Centreon Reviews

We have a lot of customers, we manage their LANs, firewalls, and other devices - mainly network devices - and we also monitor them. If we get an alarm we can see right away what is going on and log in to those devices to check what is going on.

We can proactively see what is going on in the network, so most of the time we notice problems before our customers do. This is the main reason we are using this kind of solution and monitoring, to be sure that we see the problems before the customers.

It supports active monitoring so we don't have to use traps. From time to time traps are not very useful because we never know if they are actually working or not. The reporting part is also valuable as are the event logs. Using them we can check right away if something has had a hiccup.

Also, the downtimes feature where, for example, if the ISP is doing some maintenance on its network, we have the option to put downtime on the devices or the services, so we won't get any false alarms.

Improvements I would like to see include 

• a discovery solution
• better reports
• end-to-end monitoring.

The latter is the number one feature that we are looking for. Right now, a lot of other monitoring providers already have a good end-to-end monitoring solution, but unfortunately, Centreon doesn't have it yet. So that is one thing we are very much missing.

More than five years.

It's stable. Every product has its pluses and minuses, but it's usually working pretty well. If you configure everything exactly as they tell you in the documentation then it works very well.

We haven't had any issues with scalability.

As we are using their Enterprise version, we submit as many tickets as we want. Lately, we have submitted quite a lot of them because we want to make this product even better. We have had some questions and some ideas that we wanted to share with them and test with them. So I have used their support a lot and they are always very helpful.

I haven't had any experience with other solutions and I don't even know how our company dealt with these kinds of issues prior to this solution. When I came to this company eight years ago, we took this solution with the first managed customers, so we grew with the solution and with the monitoring.

It quite easy to set up. In the past, usually our admins would do it, but lately I have tried to do it myself, and I would say it's quite easy to put up.

It's quite expensive when you use the Enterprise version, but if you compare it to other providers, it's more like a middle-of-the-line product. It's always good to have a price that is lower, but I would say the price is okay because we get very good support and if we have any other issues we can always contact them. There has never been a time when I didn't get help from them, so I would say the price is quite okay.

In terms of licensing, you have to think through if the components that need licensing are really needed. For example, the Map module: If you don't need a map to be shown, I don't see a point in paying for those licenses, if you just use it a couple of times a month or a couple of times a week. Think through what your needs are and whether those needs really require that kind of advanced solution where you need to pay for licenses. You can use the Centreon free version and get the main features. The licensing part is, I would say, only for bigger customers who have the option to pay more and who really need those kinds of modules, fancy reports, etc.

If I remember it correctly, there weren't any better solutions, at least not eight years ago.

During the last couple of years we have tried other solutions but none of them have had the features that we like.

If you put it up, be sure to use Centreon's documentation because if you don't use it you will run into problems. 

Otherwise, I would recommend it because it's quite easy to set up, it's easy to use, their documentation is quite okay. At first, the documentation was very bad, but in recent years it has gotten better, much better. Set it up, test it and try it and you will see that it is the product that you want to work with.

We use it for infrastructure monitoring.

The improvement has been the ability to deploy a log monitoring system on already existing infrastructure. When I took ownership of teams where I replaced the previous monitoring solution with Centreon, the capability to stabilize and quickly fix the infrastructure monitoring - since the previous solution was not very good - helped us.

It also gives us a good overview of our system.

The collection part, due to the flexibility and scalability.

We have provided feedback to Centreon directly. The most important issue is the capability to interconnect with other systems. It already exists for some of them. For example, the Stream Connector is something we use to populate data in another system. This kind of facility for connecting should exist for all products that it makes sense to have connected to a monitoring solution.

We have never had a big issue. Sometimes there is a mistake, the wrong configuration for example. But there has been no outage caused by a bug in the software.

We haven't had any scalability issues with the monitoring solution part. But in terms of data, analysis, we have a very large amount of data, a big database. The MBI, the Monitoring Business Intelligence part is very important for that because we have limited data analysis, graphing, and reporting. With the new solution, we will have success with that. This improvement will enable a lot of functionality and features in terms of Big Data treatment.

We have direct contact with a pre-sales engineer. We work directly with him by email or by phone, it's very fast. I don't use the support gateway from Centreon.

We had a different monitoring system. Why Centreon? It's very good at agents, in collecting data. Because of some specific integrations we must do, we chose Centreon. Based on demand and our expectations, and the collectors, we made our decision.

We picked Centreon because, after an open-source comparison, and given what we want to do, and our skills and experience as well, it was the best solution for us, the most reliable for our services. We manage the unified collaboration clusters for an organization in Europe. The difficulty is that we have to maintain a complex solution so I don't want to increase the complexity of managing it. The opposite would be the best way, to effectively simplify the management of this kind of cluster. Centreon is made for monitoring but also has extra connectors to enable automation. Globally, that was a very important point for us, to open the door to tomorrow. If we stay with Centreon, we should be able to play with the data, with Centreon and with other systems.

