Centreon Reviews

We use it for monitoring our software for illegal components. We look to Centreon to provide a visual representation of the availability of a service.

We use the soluton's dashboard for L1, L2, and L3 IT support. We set alarms and then support can look at the interface to see which element is causing an alarm. It is useful for monitoring and seeing, in a graphical way, what the cause is.

The software shows the data structure with other elements that represent the state of the software. With Centreon, we have automated the way we check for the check file and it automatically creates alarms in our ITSM system.

The most valuable feature is the ability to build an abstraction of service visualization. You can add services to an entity called Business Activities and you can see the state of these activities.

It also provides a nice dashboard, or what's called the Centreon MAP, and you can extract information very well from that for building reports for customers. It gives you a representation of service and business activities. You can access all the information in one place.

We also use Centreon Plugin Packs. They help us support Linux servers' operating systems. When it comes to monitoring things, you can set an agent on the client's operating system or you can have agentless access. For the agent-based monitoring, you need to install it directly on each OS that you want to monitor. For agentless monitoring, you can simply click through the interface to provide a Plugin Pack, and you can run it directly.

It can also help you look at KPIs because calculations can be done directly in Centreon.

Centreon is very bad with auto-scanning. It's very monolithic software. It doesn't have microservices and it only has basic clustering. You cannot, for example, have six or seven nodes for Centreon's cloud processes.

Another area for improvement is auto-remediation.

I have been using Centreon for three years.

The stability depends... For example, on Amazon, we have some problems with processes that fall and we need to restart them. And the software that provides the dashboard is very bad. 

The core service is not fantastic but it's okay.

The scalability of Centreon is very bad because of the nature of the software. It creates a bottleneck at some point and that drives everything else related to the software. 

I believe Centreon is working on a SaaS version of the service, but currently, you cannot have many hosts because of the cost of only one computer or virtual machines. Amazon permits 128 processors and, for VMware, I think it's 28. If you already have 28 CPUs and you add one more, the monitor is dead.

We don't have plans to increase our usage. We have bought Dynatrace and we will be removing Centreon in the next six months.

We have about 150 users of Centreon. Some are managers but they are generally technical people such as project managers and support. I'm the only one involved in deployment and maintenance of the solution.

Centreon's L3 support is great but the L1 and L2 support are bad. The response times depend on the person who responds to the call, but it's not great.

Neutral

We used to use Nagios. The switch to Centreon was not my personal choice, but it was done because we needed access to abstractions, and that is something Nagios cannot do. Nagios doesn't have the same features. You cannot represent things on dashboards like in Centreon.

Personally, I don't have a preference for one over the other. Management made the final choice, but in my opinion, it was for the cosmetic aspects of the product.

It's very simple to set up. A very basic installation takes, perhaps, 50 minutes. You download a package and install it, and then do some configuration. There's nothing special about it.

After, you need IT to structure your business activities with the service. There are some post-configuration operations that need to be done.

We did it by ourselves.

We have seen ROI using Centreon. When you can monitor your whole system there is a gain.

The price is not too high. Licensing is driven by how many hosts you monitor, but because you can run the agentless version, you don't have to declare every host to Centreon, one at a time. That means you can drive your infrastructure supervision with a very low number of declared hosts.

It's very simple to use Centreon's licensing model. When you know the number of hosts, you know the cost of your license. The price includes everything, there are no additional costs.

By comparison, Dynatrace is priced by the number of user agents in the infrastructure being monitored. It's a strict usage calculation for SaaS software like Dynatrace.

Centreon is a nice product that improves on Nagios at times but it's not a very big step forward. Centreon is very much like Nagios.

I would only recommend Centreon for a customer that is not an IT client. It's not great for tuning software and you cannot have more than, say, 5,000 hosts. You can only monitor a small or mid-sized environment. If you need to monitor AWS, you cannot use Centreon, and that's true in general if you need a very large number of instances of Centreon.

Centreon can help to improve the availability of service but that's all. It does enable, for example, fine-tuning of transactions between two applications. It provides a very binary vision. It helps, but it only helps IT support.

Centreon is a great product but it needs to mature. It's a very young company and they need to improve the solution, but the product itself is great.

We use it for monitoring infrastructure and custom applications. We customize the monitoring and dashboards. We have a NOC here, where we monitor our clients' environments 24/7. It is integrated with our ticketing system and SMS and email for communication. We also have a Knowledge Base system integrated with Centreon.

We use it on-premises for ourselves and we provide SaaS with it for our customers. We have more than 20 installations of Centreon.

Centreon makes it easier and quicker to get the information needed to analyze. It uses different colors when there is a problem that passes a threshold. It gives you information and you just have to analyze the machines on the report. It's easier to find the ones we need to comment on to our clients, so they can look more deeply into them.

