Device42 Reviews

The first use case is the most important. It is Application Dependency Mapping. We want to track what is dependent on what. We want to know when something goes down or a change is made. We are also trying to use it as a change management database for what hypervisor is in what rack which links over to what business application is running that uses what services and has what account. We have information scattered in a lot of different places. This seems to be a very nice solution for taking everything, integrating it together, and linking it all up. 

There seems to be a lot of automation available with our inventory. We have been putting a lot of work into getting our entire infrastructure into Device42 rolled out. However, we have had a lot going on recently because we're going through a merger and acquisition so this has been a bit of a chaotic time. So, we are trying to get everything smoothed out, put in, and figure out. It hasn't been too bad. 

Since we upgraded recently, we are probably using the latest version.

Device42 instantly improved password management because we didn't have a solid solution for that. Upon installing it, I saw that was one of the little hidden gems of functionality for this. Instead of going with a single solution or platform that we weren't interested in for password management, we have that built into this functionality. It covers a lot of bases and hits a lot of points needed for an IT department. Everything is all in one boat and the solution links up to LDAPs. Whereas, if you don't go with them, you may need to get two or three solutions from different companies or providers. 

It has definitely given us an idea of dependency mapping. We have been trying to see what we can do to link all of our applications. This would improve our security posture for auditing into Device42, as we integrate that with Jira, then link all three together. It's still a work in progress, but it's getting there.

• The password management feature
• Data center management and tracking
• Room management
• Application Dependency Mapping
• Automated asset tracking and inventory

Any successful IT department needs to have the functionalities that these features provide, whether through Device42 or through a different support application. The better that they can be supported, the more organized and successful a department will be, especially when an outage/issue comes up. Device42 has everything in one place and links it altogether. This helps when you need to figure out where things are going wrong, where things are happening, or how everything is linked together.

Application Dependency Mapping is in a lot of places scattered through different applications. We are trying to centralize that into Device42. When you first start, you look at things like they are just one application or issue. However, when you can think of it as a dependency map, then you can trace any issue you have back to the source and figure out where the issue is happening and what will be affected when I change this one thing. It has improved our thinking about an IP application or IT system in a sense that everything is linked together and one thing will change another.

The asset discovery is pretty comprehensive and covers everything needed.

The solution provides continuous asset discovery, which is great. If there wasn't continuous discovery, then there would be no way to have devices updated if things changed.

Right now, we have full use of the password management functionality that Device42 provides. The main thing is everyone can login to use it for all their setup. This is the password management under "Secrets".

The solution’s automatic IT asset discovery and inventory functionality functions pretty well. There could be some improvement if there were some automated scripts to get it off the ground. I know it takes a bit of effort to get all of various managed devices into one place. We have to go and change how they are managed and make sure they are all linking up correctly so they can be tracked in Device42. Some type of automated script for each to get over that initial activation. Once everything is in and tracked, it is a very robust solution. By the end of this year, I am looking forward to getting it rolled out and properly set up in our organization.

It gets a bit confusing sometimes when you're trying to map things to a certain spot when you are trying to configure it. The only trouble we have had with it is the initial activation to get started and get things linked in there. 

Approximately six months.

It is pretty stable. I haven't seen any stability issues yet.

Device42 links up to LDAPs. We've had no issues with managing that.

We need one person (an IT business analyst) to maintain and deploy the solution. I currently perform this function and fulfill a lot of different functions for the company. I wear a lot of different hats. I'm one of the more veteran people in the company here. I have a lot of different roles: application administration, application architecture, and account management. All three of those come together to loop in infrastructure, architecture, and administration. All those come together to get this application ready and deployed in our environment to improve our IT posture.

We upgraded in November.

The scalability is very capable. There are a lot of things that you can do with this solution. I'm hoping that as our configuration matures that we can take more advantage of them.

We have 15 users who are segmented into users of the application. There are administrators of the application and super admin accounts for the management of the back-end. We have two super admins, three administrators, and then all of the rest are users.

A big push will be when we build our new data center, then that will be hopefully set from the ground up when we redo our network. The solution is not being used too extensively right now. The infrastructure upgrade network is the main upgrade component. You have to start with the networking in Device42, so I'm hoping it will give us a fresh slate to do everything properly instead of mismatching everything in there. We definitely have plans to use the software fully and to fully utilize all of its functionality. However, we're still in the early phases.