The first setup was eight years ago and it was not very complex. We had an expert in Linux so it was not really a big issue, with ten years' experience in monitoring systems. There were no specific difficulties with it.

We have a good monitoring system and a good aggregation layer. That means we are alerted on service impacts and not when something is down. We have saved a lot of time on non-business-hours intervention.

I deal with technical parts, not with the costs.

In terms of licensing, the big question will be the ability to be flexible with the scale of design.

We had different solutions. We had Splunk for Big Data monitoring as well as Elasticsearch and Zabbix. These are at the top of the market, along with Centreon.

My advice is to make it simple. When I say that, it's in terms of templating. With Centreon we can create a lot of templates. It is very good to have something very flexible and configurable. But be careful, don't create a lot of templates that will clash with other templates because, in the end, it will be very complex to maintain. Start simple and maintain up-to-date documentation.

We use other reporting solutions to complement it, to create beautiful reports that are specifically requested by our customers. In the future, I expect we will use a diverse range of products to give us the value we need to present to our customers.

I'm a solution architect, so my main job is to provide good solutions to meet demands. When we build a design, we study which solution will make sense for the customer. As an integrator, of course, I need to be sure that any solution, for the price, will make sense for my enterprise as well.

If we compare Centreon to another open-source monitoring system, and we're talking about it as a pure monitoring system, I would rate Centreon between eight and nine out of ten. If we compare it to a Big Data system, it would be closer to seven out of ten, due to the Big Data capacity that we don't have with Centreon. Strictly on monitoring, it gets a good score but with the new technologies, what we see with Big Data and the capabilities for machine-learning and AI, etc., the latter will have a better score because they have the capability to generate a lot of metrics.

Within our technological infrastructure and Communications Management service, it is vital to use this tool to determine the status of each managed element in a simple way.

It has allowed us to review the status of IT elements and has generated alerts to ensure continuity of service.

• Predetermined templates, which allow for simple and fast service monitoring configuration.
• E-mail alert notifications
  

• Lacks service monitoring in the cloud.
• Necessary to improve service monitoring of database services in the free version.
  

We basically use the solution to host monitoring for our customers. We are trying to upsell them to use some of the more advanced features of Centreon, however, unfortunately, we haven't succeeded in doing so yet.

I've only really worked with the basic features of Centreon, including the monitoring and simple reporting for dashboards. 

I have seen on the demonstration that there are a lot of other features which could be interesting, however, I have not had the chance to really see them or deploy them for our customers. 

We have the business activity monitoring, the map, and the MBI modules and they are all very good.

One of my pet peeves with Centreon is that it's not easy to determine what the end results are of all of the inheritance from the different hosts and service templates, for example. If there was a way to easily determine, for example, for a specific host, which notification settings or service settings, would be ideal to set. 

Currently, we have to go through all of the different templates and take a look at how the template is configured, and how specific parameters may change across different templates with different precedents, megatons, etc. It's a lot of work and involves trial and error. I wish they could simplify the process.

The solution needs more features on the mobile app. Currently, the mobile app cannot be used to receive notifications. It would be great if the mobile app acquired the capability to receive notifications from devices. Our customers are asking for that kind of feature.

The organization has been using Centreon for five years now. However, I only have slightly more than one year of experience with Centreon, the same as my tenure with this organization.

We do encounter bugs every so often, however, the management offers the support and can easily jump in and help us fix those issues. Overall, it's stable. We do encounter some issues simply due to the fact that no software product is perfect. That said, they are very good at quickly addressing and resolving them.

I don't have any experience with scaling. It's supposed to be scalable on paper, however, I haven't really tried it in practice nor do I know other people who have tried to scale it up. Therefore, I have no firm opinion of the potential to do so.

In general, we have about 30 users on the platform at the moment. Most of them are customers who have read-only access.

Technical support has been great at being responsive when we've dealt with bugs on the system. We're satisfied with the level of support they provide.

I can't really give an answer due to the fact that, when I came on board, we had already been using Centreon for quite some time and I have not really explored what was used before they started using Centreon in the organization.

When I came on board, Centreon was already up and running, and I did not have the experience of going through the initial setup. As it was already complete, I can't really speak to the process. I don't know if it was straightforward or complex or how long the deployment took in general.

My management has had some issues with the pricing, primarily due to the fact that we actually are currently still a Centreon partner in Asia. Unfortunately, we were not able to really capitalize on the partnership, so we are ending the partnership. 

We are moving from the expensive Centreon Enterprise edition and downgrading to the IT edition. You could infer from that there are issues with pricing, however, had we been able to successfully sell Centreon or Centreon-based services to more customers, we might have stayed on Centron Enterprise. Since it's just for a few customers, the Enterprise edition does not make sense due to the rather high pricing.

We still have a partnership agreement in Asia, however, we are mostly just a customer. Our business relationship with the company is coming to an end and we are downgrading from an Enterprise solution to an IT one.

The way the architecture of the solution is set up, the central server is on the public cloud, and for each customer, we have on-premises servers.

Overall, I would rate the solution eight out of ten.