Centreon Reviews

Our primary purpose for Centreon is monitoring. We use it to view the status of all our pollers, manage them, and configure them. We manage around 30 Centreon pollers. 

Our team is operating multiple security services (digital signatures, 2FA, secure storage, etc.). We are taking care of everything (hardware, network, hypervisors, VMs, OS, applications, security patches, backup, etc.). Centreon is used to monitor the health of each component and alert us in case of failure. It gives us an overview of our infrastructure health and provides real-time feedback when doing changes.

It allows us to keep the same standard monitoring configuration on all the systems that we manage (checks, polling interval, thresholds, etc.). It also allow us to see the status of our different platforms on a single page.

We have a single GUI where we can view the status of all our infrastructure.

Sometimes, when the GUI and some of the search fields are being reset, and I return to the page, then I have to set them again. Therefore, some improvement on the UI and the filtering is needed.

There are a few bugs or annoying things on the GUI. However, the features are all here for what we need.

It has been stable, so far.

There are no issues that I know of at the moment.

We did have scalability issues with an older version, but now on the newer version, there are no problems. We even have more pollers than before and everything looks good.

They only sell four hour slots for support, so if you have just one question, then you need to pay for four hours. Or, you need to wait until you have enough questions to fill those four hours. They are not flexible in this. 

On the quality of the responses, the last error reported went something like, "We will open any issue on GitHub." However, then my colleague looked at the backlog, and there were hundreds of issues pending. Here there is room for improvement.

We did not have a previous solution. Centreon solved one of the biggest issues that we had. We have a lot of pollers for the metering. In the past, we had to log into each of them to see the status, which was really a pain because did not have a central metering before.

We just installed the standard packages, then the rest was done via the GUI. So, it was good.

I have no idea how much it costs.

I don't know the other solutions which were evaluated, but I know that there was an evaluation. As the evaluation was done before our team chose to use Centreon, I was not involved. Therefore, I can't speak much about the decision other than we knew that Centreon would be able to do what we needed it to do.

If they have the same issues that we had, which means a lot of pollers spread across the whole infrastructure and no central view to look at the entire status with the need to manage everything together, then it is a good solution. For this use case, I would highly recommend it. 

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.

The reports are definitely good, although, to us, the most important thing is that action is taken. When events and things happen, it's important that they're acted upon and dealt with, and that we're notified. Reporting is one of those things that can be used to show a customer that you're doing your job, but the most important thing for us is using it to do our job.

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. Being the monitoring environment, it doesn't really do remediation, so it is not our only tool. We have three core applications that we use, and Centreon is one of those very important applications. If you're a carpenter you need a hammer, or if you're a doctor, you need a stethoscope. It's one of those core tools that, if you don't have it, it's hard to do your job.

The most important thing in any kind of monitoring system is that it's set up correctly. If this is the case, where all of the correct relationships and workflow are mapped out such that you will see only the most important details, then the single-pane view is very useful and it can save a massive amount of time.

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. The customer is the most happy when there are issues that you uncover and they're quickly addressed.

It has certainly reduced our mean time to resolution. This is because it is set up properly so that we can figure out what the issue is as quickly as possible. Reducing noise is very important and it also helps increase the accuracy of the alerts that we're receiving.

Improvements are needed in the area of cloud monitoring, as that's a newer feature.

We have been using Centreon for approximately 10 years.

At the core, the systems are very stable. The only issues that we have run into are around updates. This is true with anything, including Microsoft updates. As this is an enterprise-grade solution, you probably don't want to be the first ones to apply the updates.

My advice is that you should have a conservative approach to when to apply updates. That said, we have active support, so we are always upgraded to the latest version.

This solution is almost infinitely scalable. Almost everyone in the company works with it at some level. We have approximately 20 people in technical roles who use it, and the environment contains between 3,000 and 5,000 devices. This could be monitoring a single internet connection, up to monitoring thousands of systems.

In terms of versatility, Centreon came from a traditional monitoring system, so it is better with traditional infrastructure. However, they're building more cloud monitoring and it's something that they're working on. But its current strength is on the core network infrastructure components, as I see it.