We have had very positive experiences with the technical support. They have been great. We have received so much support from their end that sometimes it may have even been too much. Anytime I'm looking for something, support is coming at us. I even had a little trouble figuring out who I should reach out to when I needed something, but that was clarified recently. There is no lack of support with Device42.

We used different solutions from different platforms. Some of them only fulfilled one specific portion of what Device42 would fulfill. They were coming from all over the place. E.g., we were using Excel spreadsheets and Word documents for some stuff. It was a mess and all over the place.

Our IT lead worked with Device42 in the past. He heavily recommended them so we moved forward with it. There has been a big need for our organization to centralize everything and have a proper change management and inventory system with live updates.

I found the overall process of the initial setup straightforward, but certain parts lacked direction.

The install guide could be a bit better. I ran through it to see where to start. Once I figured it out, we connected with support, figured out where to start, and got a plan together. Now, it's been going smoothly. However, when you first start and install the application, you log in and it's like where's the best place to start? For example, "How do I get from here to everything tracking and linking up?" The answer: It depends on your environment. A segmented approach may be more helpful, which support definitely cleared up.

We are still in the configuration phase. A lot of that is due to the lack of time put into getting this configured. The deployment phase probably took a couple of days. We are still working on the configuration phase. A lot of that is due to our own equipment not being supported anymore. We're in the process of infrastructure upgrades now, which doesn't exactly help.

The implementation strategy is to get it installed, then do whatever initial adoption we could (which was "Secrets"), as we're trying to get our network onto it. As we're going through a network infrastructure upgrade, this is a bit chaotic right now but the goal is to start with the network then flow down towards each specific server and VM that we have. On the opposite spectrum, we want to start with our rooms, then build those out into building our data center and racks, meeting in the middle. We're still in the configuration phase, which has been slow.

We have seen ROI, but we are still in the early phases. We still need a bit more time for the configuration on our end to get our infrastructure ready to be able to be imported and managed properly. 

Our IT lead evaluated this.

There are pros and cons to the solution’s agentless approach to asset discovery. Without agents, the benefit is that you don't have to manage an agent, update it, install it, and go through the application management on it. It's definitely easier from a longevity perspective. The con is that it takes a bit more configuration with higher activation to set up. If there were agents, it might be a bit simpler to deploy.

Something that we are in the early stages of is the solution’s CMDB, ITAM, and DCIM features creating a single source of IT truth in our environment. It is in our roadmap plan and where we hope to see ourselves at the end of our configuration phase.

I have learned is that there are ways for various different types of networking equipment, servers, and systems to all have ways of reporting into an application. The biggest one is SNMP. Finding out that those are not all configured properly leads to a lot of headroom once the application's already in place. I know I have to go back and configure all of our switches to be doing what they should.  The biggest lesson is that there is a lot of preconfiguration with your infrastructure to ensure that it is ready to be imported into Device42 due to the various ways that equipment can be reported.

Look into getting SNMP configured on everything ahead of time. Ensure you have an LDAP ready for use with the products. Definitely keep support in the back of your mind because they have helped a lot as we have gone through our process.

I would rate the solution as an eight point five (out of 10).

Device42 will be the single point of truth for our network, service, and device documentation. The first step is to put all data inside with the goal to discover all things automatically. We do have a few things we must fill in manually. The second step is to use this data and create automation. When we can do this, it will be a big step towards successfully automating our processes overall. Processes can be in connection with the driver ticketing system, the installation of new virtual machines in new containers to grab data automatically to ask the system what is free, determining what we can use, and also automatically returning data to Device42.

We now have nine data centers in Device42. We have data centers in Germany, the US, Singapore, and Australia. 

The company creates software and sells those services. The software send mails, SMSs, and faxes globally. We host everything ourselves. We have security, network, and infrastructure teams, which are all in-house. Nothing is outside in the cloud. We can create everything that we need in short time and easily ourselves.

I am using the latest version.

When all data centers have been added, it will be a success at this time. It is a time saving tool because we can connect all our other tools to Device42, which gives them the advantage to speak with Device42 and the ability to use data in all directions.

Device42 will be our single point of truth, and only Device42. There will be no other tool, no other person, and no other Excel sheet; it will be only Device42.

A big plus for Device42 was the auto-discovery. With it, we have updated devices, updated systems, and up-to-date systems. 