The solution also increases the accuracy of our monitoring because the plugins enable us to monitor things that we wouldn't normally monitor. There are built-in plugins that pick points that we wouldn't usually monitor if we had to create that monitoring by ourselves. When monitoring something, we might not consider one of those points, because it's not a main point. But it is being monitored. And when we troubleshoot, sometimes we use one of those monitoring options that gives us more information. That makes us more accurate. Our accuracy could always increase, of course, but there is no limit on that.

With the automated configuration for monitoring items using plugins, we optimize our time. And with integration, if we have something happening, we can automatically open a ticket and send communication through SMS or email. Both are very good options. During the day it probably saves us 50 percent of our time, and during the night it's even more. 

We usually do a mapping of our client's business and present that on a dashboard. We don't generally use the reports for that because the dashboards are more real-time. That way, the client knows in real-time what's happening. That helps align IT operations with business objectives a lot. Monitoring and presenting in that way is the whole point.

In terms of mean time to resolution, when we introduced Centreon into operations that didn't have it, it reduced the time to resolution because we located the source of problems quicker. The amount of time really depends on the stuff involved. There are a lot of links that take many hours. The time that is really reduced is the time for detection of the problem. The total resolution time, which contains the detection time, is reduced because of the detection phase. But the resolution phase is basically the same. The overall time varies a lot. It's hard to say how much it reduces the MTTR. But it can be very significant in cases where detection is difficult.

We use almost everything in the product. What is most important are the monitoring, alerting, and the dashboards. If we don't have basic monitoring, we don't have a NOC. It's the basis of the functionality of the system. 

The dashboards are valuable because they ease troubleshooting and viewing. It becomes easier to locate the source of a problem. We can use BAM for that as well, but we only have it in one of the installations, one that has the Centreon Business edition; the others are using the free version. 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.

We use the reports, but not that much, although the reporting is very good. We use it for creating books, monthly reports for our clients. We use the reports for analysis and to say, "These ones require growing," or "This is too big. You can lower the memory and save some money on your cloud." That is a monthly service we provide to our clients. 

Centreon is also very versatile. There are a lot of built-in plugins that ease the work. But if we need to connect to some device that doesn't have a plugin ready, we can customize a plugin and create monitoring for the device ourselves. It's quite easy. When there is a plugin, it speeds the implementation of new devices. If there isn't one, it takes a little longer, but we are not unable to monitor the device. We are always able to monitor.

I would like to see more plugins. That is something it needs. 

There is also room for improvement through dynamic thresholds, or self-discover thresholds. 

I would also like to see a discovery feature that could map the whole network environment and automatically suggest things. 

Finally, NetFlow would be helpful. We have a lot of clients that ask for NetFlow.

I've been using Centreon for more than 10 years.

It's very stable. We have had Centreon here for more than 10 years, and we have had about three problems in that time.

It's very scalable. We have installations with more than 10,000 pieces of equipment. We use the free version and it works well. You just add more pollers and segregate the database.

Their technical support is very good. They answer quickly without any problems. It's a good service.

We used to use Nagios. I also used the IBM Tivoli solution, OpenView from HPE, and WhatsUp Gold. I have used many solutions.

We switched to Centreon for a number of reasons. The IBM and HPE solutions were too expensive. We then went to a free solution, Nagios. But the Nagios interface is not as complete or as good as Centreon's interface. So we switched to Centreon's free version first and moved to using the EMS solution about a year ago, to get the benefits of plugins and dashboards.

The setup is very easy. Centreon itself is an ISO that you boot. You answer some questions and it's up and running. In terms of configuration, you can put in the IP address of the host and attach the plugins and they are ready for monitoring. It's very easy. If it had a more complete discovery feature, it would be even better, but it's already very easy.

The time it takes for the initial deployment depends on how many hosts, and how deeply, you want to monitor. But in less than a week, you can have good monitoring set up for a small to medium sized company. The longer part for us is the interview with the business, the analysts and the system analysts, to understand their particular applications and services and the impact of those on their business, to create business dashboards and business monitoring.

We have had a quick return on investment because we have a lot of hosts to monitor. For new implementations it speeds up the process of deploying. That is labor-intensive work, and it reduces the amount of that work. That helps create a return on the investment quickly, by not spending on as many man-hours as we would have.

In terms of replacing other tools, it hasn't really reduced our cost, but we have reduced costs with Centreon in another way. We need fewer people to monitor more stuff. Prior to Centreon we used free tools so the cost of the tool was not the issue; it was the performance of the people working with the tools.

If you need basic monitoring without dashboards, just monitoring, the plugins are very useful and really cheap. If you want a more complete solution with dashboards and reporting, the EMS solution is great and it is not that much more expensive. It's a good value. Really good.

We use multiple views on Centreon. We don't use a single view because it's too big. We could have a single view. But in terms of alerts, when we create dashboards that provide the best point of view for the whole infrastructure, we usually segment them to see things in more detail. If we put the whole infrastructure in a single dashboard, it would be too macro, it would not be detailed enough. 