Versatility is not something that is critical to our monitoring operation. For some of the cloud services, we can spin up instances and we can monitor that way. But, some of the cloud instances, depending on what it is, need to be dealt with in a different way. Often, the provider has solutions for that.

We work with a dedicated technical support person who is fantastic, so our overall experience with them has been very good.

We had a solution in place previously that didn't have a single-pane view. It's hard to quantify, but having Centreon certainly makes it much more efficient, as you're able to go in and see the status of all your customers in one place immediately, in real-time, rather than having to log into a separate portal.

One of the things that we did previously was to develop plugins and tools in-house. This was something that was time-consuming and is no longer necessary. We switched because we didn't have to spend time on training, and it allowed us to focus more on our core mission.

With any enterprise-grade monitoring system, the key thing is that you take the implementation seriously. You need to look at and understand what kind of architecture you want to set up and how you want it to be laid out for your customers. The initial process, like the initial setup process for any tool of this magnitude, will take some time if you want it to work really well. That initial time investment, however, is well worth it later on when you have the correct relationships set up and you have a reduction in false alerts, ultimately leading to a higher accuracy level for alerts.

If you're going to have success, it's very important that you take the time to set up parent-child relationships. You need to take the time to set up how the processes work for each customer because otherwise, you'll have a scenario like in Three Mile Island that had that nuclear disaster, where you get hundreds of alerts in a matter of one minute.

If it's set up correctly then it's super-useful. If a certain condition happens, you want to get an alert for the correct condition and not underlying alerts that are not useful. That's the most important thing. If it's set up correctly and you have the correct relationships and workflow all mapped out, then it's very valuable and it can save a massive amount of time. With Centreon, it's very important that you take that time to set up the parent-child relationships.

For us, it took several months to get it set up to be the way we wanted it. But, once it is in place, it is a solution that you can possibly use for decades to come.

We used a collaborative approach between our in-house team and the vendor. We had certain requirements that were important to us and we discussed those with the Centreon team. At that point, we worked together on implementation and deployment.

Using Centreon has helped us to reduce costs, although it's hard for me to quantify. For example, we have saved time in that our in-house developers no longer have to create plugins and other tools that we used before implementing Centreon. Also, because of the faster resolution times and reduced noise for the alerts, it drives up productivity because we don't have engineers looking at alerts that aren't real.

Finally, Centreon is one of our core tools and if we didn't have it, we couldn't do our job effectively.

Looking at this product from a pricing perspective, you need to consider the differences between developing your own solution in-house and buying one. There is always going to be a certain amount of time that you have to spend to customize and get to know a tool, but the fact that you have access to the support is a really big plus because it makes it so that things are done in a more uniform way.

The pricing works out well for us, given our environment and where we are.

We evaluated other options, but one of the reasons that we chose Centreon is because it came out of an open-source environment, and that is something that we really liked. We do have open-source capabilities in our organization, which helped with the transition, making it easier and smoother for us.

On the network side, it's one of the most important tools that we use to see the status of our customers' network infrastructure. With that in mind, if you don't set it up correctly then you don't get any of the benefits. My advice for anybody who is implementing this product is that they need to be ready to think through the architecture properly, then be willing to devote the proper internal resources to the implementation. This is true especially for the dependencies of hosts and services and setting them up correctly because that is absolutely critical in reducing false positives.

We look at Centreon as a partner and we work in partnership with their support because to create the most successful implementation, it's important that it's a two-way street. It takes input from you as the customer, and input and help from Centreon. To have it work in the most efficient and best way, parties need to be able to devote time and resources to set it up correctly. But then once you've done that, you are able to get the rewards, with faster resolution times, reduced noise for the alerts, and that drives up productivity because then you don't have engineers looking at alerts that aren't real.

I would rate this solution a nine out of ten.

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.

When we started using it, our work was based on Nagios completely. What we like about it is that, whereas with Nagios, by design, if you have five or six data centers, you have to open five or six web pages to see what's going on, in Centreon, this is all included in one page, a single site, one dashboard. You don't have to jump from one specific dashboard to the other.