The auto-discovery and API are big values for us. We like these features because:

• They make requests easy against the Device42 system. 
• They are an open standard that we can use for all our other systems, connecting to all our other systems. 

The solution’s automatic IT asset discovery and inventory functionality is a great feature. It was a great idea to create this functionality because we have thousands of systems. To do this manually, it's really a pain.

I tried in the beginning to use the agentless discovery. I had a few problems. There was an employee before me who started with Device42 in 2018. I came to the company in Summer 2019 and was the new tool owner. We had some problems with the agentless, so we switched to the agent discovery. We have a big Linux environment with a lot of Linux services. All Linux services are orchestrated. Therefore, I had no problems rolling out the agent approach to 2,000 to 3,000 machines. The scheduled task for the control for the agent I can create this in a few minutes with the orchestration.

I have a feature requests for the UI to sort numbers or estimates.

When servers have two network adapters, automatically discovered will be only one network card because the other one is a backup. Device42 has some problems to find the other connection. I have open some tickets for this.

For some of the network devices, the auto-discovery could be a bit improved. Some switchboards for some devices have problems to receive their connections automatically, and support names are sometimes incorrect. These are only for special network devices when we have a clustered network device.

I have been using Device42 since last summer (2019).

The stability is great. No problems overall with it.

We have a lot of devices with a modern database architecture. It does not have a problem handling our data. 

Many people from my company are now working with Device42. They switched over from the old tool to Device42. There are about 300 people working at the company.

The whole technical department is using Device42 (120 users). Technical department, at our company, means we have infrastructure, network, application management, and application support teams along with an internal IT department. Even development uses this tool to see devices and clusters.

I'm often in contact with the support team, as I have a few ideas about feature requests or fixing thing. If I do find a few mistake or problems in the tool, then I speak with the support team.

It's good support. I like it. They answer quickly, but sometimes you can feel the support does not know the solution. The roadmap from the development is now cloud-based, which is a big thing. The development is going to cloud and cloud discovery, but some of the basics are not working perfectly and development has no time to fix them. It would be great if they could fix these basics, then concentrate on bigger, newer things, such as, the cloud, container discovery, and database discovery. They need to fix these basics, but overall, I'm happy with the support.

Our tool before was Rectangles, which is an open source tool. The usability is a bit old but people like to work with it. However, everything in this tool is created manually. To create all devices manually, it's a big pain. To update everything is another big pain. In a big environment, it is not possible to use. With the auto-discovery of Device42, we are nearly up-to-date with all our systems.

I have also used another tool that was written by an application developer inside the company. It contained some special reports and other things.

In our solution, configuration was easy because we can automate this configuration over all the servers in the world and roll out the configuration in the agent. It's done in a few minutes.

For a very small installation with a few devices inside, the tool is too big. If you have a few different devices and are using cloud virtualization and cloud applications, then it's a good tool. Though, it is not specifically for this. It is a good quality tool, which is easy to manage.

One person is needed for deployment and maintenance. 

We have not yet seen ROI.

The solution has not reduced the time spent managing IT assets. I must first add all data centers in the tool. I'm not finished yet. But in the end, it will reduce time for the company as a whole.

On a yearly basis, our licensing is $10,000. However, our license is now nearly full with devices. We need the next bigger license with 5,000 devices, which will cost us $19,000. We pay for a set of licenses, a maximum number of devices, and a maximum number of IP addresses. We have the smallest amount of features, which is enough for us at this time. E.g., we don't need application discovery, but possibly in the future, it will be a good thing.

We evaluated a few other tools, even open source tools. Big pluses for Device42 were the price was clear and the features received. 

The problem with using other vendor, like BMC, is the pricing. The price is so horrible and nobody wants to pay this money.

Overall, I am happy with tool because we have a big infrastructure across the world with a lot of different devices. We have a lot of service, virtualization, hardware machines, and network devices. You can't find a perfect tool for all devices in this world. You must find something in the middle, and Device42 is a good tool for this. 

The agentless approach is a good feature. It didn't work for me. I was happier with the agent, as I had immediate good results. 

There are only a few people still manually creating tools because we have no option for these specialty devices. For these specialty devices, we not need automatically update them because these devices are aesthetic. It's only a few devices, so administrators for these devices do this work manually.

The solution doesn't affect our environment or security.

Compared to other tools, I would rate this solution as a seven point five (out of 10).

Our primary use case is to track all of our IT information in one spot. So instead of using spreadsheets and other tools, it's consolidated here for us.

