Centreon vs ServiceNow IT Operations Management comparison

Centreon and ServiceNow are both solutions in the IT Infrastructure Monitoring category. Centreon is ranked #21 with an average rating of 7.3, while ServiceNow is ranked #11 with an average rating of 8.5. Centreon holds a 2.9% mindshare in IM, compared to ServiceNow’s 2.3% mindshare. Additionally, 92% of Centreon users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 94% of ServiceNow users who would recommend it.

Centreon

Read 28 Centreon reviews

4,788 Views
2,994 Comparison Views

92% willing to recommend

ServiceNow IT Operations Ma...

Read 40 ServiceNow IT Operations Management reviews

3,443 Views
2,660 Comparison Views

94% willing to recommend

Centreon

ServiceNow IT Operations Ma...

Comparison Buyer's Guide

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Oct 9, 2024

Centreon and ServiceNow IT Operations Management compete in the field of IT monitoring and service management. ServiceNow appears to have the upper hand due to its comprehensive suite and strong integration capabilities.

Features: Centreon provides scalability and flexibility, allowing monitoring of unlimited devices, easy setup for monitoring, and integration of third-party modules without extra licensing costs. ServiceNow IT Operations Management offers advanced discovery, service mapping, and an end-to-end IT service management and automation suite.

Room for Improvement: Centreon users seek better API functionality, enhanced UI responsiveness, and improved cloud monitoring. They also desire more insightful reporting and integration options. ServiceNow users call for improved scalability of Discovery and Service Mapping features and expanded AI and automation capabilities.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Centreon's deployment is mainly on-premises with hybrid options. It has mixed technical support reviews and calls for 24/7 support for critical issues. ServiceNow offers flexible cloud deployment and strong integration. It receives suggestions to improve the discovery process, with robust support despite a higher cost.

Pricing and ROI: Centreon is cost-effective for smaller organizations, leveraging an open-source model with optional premium modules. It yields good ROI through reduced mean time to resolution. ServiceNow is more expensive, appealing to enterprises for its comprehensive features. Its price is justified by the integration and functionality it offers to larger deployments.

To learn more, read our detailed Centreon vs. ServiceNow IT Operations Management Report (Updated: January 2025).

Buyer's Guide

Centreon vs. ServiceNow IT Operations Management

January 2025

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Review summaries and opinions

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:

Categories and Ranking

Centreon

Ranking in IT Infrastructure Monitoring

21st

Average Rating

8.4

Reviews Sentiment

7.2

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Network Monitoring Software (23rd), Cloud Monitoring Software (18th)

ServiceNow IT Operations Ma...

Ranking in IT Infrastructure Monitoring

11th

Average Rating

8.2

Reviews Sentiment

6.8

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Event Monitoring (1st), Cloud Management (9th), AIOps (4th)

Mindshare comparison

As of March 2025, in the IT Infrastructure Monitoring category, the mindshare of Centreon is 2.9%, down from 3.0% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of ServiceNow IT Operations Management is 2.3%, down from 2.8% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

IT Infrastructure Monitoring

Featured Reviews

Caulson Chua

Technical Services Manager at ATS

With fewer staff resources, we can identify and address issues before the system goes down

Centreon's most valuable features are preventative maintenance and cost-efficiency. Everything is monitored, and we get a log before the system fails. We have an opportunity to fix the issue and avoid downtime. The dashboard is user-friendly, and the solution provides good reporting and visibility. The layout is straightforward. You can click on the drop-down list to select the server you want. The anomaly detection feature helped us reduce our average resolution time by 30 minutes to an hour.

Read full review

RichardG

Account Manager at a consultancy with 11-50 employees

Effortlessly blends management systems for comprehensive infrastructure insight

ServiceNow IT Operations Management brought together Intune and SCCM or MECM really well. It provided out-of-the-box integrations, requiring only minimal effort, typically a couple of days, to massage those systems into a seamless operation. Additionally, the performance analytics of ServiceNow was especially beneficial for setting thresholds, aggregating, and correlating infrastructure data.

Read full review

Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:

Pros

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

"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."

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

"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."

"Predetermined templates allow for simple and fast service monitoring configuration."

"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 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."

"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."

More Centreon pros

"As a product, ServiceNow IT Operations Management is pretty strong, and it can discover non-IP devices."

"It is a stable solution. I have not experienced any system outages during my time using the solution."

"It provided out-of-the-box integrations, requiring only minimal effort, typically a couple of days, to massage those systems into a seamless operation."

"I like the tool's discovery feature."

"The most valuable feature of ServiceNow IT Operations Management is the user interface."

"It's easy to set up."

"It is a market leader and is very implementation-friendly. Developers have a clear understanding of how the solution works, and it is mature enough to handle different client needs."

"The scalability of ServiceNow is good."

More ServiceNow IT Operations Management pros

Cons

"I think Centreon's security could be improved by leveraging AI. That's where things are heading in the industry."