I also really like the filtering capabilities of it. You can easily tell what's critical next to what's okay, the state of the services. It's very easy to get the whole picture quickly.

In terms of the data visualization features, since we're not looking for anything too particular or too complex, it works for us. It's very easy to find exactly what alerts you have. It's very easy to filter by a specific alert. It's very easy to search. It's very easy to configure a specific relation between alerts, to see what's good and what's bad at a given place.

I would compare it to something like Excel, perhaps. Visually, it's very easy to work with. Maybe you can't do things that are too complicated or have some sort of BI, but it has what we're looking for. What we need to understand is: Where is the alert, is there anything else affected, is it clear? And then resolve it as fast as we can. It's a very straightforward, non-complex GUI.

There are improvements that they need to make to their API. When we're using different systems and we want to disable monitoring for a specific server, we still can't do that through the API. That's something that's lacking. We have to be creative and think of other ways. 

And now that we're looking into switching to the world of containers, which is a different type of monitoring altogether, I hope that they have some sort of scalable solution for it. In a container world, the container is irrelevant. It could just be destroyed and another one can come up in its place. It's about the history, the log, and the service itself; that's what is valuable. That's something that they have to think about, although we're not there yet ourselves.

The stability is good. The old Centreon, for us, wasn't stable but, again, we're talking about an old system that wasn't supported, that wasn't built on best practices. The current solution is stable for us.

I don't think we have had any availability issues since we installed the new Centreon. The only time we did was when someone was doing work on Centreon on our side. But other than for maintenance, we haven't had any downtime. We have had some slowness, but not a time when the system wasn't available.

It is a very critical system for us, so if there is a problem with Centreon, we do have to deal with it right away, because it's our eyes. I would know if there was some big issue with Centreon.

In terms of the scalability, so far it looks like it's been doing well. We use the best practices that they send us.

We have a problem because we're growing a lot, server-wise, and we have to accommodate the capacity and rearrange it every time. Sometimes the engines are loaded. But it's something that we have to keep watching because it's installed in our servers, not in a cloud. So we have to make sure that the sizing is what it should be.

Maybe another thing that would be helpful would be a way for Centreon to monitor itself, to tell us when we need to add more engines, or when need to add more CPUs - scale up, scale down - based on the Centreon infrastructure. I'm sure they have this in their best practices, but it would be much better if this was part of an actual alert, so we would know, beforehand, and not have to proactively check it every once in a while.

Their support is very good, they're very knowledgeable. We do use them quite often and they're very quick to answer and very quick to take over the desktop and to investigate it themselves. They seem to be very technical.

We wish they had 24/7 support just in case, but we have our own design failover, so the chances that the checks aren't going to work in one way or another are very slim.

We used the regular Nagios, two or three of them for each of our data centers. I wasn't there at the time the switch was made to Centreon, but I can guess that it was because Centreon is a unified solution. You can now configure checks and do it on one page. With Nagios, at least the old one, you had to have a different site for each data center, so you had to manage three or four things.

The initial setup was pretty easy. It's very similar to Nagios. The initial setup of Centreon is not difficult at all.

We cleaned all our infrastructure and built Centreon from scratch, but we already knew what we were doing. For the deployment of an empty environment, it was very quick. It took a few days. The difficulties were on our side, making our specific checks and fitting them into the plug-ins, but that didn't have to do with Centreon. We had to go back and do some re-engineering. For us, it was easy.

In terms of our strategy for restructuring, we had a lot of checks that were irrelevant, servers that were irrelevant, and checks that weren't written correctly. Our strategy was, first of all, to have the minimum number of checks needed; second, to have a naming convention; and third, wherever possible, to use a Centreon plug-in and not write our own. It took us a while because we had a lot to review. We have a lot of different applications with a lot of different checks. It was more of an in-house project of processes and procedures. We took advantage of the new Centreon to clean up everything and do it right.

We have the skills. We had a consultant from Centreon come in - that was part of the contract - for three days, and he showed us some tricks, some best practices, and answered some questions.

