What is our primary use case?
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.
How has it helped my organization?
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.
What is most valuable?
The most valuable feature of the solution is the flexibility, the ability to integrate all kinds of equipment. As long as something has an IP you can monitor it. What we try to achieve all the time is not only saying a company's system is available, but to give additional data on the performance of the equipment. So the flexibility is what matters the most to us, where we can script everything. Centreon has a lot of Plugin Packs, meaning they support, by design, a lot of devices. And on top of that, we have the ability to add our own scripts and do whatever we want and display the data as we want in the central dashboards.
The customizable reports and dashboards are really flexible. We started this partnership with Centreon, when we were looking for a solution, because of the flexibility of the reporting. That's what we found to be most attractive in the solution. You can display the data as you want. It's a bit tricky at first to understand how it works, how the data is organized, but once you go through the learning curve, the tool is really powerful.
Also, because we are able to segregate the data within Centreon, by customer, using the dashboards, we are able to see all our customers in one place, and bring all the relevant information to us directly.
What needs improvement?
There is room for improvement in the basic reporting. They provide reporting in PDF files but you cannot modify these PDFs much at the beginning. It would help if they would simplify the modification of reporting, when starting. A lot of solutions in the market have this issue.
For how long have I used the solution?
We used to use it when it was an open source solution and, more recently, about a year and a half ago, we started using the EMS solution, the enterprise version.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
It's really stable. It's been working for a year and a half and we haven't had any issue with it. No downtime on the platform. We were able to upgrade, again with no downtime.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
It's really scalable because you can spread the roles of Centreon across different servers and you can add servers when you grow your infrastructure.
Right now we have 1,000 hosts, and the other deployments we do are around 500 to 2,500 hosts, usually.
How are customer service and support?
Centreon's support is good. When we have an urgent matter, we speak directly to the Centreon team and bypass support. We speak to the engineer who validated our infrastructure. He answers all of our questions.
How would you rate customer service and support?
How was the initial setup?
During the initial setup we faced some issues. Part of it was because we had to become more knowledgeable in the solution. There are some gray areas and if you don't know the product well you may have issues. Another part of it was some bugs that we came across, although that's part of every software solution in IT nowadays. But the initial setup could be easier.
Our deployment took 10 days, but because our customers want specific dashboards and specific KPIs, we worked on that also.
The goal was to properly size the infrastructure to make sure we have room to grow. We wanted to make sure we have best practices in place for future deployments. If today we have 1,000 hosts and tomorrow we have 5,000, can we grow easily or do we need to redo everything? We also worked on how to structure the data. What kind of data do we want to pull from the hosts? And once everything was set up, how would we display this data? We also wanted to make sure we reduced the false positive alarms as much as we could.
We have five or six people who work with the solution. We have some developers who are working on scripting. We have non-technical people who are more focused on building reporting, and when they have a question or something doesn't work, they ask a monitoring expert to interpret the data. And we also have our customers who have the read-only view of Centreon and the dashboards where they can see the real-time data.
There is no maintenance of the solution on our side, other than adding new hosts or updating, when required.
What about the implementation team?
We had one day with a Centreon consultant who helped us on the design part, to make sure we were starting off on the right foot, and at the end to help verify that our deployment was correct. He did a really good job and was really knowledgeable.
What was our ROI?
We've seen ROI because we're able to monitor new customers more easily and with less work. We're able to reuse the work we did to deploy new hosts. That is a gain for us. And our customers are happy with the reports and the data we provide to auditing.
What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?
Their licensing model is really easy. You have one license and you have access to all the features, compared to other tools where you have to purchase add-ons. And since you can track anything in this tool, it's easy to integrate new hosts. It's fairly easy to replace older versions of other monitoring tools and you can save a lot.
Which other solutions did I evaluate?
Because we are a consulting company, we usually work for large organizations, such as banks, industry and retail companies. We have a deep knowledge of monitoring tools such as SolarWinds or HPE. We have extensive knowledge of what's on the market and, knowing that, that's why we chose Centreon.
The advantages of Centreon are its flexibility and that the licensing is pretty easy compared to other solutions.
Where Centreon is weaker is that the initial deployment could be easier. It's based on the open source solution, so if you are not from the open source world, and you're not good at Linux, that could be a barrier. But for people who are familiar with Linux this would be a pro. I'm not from the Linux world so for me it is a con.
What other advice do I have?
Because Centreon is from the open source world, you need to have some skills at first to be able to master the solution and to deploy it properly. What we frequently see with our customers is that they purchase an expensive solution but they don't take the time to configure it properly. They might be using the solution at 20 percent of its capacity. The same thing can happen with Centreon. That's why you need skills, at first, to deploy it. But after that, it's pretty easy to maintain on a daily basis.
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. The reviewer's company has a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer: Centreon Provider/Reseller