We have a lot of screens for monitoring so we create a lot of dashboards and put them on the screens. Those dashboards are not super-detailed, but they are also not a single, macro view, so that we can know where a problem is. We usually create enough dashboards to avoid having to drill down. We have drill-downs, of course, but as a NOC, we prefer to have the most information we can have on-screen. For that we have a lot of dashboards open simultaneously. All together, the way we have set things up, it provides a single view, but with a lot of dashboards, not a single one. That's how we prefer it.

In our company, for monitoring, we have 12 people using Centreon. For support, there are about 20. As for the number of users who only use our Centreon dashboards, I really don't know because our clients have a lot of people. We have three guys who implement Centreon, customize the monitoring, create the dashboards; all of them do all these functions. They maintain the solution to make sure it's working well.

I would rate Centreon a nine out of 10. It needs those features I mentioned earlier. But, for the price, it's really a 10.

I use the solution in my company for our supervision purposes. In my company, we supervise all of the infrastructure with the tool. It is a monitoring tool.

The most valuable feature of the solution is that most of its plug-ins are free.

The issue my company has with the tool stems from the fact that it didn't give an on-time response to us. The product collects the information, but it fails to send them via SMS, WhatsApp or Telegram. The solution can be used if you want to get email notifications, which is not good for our company because if someone is not in front of their desktop, you can't receive information about an equipment or LAN that is down.

I have been using Centreon for twelve or thirteen years. I am just a user of the tool.

The tool is not stable, and it may be because we are not using its latest version. Sometimes, there are breakdowns in the tool.

Around seven or eight people use the tool.

I have provided technical support for the solution to deal with the product issues. Sometimes, the solution's technical support says that they will post some updates and make corrections in the stability area of the program. Sometimes, the corrections in the stability area made by the tool's support team do work, and at times, it doesn't work. I rate the technical support a five out of ten.

Neutral

The product's initial setup phase is really easy, even for a beginner.

The solution is deployed on an on-premises model.

The tool is cheaply priced.

Before people try to use Centreon, I suggest using Zabbix or SolarWinds. One should try to use Zabbix first and SolarWinds in the second position. If you use Zabbix or SolarWinds and you find that they are not okay with you, then you can use Centreon.

The tool does not meet our company's needs. Even though the tool can collect the information, its metrics are not really easy to be explored or used.

I rate the tool a six out of ten.

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 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.

The best features that we've come across enable us to create our own monitored instances. For example, we have a SQL script that is being run by Centreon, and it gives us a specific metric on the dashboard that we utilize for monitoring the performance of a third party. We integrate with third-party companies or, in this case, government institutions, and they do not give us any guarantee of the service, and they also don't give us the ability to monitor the service. However, from our side, we can monitor the throughputs with the SQL script that we have running with Centreon.

In addition, the flexibility, customizability, and analytics of Centreon's dashboards are all very good. The dashboards help us see the whole network map, and that is quite valuable for us. In addition, the dashboards have helped to improve our visibility and ability to proactively ensure the right data is available at the right time. Our service desk staff spends most of their time on the dashboards, and they use the proactive monitoring to log service requests to the L2 and L3 support. They've been invaluable in that sense.

The flexibility has given us the ability to add in our own monitoring metrics and that has been quite interesting and very useful for us as well.

We've been using Centreon for close to two years.

We haven't had any stability issues with the solution since we started using it.

The scalability is also good, not that we've needed to do much so far.

We don't yet use the anomaly detection to help alert on unusual or dysfunctional behavior, but that is a feature we want to implement.

We haven't needed to use their tech support so far.

A different team within our organization was involved in the setup, but as I understand it, the guy from Centreon was quite familiar with it, so it was quite easy.

The deployment of Centreon took about two months, but that was mostly due to user adoption by the service desk and NOC teams.

Initially, when we did the setup, we just threw all of our devices into Centreon, and at one stage it became quite bogged down in the sense that there was too much reporting or alerting. But it was quite easy to filter things and to streamline the reporting, enabling us to get exactly what we needed, including the proactive monitoring that we needed. The flexibility that Centreon has given us to do that kind of analysis and streamlining has been invaluable.

I would like to see improvement in the licensing model. You can purchase X number of licenses, up to 1,000 devices or 1,000 instances. Your next batch is 2,000. But what if you only need, say, 1,200? The model could be changed a little bit.

In a different company, I was dealing with SolarWinds, which was okay for what it did, but the licensing for SolarWinds was quite expensive in comparison. In terms of navigating the licensing models, Centreon and SolarWinds are basically the same.

The other option being looked at was SolarWinds. With Centreon, there's the licensed package, but it's also an open-source platform, and that was the driving force behind the decision to go with it.

My advice would be to go ahead with Centreon. Don't waste time, go ahead.

There are still a lot of features that we don't yet use that we are looking into. But overall, so far, it's been very good.

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 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.

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.