Specifically for us, because we knew what we were doing, I don't really think we got a lot of value from the consultant. But I can tell you, if someone has no clue what's going on with Centreon, the consultant would be very helpful.

If we're looking at Centreon and how we managed to integrate it with ServiceNow, if we needed to buy another monitoring tool, that would probably be a cost of $20,000 or $30,000 a year. We didn't have to do that. Our escalation rate from our NOC is very low, it's about two percent, so I have to give Centreon some credit.

I think Centreon's pricing is fair, especially given the criticality of our system. They were cheaper than the other solutions.  

I understand Centreon is going to North America now. They were smaller when we got it, and the pricing was fair. It took us a while to get in contact with sales, which was a little weird, but once we did and they knew we were serious, the pricing was fair.

The licensing terms were pretty straightforward. I believe it was based on the number of hosts.

The other solutions we tested give you a unified GUI and a platform, like "Nagios as a Service." They all do basically the same thing.

We also had Opsview, after acquiring a company that used it. We took all their checks and migrated them to Centreon, and then we closed Opsview. It was pretty easy to migrate from it - as long as it's Nagios, it's pretty easy. We had to do fixes here and there, but it was something that took a few dev-man days of work. It was not something that was a complicated project. Doing so, this saved us a lot of money. They were paying more for Opsview vs Centreon for about 10 percent of the service. We had a chance to consolidate to Opsview or Centreon, and it was clear that we should consolidate to Centreon.

Take what you have and challenge it. If you're using another system and you decide to move to Centreon, even if your system is similar, don't put your junk on Centreon or any other tool. Go through your processes, go through the system, see what the system is good at, see what it's not so good at, and try to use plug-ins and best practices. Make sure you do an in-house cleaning first. Don't just dump everything on another system and expect it to work.

We've trained a lot of people on Centreon. It was very easy for everyone. It wasn't something that someone specific had to get used to. When we were looking for different solutions - because we ran out of the support for Centreon - we tested Centreon against a few other solutions, and then we understood the advantage of Centreon, especially the GUI.

We already have a system, ServiceNow that does a lot of the reports and consolidates a lot of the incidents for us. We have to do it in one system and we chose that specific system because a lot of other components are relying on it. But, from our perspective, it gives us exactly what we need. I wouldn't need to over-complicate it.

We have around 70 users who use Centreon in one way or another. Ten to 12 are using it daily, one of their main tasks is to go through it. The rest are on-call, escalation. They would go on Centreon, if they get a specific call, to get more information. In terms of their roles, we have the NOC team that uses it, and then we have the Cloud Operations team, which is the second tier of our infrastructure cloud. They use it when they receive escalated incidents. Part of the DevOps team, two or three, uses it to administrate the system. And some of the managers look at it every once in a while to see if there are things that are alerting in a major incident.

Regarding staff for maintaining the solution, it depends. When you have, say, a new product, and you have new service checks and need to connect it to new host templates, that might take some time, but that's a business requirement. When it comes to just maintaining Centreon itself, it's not too much work. It's one of many tools that our DevOps maintain. I don't think they have too much of a headache with it. There are things here and there but it's not something that is very time-consuming.

In terms of how much of the solution we're using, you can always improve it. It's a matter of the time that you have to put into it. Right now, it's giving us enough. We have tried to learn a few things about it. It's a lot work, and we have had to do other things instead. We are happy with the solution, with where we are at the moment. If we had more time we'd seek to improve it, use new features they have. But we haven't had time to work on it. You have to configure it, you have to maintain it, and write processes. That wasn't at the top of our list. We're using Centreon for what we're using it for, and we're using other tools to complete it.

Overall, I would rate Centreon at nine out of ten. They have excellent support, fair pricing for what you get. It's not some sort of machine that does analytics and discovers the servers and these kinds of things. If you want something, arrange a call, talk about it. When they have a new feature they're very excited about it. It's open-source, they're contributing to that and releasing things.

If you're good at something, just stick with it. Don't make any critical changes. If it's working well, don't try to break it, or be something you're not, and reinvent everything. They haven't changed the UI so much, and that's what's good about it. They didn't try to reinvent it or change something. They took what's good about Nagios and added the things that needed to be added.