"Improvements I would like to see include a discovery solution, better reports, and end-to-end monitoring."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"Centreon introduced network discovery in the most recent update. However, it doesn't work well. Our previous monitoring tool could discover networking equipment on the network and identify the relationships between the devices."

"The product collects the information, but it fails to send them via SMS, WhatsApp or Telegram."

"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."

More Centreon cons

"The pattern part can be improved. Patterns are used in the Discovery feature. Although it is easy to create new patterns and modify the existing ones, it would be better if this solution can have more out-of-the-box patterns. In terms of new features, they can include artificial intelligence, something like machine learning."

"We are facing difficulties with service mapping of CIs from the end users, and are seeking help from third-party vendors."

"I would like more manual issues to have automated report-facing options."

"The out-of-the-box reporting feature is not as user friendly as other tools."

"The most complaints we have received from our clients are the solution's discovery aspect. I've heard a few concerns from the customers where we have to integrate with a third-party tool to make a full-fledged discovery along with ServiceNow. ServiceNow alone does not do the total capacity of the discovery. The discovery portion of ServiceNow IT Operations Management is not in-depth as what the customers are looking for. The information that it gathers from the assets is a little more limited than what other tools provide."

"When it comes to improvements, I think that my colleagues and I often have issues finding the correct screen and the search box does not work as intended."

"The solution's licensing model is a bit complicated. It should be simple and easy for people to understand."

"If you are new to using the solution, you will find the setup complex."

More ServiceNow IT Operations Management cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Centreon is an open source product. Thus, there is no need for licensing."

"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."

"I think Centreon's pricing is fair, especially given the criticality of our system. They were cheaper than the other solutions. The licensing terms were pretty straightforward. I believe it was based on the number of hosts."

"The tool is cheaply priced."

"The solution has a free part and after that threshold, you will need to pay. For example, if you believe you can create an interesting map, most of the time, you will have to pay 10,000 Euros per year for having access to these components."

"The solution is very effective, despite the low price."

"The pricing is acceptable."

"It is perfect and very cheap if you are a little company or startup. After that, it is quite expensive for a big company."

More Centreon pricing and cost advice

"ServiceNow IT Operations Management is a costly solution. I'd rate the price at ten, on a scale from one to ten with one being the lowest and ten being the highest price. Some clients do have a problem with the price, but most find that the solution is worth the cost."

"It is expensive. It is around 10 Euros per server per month."

"It has different subscription models."

"There are additional costs, you have to pay more for everything."

"The solution is costly compared to the products offered by its competitors."

"My customers pay for the ServiceNow IT Operations Management license annually. I'd rate the pricing based on value. ServiceNow IT Operations Management is a premium product as it has better features than competitors."

"This solution offers good value but comes at a very high premium. Pricing could be reduced by 10 to 20%."

"While not entirely sure, I believe the solution costs at least a million dollars annually."

More ServiceNow IT Operations Management pricing and cost advice

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Computer Software Company

19%

Government

10%

Financial Services Firm

Comms Service Provider

Financial Services Firm

15%

Computer Software Company

13%

Manufacturing Company

11%

Energy/Utilities Company

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about Centreon?

See all answers

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Centreon?

The tool is cheaply priced.

See all answers

What needs improvement with Centreon?

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 Telegr...

See all answers

What do you like most about ServiceNow IT Operations Management?

From my perspective as an asset manager, the most valuable feature of the solution is the configuration management portion, where I can actively add something to the database.

See all answers

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for ServiceNow IT Operations Management?

We obtained discovery licenses at about seven dollars Australian per unit, which we found to be reasonable and competitive. The pricing model offers scaling where not everything consumes a license ...

See all answers

What needs improvement with ServiceNow IT Operations Management?

There is room for improvement in service mapping within ServiceNow ITOM. When we have more time, we'll look to extend that and apply it to business-critical services like email.

See all answers

Comparisons

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Compared 32% of the time

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Compared 14% of the time

Nagios Core vs Centreon

Compared 11% of the time

Checkmk vs Centreon

Compared 6% of the time

Icinga vs Centreon

Compared 5% of the time

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Compared 15% of the time

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Compared 9% of the time

Splunk ITSI (IT Service Intelligence) vs ServiceNow IT Operations Management

Compared 9% of the time

Moogsoft vs ServiceNow IT Operations Management

Compared 7% of the time

IBM Tivoli NetCool OMNIbus vs ServiceNow IT Operations Management

Compared 6% of the time

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Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Centreon

March 2025

Download Centreon product report

Buyer's Guide

ServiceNow IT Operations Management

February 2025

ServiceNow IT Operations Management report

Download ServiceNow IT Operations Management product report

Also Known As

No data available

ServiceNow ITOM

Overview

Centreon is an all-in-one IT monitoring solution that is a network, system, applicative supervision, and monitoring tool. It is free and open source, and one of the most flexible and powerful monitoring softwares on the market.