We had all the information in a mix of spreadsheets, homegrown applications, and databases, and then we moved it all into Device42. For example, we had one system that was tracking our device inventory, and we had spreadsheets for IP address allocations, while password management was completely separate. This solution really enabled us to lump everything together in one place.

Having the ability to see how things are connected and keeping track of, for example, which server, and which ports on the servers are plugged into which network switches is very helpful when we're looking at network troubleshooting, and we want to do things like mirror ports and mirror traffic. Tracking which MAC addresses belong to which devices is also linked in there.

The topology view enables us to show how our applications interact with each other and with the rack elevation we can see the equipment in each individual rack and which power outlets they're plugged into. That has also been really handy in a few cases.

It definitely saves us time, but I don't know how to quantify it because we've been using it for such a long time. I don't remember what kind of time it took to track down information in the past. Right now, it's super-simple to find whatever we're looking for. I would imagine it saves us a few hours each week.

Just having this solution at all has been really solid for us. If I had to pick one part of it, it would be a toss-up between the IP address tracking and the password management. I'm not sure which one of those I'd rank higher.

We have a lot of different devices and some of them have many IP addresses, so keeping track of which ones are assigned where is very critical for putting new devices on the network and giving them new addresses. All of our devices are statically assigned, so if we don't keep good records then we could accidentally assign a duplicate, which would cause problems on the network.

As far as password management goes, before we had this we didn't have anything. We had shared passwords, which is always a horrible idea. Now we have the ability to know who has accessed a password, who's looked at it, and when it's been used or when it's been changed. That's helped us from a security standpoint.

In addition, the solution has some very good relational capabilities that show us how certain devices relate to each other and how some of our environment actually works together.

It also helps us track equipment replacement to know when we have swapped out parts and how much money we've spent on a particular server over its lifetime. We try to utilize all the pieces of it that we currently license.

We use it to track our servers, storage, switches, firewalls, and most recently we started putting our desktops and laptops in it too.

One thing I have brought up with their product team, and we opened up a case and a feature request for it, is having a requisition-style system in the software. Right now it does have the ability to track purchases, which is okay. But I would like the ability to create a request and say, for example, I want a new server. 

The way that it works right now is that you have to create the server object before you can assign it to an actual purchase. Obviously you won't have the server until you've bought it, so it's something of a cart-before-the-horse scenario where, in order for me to create a purchase, I already have to have the device, which doesn't make sense. It's fine if you're entering the data after the fact, but I would hope to use the system in a pre-purchase scenario, where I or one of my technicians could log into the system, create the request, and then forward that request to my purchasing people or to our ERP.

The other area where it causes us a little bit of a hassle is if I want to track the cost of spare parts. Recently I had to order about a dozen hard drives for servers. For me to use Device42, I had to wait until the drives came in so that I could create the drives and assign the serial numbers to them, and then assign a cost to each drive. A better scenario would be where I'd say, "Hey, I'm buying 12 drives," and be able to have 12 generic drives in the system without serial numbers. Then, once the drives came in we could assign serial numbers and then further assign drives to servers as we need to.

I worked with their product team at least a couple of years ago to express that concern. They claimed to like the idea, but I haven't seen it implemented yet. I don't know if it will ever make the cut. And I would like it not to be a paid upgrade feature. If they could include it with the license we use, that would be extra nice.

I have been using Device42 for at least five years, if not longer.

It's been very reliable. We had a case last year when it was unavailable because I failed to pay attention to the warnings about our license expiring. That temporarily caused us a glitch because I didn't have our subscription renewed on time. But that was entirely on me.

I would assume it would be fine for all of our future needs. But we're a relatively small organization, so I don't think we're ever going to really stress it.

Tech support has generally been pretty good. Over the years there have only been one or two cases that maybe took a little bit longer than I thought was reasonable. Other than that, they've generally been very attentive and responsive. There have been no major hiccups with any of their support.

I've never had to escalate. The few times that I've had to talk to support, whoever I've talked to initially has been able to get things addressed for me.

We were using spreadsheets and we had a couple of homegrown databases. We weren't using any commercial product prior to a Device42.

We came across the solution because we needed to find a better way to do keep track of all the data. We did some Google searches at the time to see what other people were out there doing. I'm also part of a few different online communities, and I'm sure I asked around those, at the time, if anybody had thoughts or suggestions.