There's always room for improvement, they're not perfect, that's why I'm not giving them a ten, but they are good. It wasn't just me who decided that we should go on with Centreon. It was myself and three DevOps, and we all came to the same decision, that we should continue with them. Looking back at it, we'd probably do the same. It's just what we need. I just hope that in the future they'll be able to adapt in the world of containers, more complicated monitoring.

We use it primarily for monitoring our devices. We also use it for discovery. For example, if a server is down, the first step to take is just go to Centreon and have a look.

I installed this solution on my company's local server. It is on the LAN network. There is a plugin for Centreon for connecting and providing visibility to the host.

It provides visibility into the network. Without visibility, it is difficult to know what the first step to take is when there is a problem. With Centreon, I can just go to their website if the server is down and it gives me visibility.

We have seen increased usage. That has expanded.

Centreon helps align IT operations with business objectives. It helps our guys in support monitor all our services. It gives you visibility for all services on the host via a link.

You have one single view, which is good. As the administrator, the permissions are the same for every account in the Active Directory. 

We use the solution’s Anomaly Detection feature. It helps our teams to predict potential issues. I like this option for its graph. The graph is very good for when you want to look at evaluating your system over time. It also automates the alerting process. 

It is very easy to manage because the visibility is good.

In the next year or two, I need to implement a load balancing system because I am using Veeam Backup, which I don't like. 

We have been using Centreon for the last couple of months.

The stability is good because the operating system is Linux, and we are using the latest version.

We use it with vBackup, and the server backs up to vBackup every two to three days.

The solution is monitoring 6,000 services.

35 percent of the technical support use the solution.

The support is good when I contact them directly. Opening a ticket on the website of Centreon can be difficult for my colleague, but not for me because my English is good. However, my colleague doesn't speak English well, as our company is in Quebec and our first language is French. We do have someone there, who helps us with French when needed.

The support checks the command line of our Linux system, which is good. 

You can go to their website to investigate problems. This provides us flexibility.

At my last company, I used Nagios XI.

We brought on Centreon because we didn't have a monitoring solution.

The initial setup is very easy. On the website, if you want to create an account, you go to the website for the cloud. There, you have the possibility to run a test of the system, before you want to implement it.

The implementation process was the same as the last system that I used. This made it easier to use.

My company implemented the system. Then, we implemented a hub with the services, and this took five to six months. It takes time to implement all the services of a company because of all the firewalls. 

Only six to 12 people can currently configure Centreon.

Centreon helps me detect where the problem is quickly. When we resolve a problem quickly, this lowers our overall costs.

I recommend looking at the trial version.

Centreon is better than Nagios XI in regards to cost and support response times, when you have a problem. If you have a problem, it costs money to contact the Nagios XI support.

The solution is very good. I would rate it as a nine (out of 10). 

We use Centreon to centrally monitor our entire global IT infrastructure and to alert us about impending issues.

Centreon enables us to proactively take action on issues before they even become incidents, which significantly reduces business disruptions resulting from controllable factors.

I find the product's scalability to be one of the most valuable features since it allows us to add unlimited devices for monitoring and to set up additional polling servers without additional license cost or downtime in our monitoring.

The Home view could be improved by adding customization functions that allow users to change the size of the widgets for a more uniform layout.

No issues with stability.

No issues with scalability.

Centreon technical support is only available during Central European business hours. When it comes to critical business solutions, there should be a 24/7 hotline that customers can rely on.

We switched to Centreon from our previous solution because of the flexibility it offered as an open source solution and because it allowed us to have more control over the design of our monitoring environment.

The initial setup was straightforward, as the product is available in ISO image format, ready for deployment. Centreon also has a comprehensive guide and documentation that are simple and easy to follow.

Open source solutions can be very cost effective for an organization looking for a product that can be quickly implemented, as there is no initial cost and there are no license renewal fees. However, it is important to take into consideration some of the related costs that may come along as needed, such as training, support, and product enhancements.

