, it increases the accuracy of our monitoring. When looking at the availability of an asset, what matters from a business perspective is what is the real value. For example, if we're monitoring a retail store and there is an outage during the night, since the store is closed it doesn't matter if the systems there aren't working during the night. With Centreon, you have the ability to track the availability for specific time slots. That's one of the features that we use a lot. We are able to say that during business hours everything went fine.

Once you're familiar with how Centreon works, it is way easier than any other solutions. You are able to cut out all the unnecessary notifications that you can get and only stick with the essential ones. In this way, you don't miss any important alerts. And because we are able to track a lot of data, and not only availability, we're able to find the root cause of an issue much faster than with another solution. Once everything is set up correctly, it reduces our MTTR by 50 percent.

There are a lot of free tools on the market, and they work. But once you have some specific requirements, especially for reporting and dashboarding, you need a complete enterprise grade solution. It's the category that Centreon is in, and it can save you 20 percent on operation costs. Once you know how to use the solution, you can reuse the scripts and everything you've been deploying, so when you want to add new equipment, new hosts, it's really easy and faster compared to other solutions.

We use Centreon primarily for network monitoring. We monitor our customers' networks, including the internet connection and the switches, for temperature and general hardware status. For some of our larger customers, we use it to monitor servers as well, using the simple network management protocol (SNMP).

We see benefit from using this product all the time. For example, if there is a hard drive that's failed in a system then we get notified via Centreon. If there is some kind of environmental deviation, such as an air conditioning unit or something else that doesn't work, then we get environmental information like the temperature has changed.

We also get notifications if the internet goes down. Prior to COVID, there were lots of people in various offices and we need to know if they're all working and productive. 

This monitoring and notification system is something that happens constantly.

Centreon increases the accuracy of our monitoring, although accuracy is something that we consider to be a core feature. If the product generated alerts that you couldn't trust then it would be a cry-wolf scenario, effectively making it unusable. We would not use a product that was not accurate or didn't perform as expected, because that makes the whole product useless. Basically, if the monitor isn't accurate then there's zero value in the software.

We use it for standard monitoring of 300 to 400 devices, the usual Windows and Linux servers and network equipment. We are monitoring the disk usage and the network ports.

The teams within our NOC get proactive reports which are quite detailed. That saves them a lot of time on having to research or troubleshoot to find an issue. Thanks to Centreon, they are guided to what needs to be fixed.

And it's an invaluable tool for helping to drive business performance excellence and aligning IT operations with business objectives. It's been helping us to engage in smarter reviews of what's happening within our network. We get alerts popping up from time to time, and we can use them to implement permanent fixes or workarounds.

Another benefit is that Centreon has helped measure service performance by modeling IT service maps for business-critical IT workflows. We actually give detailed reports to our customers and they're all based on Centreon's reporting. That ability is very important, a top priority.

Firstly, it was used to start monitoring the desktop computers of the company and all of the servers, systems, and desktop applications. Secondly, it was used for monitoring the company's network. Lastly, it was used to monitor the company's applications.

Most of the time we solicit engineers and other experts in IT when something doesn't work. When everything works, everyone considers that normal. It is a critical app and a critical piece of equipment in our organization. Being able to anticipate and act before there is big trouble is better for our business and for the image of the company. There's no point to wait until there is a problem in the company, if you can avoid it. In many French companies, many people don't understand that part.