The initial setup was very easy. It was restoring a virtual machine image. It gets delivered as a virtual disk file. Spin it up on your choice of hypervisor and it's ready to go instantly. For us it was ready to go, full-production. I'm sure there are some scenarios where it could get a little bit more complicated, but ours has always been very simple. It was deployed as a virtual machine. We didn't have any wrinkles.

Even with version upgrades that have had breaking changes — and that we had to do backups and restores for — even that hasn't been that terribly difficult. I just I told the people that use it, "Hey, we're going to be down for about 20 minutes," and ran the upgrade and everything was good.

In terms of a learning curve, it's relatively straightforward. There are a few things here and there that, when you come across them, seem a little bit backward. I can't remember specifically what those issues are, other than the purchasing one I mentioned. But it's mostly straightforward, mostly easy to use.

There is a value to it. 

The part that makes some of the solution's add-ons a little bit harder for me to justify and get approved is that I don't have any mechanism to show how much they could possibly save us, or what we're currently doing on a day-to-day basis that they would somehow help us with. Maybe if they had some kind of ROI calculator or, "Here's what you could be doing if you added on some of these extra features," that might help.

Their pricing model is very poor. For instance, software licensing, at one point in the distant past, was a standard feature. At some point they broke it out as a separate, paid license upgrade. That was kind of rotten. 

Right now I'm looking at my license page and all of the add-ons are disabled because we didn't pay for any of them. The solution is helpful and it is useful, but it makes adding on any of the extra applications or any of the extra components cost-prohibitive, for us at least.

We've looked at a few different products. One of them was called Sunbird and there was something by HPE that we might have looked at a long time ago.

Sunbird did not have a full web interface for the solution, so you had to have desktop software. Quite honestly, I wasn't interested in desktop software. I wanted something that I could hit with either my computer or my tablet, or even my phone for that matter, and still be able to get at our information.

It's all pretty easy to use and you'll get out of it what you put into it. We try to make sure our information is accurate and up to date and we periodically do audit against the information to make sure it is current. The biggest advice I would give is to make sure you don't let your data get stale.

Documentation is important. We've had internal problems where we've lost a hypervisor or our network has gone down and we haven't had access to it. Those scenarios have proven that we rely on the info and we need it. So having some kind of high-availability solution would be good for us at some point. We do have a standby server that takes backups of our data and sends it to a separate Device42 instance, but I have not experienced trying to fail over and make it active.

Maintenance of the tool does not even require one person. It's just something that runs in the background and it doesn't take any extra effort, other than what we normally do with our virtual machines and hypervisors. We treat it the same as any other server that we manage. Because it's deployed as a virtual appliance, we count on Device42 to have things hardened and patched. I'm not sure if their normal software upgrades include any system-level patches, but it's nothing that we manage or maintain.

There are five people using it across our organization. I use it in my role as IT manager. The others are server admins, a desktop admin, and a couple of people who have access to it to retrieve asset information.

We're subscribed to just the core product and we utilize pretty much every bit of it. It would be great if we could get into some of the other stuff, like the application discovery and the application mapping; software license management would be sweet, and power and environmental monitoring would be nice too. But those features are all paid add-ons. Right now, the biggest challenge for us is what we currently pay with our base licensing. It's reasonable in terms of the world. We've looked at competitive products in the past and either the other products weren't as well polished and as well put together as Device42, or they were just completely out of our reach in terms of price.

It has generally been a really solid and useful tool. It would be cool if they could get around to getting that purchasing aspect worked in. Other than that, it's been solid. It's done what we've needed it to do so far.

Our goal for using the product is to be able to migrate apps to the cloud successfully. E.g., you can't move something if you don't know all the dependencies or all the bits and pieces that need to go with it. If you move something and forget, "Because it talks to this database," and no one realized, then it's going to fail. You will have downtime and have to move everything back. App dependency is the biggest part for us right now. That is the immediate need. 

I have been focused exclusively on bringing in data, connecting it and making sure all the servers and network devices are being scanned. I haven't spent any time trying to figure out how to get data out.

We are on the newest version of the next-gen line.

I know they're using Device42 to prep for moving stuff to the cloud. I'm not aware if they've used that data to move an app to the cloud yet. I think we are still learning the product and figuring how to get the data out so we can get the right reports, giving us the information we need.

