What is our primary use case?
We have multiple instances with Centreon: a central, remote, MBI, report server, and two pollers. We also have Centreon MAP. All the pollers are pulling all the endpoints, sending information to the central and remote instances. If we need to produce some reports to connect, then we connect directly to the report server. If we need to produce MAPs, then we connect to the MAP server.
We monitor bandwidths of all the links inside the data center as well as outside Internet links and MPLS links to have the connectivity, status, and bandwidth consumption. We have defined the threshold on these links to understand if they are being overused or not. This is the main feature.
We use the same for network devices to see basic information, like a device's uptime to know if it is up or down. It is also the same for all the ports and environment probes on the hardware.
For the server, we configure specific probes to check some specific services. For example, the server provides a service through a Docker container, then we can configure a specific query to check the Docker container stages. Or, if we need to have the temperature of the air conditioning system, then we configure a specific query to ask for it. So, there is basic information coming from the network devices related to hardware. There is also some specific monitoring about services that we are using in terms of the business or infrastructure on specific devices.
We have 500 hosts and 4,000 services.
What is most valuable?
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.
What needs improvement?
The solution’s customizable reports and dashboards for allowing management to see performance metrics is very well done. However, it is very time-consuming. I am pretty sure we can create a very beautiful report, but I don't really have time to focus on it now. I wasn't using this feature at the start. Now that we got it, I haven't had time to work on it since it is a paid solution that is quite expensive. We also need to dedicate human resources to work on it, because it is not so simple or quick to configure.
I would like them to improve their documentation. When I faced some issues, I was looking for more documentation on the Internet. There is official documentation on Centreon's website, which sometimes is useful. Sometimes it is not very useful, as you cannot find the information or enough examples of configuration. The answer for me was to contact the support, who helped me, but I was not able to find all the information by myself on Centreon's website. A Centreon community or blog would be helpful.
For how long have I used the solution?
I have been using this solution for eight years: four years at my first company, three years at my second company, and a year at this company.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
It is very stable. In fact, I thought it has improved a lot over eight years. When I started working on the network, we had to restart Centreon Engine quite often. There were some bugs, mistakes, or errors in the configuration. Therefore, we needed to restart Centreon Engine and some other services inside the server. Since I have been at my current company, we have not done that. We have 4,000 services that we monitor, and it is very stable now.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
It is quite a good tool. It is scalable in the sense that we can use it for more hosts and services that we want to monitor. If we monitor different kinds of devices, we can still find plugins and plugin packs directly from Centreon's support and website. They are still developing new plugins and updating them. So, it adapts to your infrastructure. They have also developed some patches. So, it has good scalability.
How are customer service and support?
The support was great. They answered me very quickly for our two first concerns. For the last one, it was quite long. However, after one escalation, we did solve the problem after a day. I am pretty satisfied with them.
They could talk in English with my colleague as well as French for me, as I am French. The people, with whom I talked, were very skillful. So, I was impressed. They could easily help me.
How would you rate customer service and support?
Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?
I was using Splunk at my previous company. Splunk is much more expensive, but it has some capabilities in terms of getting logs. On Centreon, you only get SNMP metrics. However, if you want to get syslogs with a monitoring solution, you can use Splunk, a regexp query, and a specific SQL query to construct a proper output. For this, Centreon is not helpful, but Splunk is.
How was the initial setup?
I was not involved with the initial setup at my current company.
What was our ROI?
Centreon has helped reduce our mean time to resolution. Because we have well-configured monitoring, we can decrease the time to answer any problem. We are informed quite quickly about an issue, so we can say, "Yes." Compared to no monitoring and waiting for a user complaint, it can save us 30 minutes a month between the first user's complaint and the monitoring alert.
What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?
We buy the Centreon solution and licenses for many projects and monitoring hosts.
It is perfect and very cheap if you are a little company or startup. After that, it is quite expensive for a big company.
It is a business choice from Centreon to fix the price, so a big company can afford this license or policy. What I am facing right now is that we are short licenses, and they only sell packages of 500 hosts, which is quite a lot. We have a 500 limit for now, and we want to have a quotation for 100 or 200 more. They told us, "No, the next step is only 1,000." So, they could maybe try to sell a smaller package of licenses.
Which other solutions did I evaluate?
I tried a few other solutions in terms of monitoring, e.g., PRTG, LibreNMS, Nagios and Cacti. All these solutions, except LibreNMS, are very poor in terms of design. The user experience in Centreon is much better. However, in the end, you just configure some SNMP work on the solution to get your answer. The difference with Centreon is that you can easily define, in the configuration, to have the templates for each host, services, notification, etc. So, Centreon is much better than all these other solutions.
All the SNMP data is available on the devices. If you know what you want to monitor, you can do it with or without Centreon. So, it does not increase the accuracy. It provides a very user-friendly way to display it, but it's not more accurate. To be more accurate, we did use another tool, Splunk, which provides some artificial intelligence or behavioral monitoring.
In terms of pure SNMP metrics monitoring, Centreon is very good. However, if you want to diversify your monitoring with other inputs than SNMP, e.g., syslogs. Other tools can be very useful, like Splunk or ELK, for diversification.
What other advice do I have?
Take time to configure it well, as it is very useful. Don't leave it until later. It should be implemented at the start, not after all the infrastructure is in place and in production. It should be done from the beginning, before the application server.
Get the vendor training to understand as much as possible about the solution. While it is quite user-friendly, it is not so easy to understand how the plugins and plugin packs work.
Invest time at the beginning, as it will save you time later. This will help you a lot. So, my advice is to start as soon as possible to work with a monitoring solution when you have an infrastructure, especially on Centreon.
I would rate Centreon as eight out of 10 because I really like it.
Which deployment model are you using for this solution?
On-premises
Disclosure: PeerSpot contacted the reviewer to collect the review and to validate authenticity. The reviewer was referred by the vendor, but the review is not subject to editing or approval by the vendor.