We have used SolarWinds Network Performance Monitor and SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor.

Centreon is like a sandbox for monitoring your systems. It allows you to customize and automate different tasks, such as the configuration of hosts for monitoring, and actions taken during an alert.

I recommend some training and deploying a lab environment instance, where administrators can fully understand how each feature integrates with the rest of the system to help avoid early configuration mistakes and achieve an efficient production environment design.

We're a telecom group and we use Centreon to monitor all our services.

Centreon's dashboard is good. Centreon's dashboard provides a single view of all our customers. When there is a problem, Centreon notifies us and works with us to resolve it quickly.

Centreo's dashboards help to improve our visibility and ability to proactively ensure the right data is available at the right time which is important.

We use Centreon's plugin packs to communicate with our telecom locations in Brazil when the host does not have Centreon integrated.

Centreon's ready-to-use connectors and integrations are essential because they provide a comprehensive overview of our organization, which allows us to quickly resolve client issues.

Centreon helps me organize our hosts by stage and monitor our clients.

Centreon is the best for helping monitor our IT infrastructure from cloud to edge and providing holistic visibility.

Centreon helps us align our IT operations with business objectives by identifying problems and resolving them quickly and permanently.

Centreon helps us measure service performance by modeling IT service maps for business-critical IT workflows and metrics. This allows us to see the hierarchy and discover problems. Centreon is a valuable and important tool for addressing these issues.

Centreon helps to consolidate all alerts, KPIs, and business maps as well as manage metrics across domains. We can seamlessly integrate with the client's network.

Centreon's most valuable feature is Opsgenie.

The reporting has room for improvement. The reports could be improved by providing more data and more detailed charts.

I would like Centreon to offer support in Portuguese.

Centreon should have better integration with WhatsApp.

I have been using Centreon for four years.

We use Centreon for every stage in Brazil and the solution is stable.

The scalability is acceptable, but there is room for improvement.

We do not have local support in Brazil, which is challenging due to the language barrier.

Neutral

Our organization previously used Zabbix before switching to Centreon.

The initial setup is complicated because consolidating and configuring the database is a complex process.

We have seen a return on investment and that is why our organization has been using Centreon for over four years.

I give Centreon an eight out of ten.

I recommend Centreon because it is a good solution that configures well.

We are an IT company. We are using Centreon to deliver services to some of our customers. The main use is for IT monitoring of their infrastructures, especially right now in the media and telecom sectors. In the last month, we have also been approaching the public media sector in Italy.

We are using Centreon for our customers. During the COVID-19 emergency, we were able to do all the tasks required from our customers because you have unlimited access to information remotely. It is very powerful from this point of view because you can see real-time information about how the customers' businesses are going. If you need to make some emergency actions, you can put in place all of them effectively and in the right position on time.

You can combine step-by-step the URL services or review services that you are invested in. You can operate at a higher/different level of critical alarms or at a different level. You can review whether a service has been met.

You can concentrate and orchestrate several other solutions from other vendors. You can consolidate those solutions all in one place, then maintain and monitor from that single point. This creates ease of use. It is a very powerful solution from this point of view.

Centreon has some additional modules. Through these modules you can have all kinds of reporting and dashboarding, which are fully customizable, not only from the content point of view, but also from the graphical point of view. You can design, implement, and deploy real maps representing your services from a geographical and service point of view. So, executives can view their services, e.g., if there is an impact and which are the services impacted. In this way, you can strictly separate the dashboard for the technical stuff and create a separate dashboard for executives to see business information. These are the specific capabilities of Centreon. 

You can do some predictive metrics using the tools of Centreon. Therefore, you can have an alarm of sorts before some events can occur.

Connecting to any system, such as traditional on-prem, cloud, virtualized, or edge devices, is very simple. There are hundreds of plugins ready to be deployed with several key monitoring indicators that take place. This is very powerful because you can simply pick up the connectors made available by the plugin's package. 

You can use the API to develop any type of integration. The plugins for users are capable of covering the major vendors and other kinds of software, e.g., the major types of ticketing software that are widely available. 