I like the solution’s agentless approach to asset discovery because the IT and OS teams don't want to go install and maintain an agent on their systems. It's just more overhead when they have to do something like that and make sure there's enough space on the server. It's nice that it's agentless, as it will go out and connect, then do its thing.

It is not about the app affecting our security. Instead, it is about how the app will change to adapt to our security, which is very tight. Security was discussed from the very beginning and all the way through. However, we didn't change for the app. The way we deployed the app, it had to change to fit our security.

The most valuable feature would be the scanning stuff: the discovery. It has a lot of different hardware that it can talk to, providing a lot of good information. The way the solution’s automatic IT asset discovery and inventory functionality works is you set up a discovery job, then you can schedule it to run. I schedule all of the runs daily at different times so nothing is interfering with anything else. It's nice to know that you can set up the scan, schedule it, and sit back. You can check them every day and make sure everything ran, making sure nothing had errors, then you're good to go. Anything new is going to automatically be discovered, which is nice. It takes some of the stress off because you don't have to know, "If this team opened new servers, we need make sure now it will automatically pick them up." It is one less thing to worry about. It gathers a lot of data points.

We use the solution’s Application Dependency Mapping. It was the biggest reason that we went with Device42. I've seen some eyes open in surprise, for example, "Whoa, I didn't realize this talked to so many things." It's really eyeopening. This is the whole point of app dependencies. Sometimes, you're not able to take a step back, look at the big picture, and go, "Wow, things talk to other things a lot more than we thought they did."

Since I was focused on deploying connectors and getting all the servers to be scanned, one of the biggest pains was when a job would fail, then the output (logging) was poor. For example, "Why did it fail?" In these cases, you get a generic error. It doesn't point you in the right direction and tell you why you got the error, which is really annoying. There have been times I asked, "Is there somewhere I can see a better log as to why is this failing?" That would be a really nice improvement.

I was brought onto the project five months ago.

For an enterprise solution, it seems pretty stable most of the time. The discovery scans just work. When they don't, it's sometimes difficult to figure out why. We have had the odd occasional issue or two, which I don't know if it was just our environment or due to instability in the app, like a remote scanner suddenly becoming corrupt to where I had to remove the scanning software from the computer and reinstall it before it would work. Twice that happened, and I had to call support. When you go in and tell a piece of software to uninstall, and it's like, "Error, couldn't complete." Okay, that tells me nothing. Then I call support who has to send me a special script that cleans things up in the background. Finally, it will let me do things in the normal way that you're supposed to do them. This is something that they have some things to work on.

It is scalable, though it all depends on the size of the database. If that grows, you have more room to read in more devices.

We are looking at some long-term goals of other teams using it. We are looking at having the network team map out everything, then letting them have access to go in and look at all their inventory. However, for now, we have started the push to the cloud, which is about mapping all the dependencies into the topology of the network, such as what talks to what ports so nothing gets left behind, firewalls, dependencies, etc. This is all flushed out ahead of time.

Device42 is currently hitting about half of our environment/LOBs, which is approximately 4000 servers. From what I've heard, there are plans to extend it to the rest.

There are two to three system admins who I have handed the project over to for day-to-day operations. The project that I was on, which was on hold, has picked back up, so I'm on it full-time. Therefore, I have been training other people to take over Device42. Right now, I'm in more of a training role than an active user of it.

The two times that I had to contact the technical support when the machine went corrupt, they were helpful. They sent me a script with a nice email telling me how to use it. I got on the phone with them just to make sure everything was going correctly. We have no issues with them.

Previously, it was just a black hole. People guessing they knew what talked to what. There was no centralized tool for bringing it altogether.

We primarily chose to go with Device42 because we needed to know our application dependencies before moving to the cloud. We didn't want to rely on individual teams, like the network team, to say, "We have this diagram, app, or program that we use." We needed somewhere where we could see it. We also needed all the different parts to come together to see what's going on.

I took over the solution because a project that I was working on was put on hold. They handed this solution to me after the initial setup was done, and I ran with it from there.

The deployment is easy. I did it myself. You don't need a lot for this application. I handed it off to two or three people because they also are doing other things. This way, they can share the load. Once you get everything set up, it just runs. It is not like it needs a whole lot of constant handholding.

For deployment, you need to roll out the servers, install the software on them, and get the firewalls opened up. Each company will be different on how long stuff like this takes. You could have something up and scanning servers in a couple of weeks.

The deployment strategy that we used was hitting environments that needed to be moved to the cloud first. Once that is done, then they will to start expanding into other areas.