Centreon Features

Centreon has many valuable key features. Some of the most useful ones include:

Supervision of hybrid infrastructures, from one end to the other
Open and flexible architecture
Open-source solution, downloadable for free
Filtering capability in GUI interface
Proactive end to end monitoring
Easily configurable and simple to handle
Dedicated dashboard widgets
Scalability
Independent application for monitoring
End to end reporting with actual logs

Centreon Benefits

There are several benefits to implementing Centreon. Some of the biggest advantages the solution offers include:

Single platform, multi-user rights & access: Centreon is designed with built-in ACL, allowing enterprise users access to the monitored data on a need-to-know basis.

Smart data-mapping for customized macro & micro views: Centreon provides real-time custom views in multiple screens with graphic-rich data mapping, which also enables monitoring operators to act and troubleshoot from a distance.

Ready monitoring intelligence & reporting: With Centreon, you can easily generate reports of essential operational KPIs by using pre-configured templates, and add reports as needed by exploiting the dedicated monitoring data warehouse.

Reviews from Real Users

Below are some reviews and helpful feedback written by Centreon users.

PeerSpot user Thor M., CEO at a tech services company, says, "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. 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.”

Thomas C., Managing Director, Canada at Eva, comments, “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.”

Marcilio L., President at ITS Solucoes, expresses, "The dashboards are valuable because they ease troubleshooting and viewing. It becomes easier to locate the source of a problem... 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."

Florent Q., Network Engineer at a computer software company, mentions, "The most valuable feature is that we can manually configure everything we need. After it comes inside the interface of Centreon, you can display it. Because the interface is quite user-friendly, you can manually configure the configuration very deeply, which is very pleasant and useful because you can monitor and see everything on your service list, dashboard, or MAP. The most useful feature for me is that you can create your own plugin and monitoring query."

Centreon

ServiceNow IT Operations Management (ITOM) is a cloud management and infrastructure tool that facilitates the administrative and development process of creating, planning, and operating digital services, technology, application requirements, and components for organizations. Service Now ensures effectiveness, performance, and availability throughout an organization's processes and services.

ServiceNow ITOM will help organizations facilitate consistent policies with regard to deployment, support, and services to ensure trustworthiness and quality of service (QoS). ServiceNow ITOM will ensure that all applications, services, and infrastructure are consistently available and stable.

ServiceNow IT Operations Management Features

Help Desk: ServiceNow ITOM help desk enables IT and operations administrators to better communicate issues concerning managing data latencies, controlling the monitoring of user profiles, executing disaster recovery plans, and any other problematic incidents.
Device and server management: ServiceNow ITOM will ensure IT operations teams can better handle general maintenance, upgrading, and patching for server-related concerns. The solution will also help to maintain the health of organization devices such as laptops, phones, tablets, mobile devices, and desktops.
Infrastructure maintenance: ServiceNow ITOM helps organizations set up remote access networks, maintain network security, regulate communication with external servers and firewalls, and also monitor and manage internal telephone systems.

ServiceNow IT Operations Management Benefits

Improve DevOps: ServiceNow ITOM improves the ability to inspect microservices, which enables DevOps and SRE teams to improve incident response.
Improve data control: The solution will help to manage the entire digital lifecycle, and will also enhance the organization's configuration management database (CMDB) to enable a more robust data foundation.
Problem-solve: ITOM is able to proactively identify anomalies before they become issues/problems with tremendous accuracy. ITOM helps organizations minimize outages and reduce the negative impact to end users so that they do not experience any downtime or service degradations. ITOM will also use artificial intelligence for IT Operations (AIOps) along with machine learning (ML) to reduce the possibility of false positives, saving time and increasing productivity.
Automate workflows: ITOM offers a pre-designed workbook and no-code/low-code workflows to reduce redundant tasks and improve recovery times. ITOM provides intuitive workable processes to be shared easily with all teams throughout the organization.

ServiceNow ITOM enables organizations to become robust, strategic operations able to successfully anticipate issues before they have an impact on the organization. Organizations that use ServiceNOw ITOM will be able to easily automate workflows and improve how their IT teams communicate and work together to deliver successful outcomes and maintain productivity and profitability 24/7.

Reviews from Real Users

“With this solution, operational costs will be reduced. Your maintenance cost will be reduced when you use the item model. You will deliver a fast solution to the customers. If something happens on the server-side or router-side, it will be immediately caught. Efficiencies are improved. “ - Rupesh J., Solutions Architect at Globant

“It has been very useful for tracking. It has evolved a lot over time, and there is a single pane of glass where you can track and see everything.” - Uday T., Project Manager at MindTree

ServiceNow

Sample Customers

Airbus, Bollore, BT, Canal Plus, Kuehne Nagel, Limagrain, LVMH, Oberthur Technologies, Orange, Darty, Addax Petroleum, Plastic Omnium, Auchan, Valeo, Saint Gobin, Clarins, Hugo Boss, JC Decaux, French Government (Defense, Justice, Environment, Agriculture), OptiComm, Thales, Zeiss.

servicenow, TransAlta, NATS, Symantec

Buyer's Guide

Centreon vs. ServiceNow IT Operations Management

January 2025

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