Centreon is missing an easy way to create a trendline for the metrics. Actually it is possible to create it, but you need a good knowledge of math, Centreon, and RRD.

More than 12 years.

It is very stable. It is rare to receive complaints from customers, though sometimes it happens.

It is scalable. We have tens of thousands of homegrown devices.

We have five users, including our CTO and systems engineers. They can design, implement, and train people on the solution.

Our people get a quick response in the proper time.

We primarily switched to Centreon because of compatibility, cost, difficulty in finding expertise, and support with our previous solution. 

Centreon has been more flexible with customers' requests. We also saw at the same that Centreon would be able to grow with customer needs, not investor needs. They have developed their technology to solve customers' problems in the last two years, doing an excellent job with reporting and predictive analysis.

The initial setup is not complex for skilled Centreon users, even in cases of customers with very heterogeneous infrastructure. In fact Centreon has the ability to grow horizontally when needed, using the ready to use plugins. Usually, for customers from 500 up to 1000 hosts to be monitored, the implementation process may require from two up to four weeks for a basic-standard deployment.

We can do the implementation by ourselves.

We take a step-by-step implementation process for customers. We adjust the solution based on each customer's needs.

We have seen ROI with Centreon.

The solution has reduced our mean time to resolution.

One of the main characteristics that help customers to reduce costs is the solution's capacity to consolidate. This causes the solution to be more efficient. It immediately gives you the big picture about what is happening. Staff can immediately identify a problem and how to solve it. Centreon provides one single point for information so you don't have to use other solutions.

The solution is affordable. The price isn't so high compared to other solutions. The price is negotiable, e.g., you can get a very good price at 20,000 devices if you can commit for several years.

Centreon is always available to develop new plugins when needed. The most important thing is that their maintenance account yearly subscription fee includes the fact that they will maintain the new plugins that you requested them to deliver.

We do a competitor evaluation every year of the market to determine if there is a better competitor. While there are other solutions, I don't think there is a better solution than Centreon.

The solution increases the accuracy of our monitoring. The reaction that I have had from some customers, or even prospects, when we do a live demonstration involving how Centreon is working is that their experience with other solutions is bad. Centreon is a really capable tool that increases efficiency and gives you more information.

We have been a partner of other brands in the past, and comparatively, Centreon is much more stable.

If you are large customer who spends more on the solution, you receive more services versus other market competitors. Centreon offers value for its cost.

It is a complete solution. Our customers are happy. If you want to improve your active monitoring activity, you should use Centreon. I would rate the solution as a 10 out of 10.

Centreon is readily available to integrate tools from other vendors.

We use Centreon for monitoring resources to prevent priority-one and priority-two tickets. It is our primary monitoring tool. All our devices are being monitored using Centreon.

We have reduced the number of priority-one and priority-two tickets by about ten percent.

What I like most about Centreon is that it is very flexible and customizable, based on the user and/or business needs. Centreon is very flexible when it comes to monitoring parameters. We can use scripts found on the internet or scripts created by our infra/apps team.

Also, the data visualization features are very simple and straightforward, yet very informative.

Finally, it is very simple and user-friendly. It is easy to understand and to make your way around it.

Centreon needs to improve the granularity of the data as well as the graphical data. It would also be better to if there was improvement to the filtering/grouping system as well as the creation of views.

It would be a lot better if they improved the scalability and granularity of the data.

Technical support is great, very helpful and accommodating.

We had a previous solution. We switched because we are trying to save some money and, at the same time, looking for a solution that will support our business needs. This solution was suggested by upper management.

The initial setup was very simple and straightforward, including installation, adding of nodes, creating services, etc.

The solution is very effective, despite the low price.

Follow the best practices and the installation process in the documentation. It is very easy to understand.

In terms of the Remote Server functionality, I'm not highly familiar with it yet, but based on what I have read I think it is a great feature and I'm open to any possibility of using it in the future.

We have 300 to 400 users. Some are infrastructure engineers, VPs, application analysts, and people on the upper management team. For deployment and maintenance, we have three to five personnel: our Senior Vice President, Linux/VM engineers, and global operations engineers.