Be careful who you partner with. We partnered with a third-party to come in and help us set everything up. The first technician that they gave us did not know what he was doing. Every time I would ask about something, he would say, "Oh, this looks different. They changed that from an older version." He didn't seem to know the current version. He was stuck in the past. Finally, we got a different guy who knew what he was talking about. So, it stunted our growth in the beginning.

The second guy comes along, and he's like, "App dependency wasn't even checked in the scans," because we weren't told to. We didn't know that we needed that checked to get what we needed until we talked to the new guy. We were like, "This has been useless so far," because this one checkbox alone is essential to what we want to get out of it. He had several suggestions on tweaks to the scans, etc. 

If you're going to partner with a company to come in who are supposedly experts to help you set up and configure it, pay close attention because there are a lot of things about the app to learn. You need to know exactly what you want out of the app so they can help you figure out how to get it.

It has not had an impact on our managing of assets yet, as we are still in the learning phase.

I believe that they evaluated one or two other options.

The environment is a lot more complicated than I thought. It is like, "Wow, there are so many more servers, devices, and things talking to things." I have been in corporate enterprise environments for many years now, and this is the point of the app. I never really stopped to look at the big picture: "Wow, the environment is really complex." It's an eye-opener and makes you think about things differently. E.g., when you make a change to one thing, it helps you understand all the different things that could or could not be impacted. If you think small, then, "I will make this change to this one server." But, if you step back, you realize, "That's part of this, which is part of that. These things are all connected." It's like the butterfly effect: One thing will affect another, and another, and another.

There is an enterprise architect who is focused on getting information out of Device42:

• The right reports
• All the app dependencies
• The data that we need to help us get stuff to the cloud.

We are not using the solution’s CMDB, ITAM, and DCIM features.

If you know what to put into the app to get out what you need, then it can do it. I would give it an eight (out of 10).

Device42 uses your infrastructure discovery and network device discovery to get information about your infrastructure CMDB. It uses this when you are migrating your on-prem servers to the cloud or VMware Cloud to public cloud. For our purposes, customers use it to discover their infrastructure, services, applications, features of those servers, CPU, memory, and RAM. All these details can be discovered in their infrastructure using Device42. Then, you can easily migrate to the cloud. 

We have used the solution in conjunction with our clients’ migration to the cloud. The view it provides of assets and application dependencies assists in getting things to work post migration because of Application Dependency Mapping. We can easily migrate the business and infrastructure applications, thus determining the other applications it is dependent on. This way we can easily predict how to migrate and the things that need to be done while migrating.

We provide support for Device42 as a managed service provider. Currently, I have two customers: one is on Azure and the other is on VMware.

I am using the latest version. 

It is good tool for our customers if they want to go into the details of their infrastructure for migrating their on-prem environment to the cloud.

Device42 provides almost all the details of your infrastructure. Its reporting is very good. It has reports that you can fetch easily and are easily readable. There are a few scripts that you can also use for downloading reports in different formats.

It requires only two or three ports to be open while doing discovery. Therefore, you can have an environment which can be installed in a DMZ environment or on the customer's environment. It won't affect the security or customer's infrastructure.

Continuous asset discovery lets you continuously monitor the resource utilization when using Device42, such as: 

• Resources being used on your infrastructure. 
• If there are new communications happening on your servers, then they are being captured in Device42. 
• If there are any changes in your CMDB infrastructure, they are getting captured in your Device42 reports. 

You can download also these reports with a ServiceNow and other tools.

• Device42 is very easy to install.
• It has lighter graphics. The graphics are easily loadable.
• The front-end is good and user-friendly. 
• It provides network device discovery and Application Dependency Mapping.
• It has agentless discovery; you don't need to put agents on your servers. You can open one or two ports to discover all your infrastructure.
• It has a Remote Collector facility where you can use that facility to discover your DMZ environment as well as your load balancers and domain appliances.
• It provides inbound and outbound connections for your servers.
• Application Dependency Mapping helps us understand on which servers are our applications dependent and what things affect our application.

For the iPhone, the device diagram cannot be downloaded. You have to go to each device and download the device diagram for that device. E.g., suppose there are a 1000 or 2000 servers. You cannot go to each server or device to download a device diagram for each device. There should be a one-click solution for downloading all device diagrams.

I have been using Device42 for two and a half years.

It is quite a stable solution. You can have 4 CPU or RAM for your appliance. You can also configure more CPU and RAM for your appliance if you want to discover more servers.

They have frequent updates, though sometimes you need to get Device42 updated to fix bugs.

Right now, we have two or three technical service engineers managing Device42.

The scalability is good. Depending on the number of servers that you want to restore, you can scale up or down. You can have one or multiple Remote Collectors for more stability and load balancing.

We have three different customers using Device42, and I have supported seven to eight customers until now. One of our customers, they are doing their plans in waves: wave one, two, and three. In wave one, they managed to discover almost 500 servers. In their second wave, they helped manage 400 servers. In wave three, they are now managing 500 to 600 servers.

It has very good, prompt support.

It is very easy to setup Device42. 

I have setup it 600 to 700 times. 

On average, the deployment requires only four to five hours. However, the requirements gathering that we need to forward to customers to follow their change process to open all ports may take two to three days.

There is no implementation strategy because it depends on customer. A few customers helped us and others deployed it by themselves. In these cases, we provide the documents, then the deploy it themselves. So, it depends on the customer.

The solution has reduced the time spent managing IT assets.

Customers are happy with the solution. They can easily deploy this solution for cost-effectiveness.

The product cost is low. It is quite cheap.

We also evaluated Microsoft Mover, but it was not approved by our management.

I haven't used another solution with customers.

It is a very good tool. It is very easy to use for migrating an on-premise to cloud. The tool is user-friendly, easy to understand, and flexible. It has good support. It is the least expensive. This is all beneficial.

I would rate the product as a nine (out of 10).

We are not using Device42 for its monitoring capabilities. We are using it just as a CMDB. We are storing the server data and using this tool for data storage. We don't do many day-to-day activities apart from updating the device information as and when it comes.

Customers are constantly expanding the environment. So, it's easier for us to keep track of how many devices have been added. We are using another tool for monitoring, and we are using Device42 as data storage. Whatever devices have been decommissioned and commissioned are in it. So, it's a central database for us. We are not relying on just one tool for device information.

The import/export for bulk operations is a valuable and good feature. 

The resources table needs a few tweaks. We've raised a feature request for this. When you click on resources, it opens up the entire CMDB or the entire data stored in Device42. If that could be customizable, it would be good. We should be allowed to add our own columns to that by writing a script or something like that. There should be an option to add or limit whatever we want.

There should also be a customized dashboard. We should be able to include widgets on the dashboard. Currently, for app insights, only predefined dashboards are there. There should be an option to create our own dashboards. Instead of using scripts, they can provide a bunch of widgets, similar to what SolarWinds provides.

The discovery option is fairly simple to understand and use. If they could include an option where we could discover devices using an IP range for a subnet, that would be helpful. I'm not sure if that option is already present because we are not using this tool for monitoring.

I have been using this solution since July. It has been five months.

It's stable. We haven't had any major issues since I have been here. 

It's scalable. It all depends on how a customer purchases its license. Overall, it's able to handle the capacity.

It's being used in just one environment. It's not deployed across multiple environments. There are four to five admins who use this solution. 

They're good. I've spoken to two guys from their technical support. Whatever they told me, I have not forgotten it yet. They're good. I would rate them a 10 out of 10.

Positive

I've been working in this organization for the last five months, and I am not sure which solution they were using before. 

I don't know about its deployment, but in terms of maintenance, every now and then, we need to do some upgrades. We recently applied certificates. So, there was a little bit of downtime. That's where maintenance comes in.

Go for it at your own risk. There is a learning curve to it. There are some options or tools that I don't clearly understand. So, there is a learning curve, but once you get a hang of it, it's pretty easy.

It does agentless discovery, which has its advantages. If there is an emergency and we have to commission a server, we don't have to first install an agent on it. If it's a critical server and the customer doesn't want any downtime, we don't have to reboot the server after we install the agent. A reboot is a recommended action across all environments for any agent. However, the disadvantage of being agentless is that it limits our options for monitoring because agent-based monitoring is a good way for gathering data from devices. SolarWinds does it, OpenManage does it, and most monitoring tools, including even Splunk, have agent-based monitoring. So, not having that as an option is probably a disadvantage.

Overall, I would rate it a seven out of ten.

We use Device42 mostly for asset inventory because our compliance rules require us to know what devices we are using: the warranty for each device, when we install it, when we remove it — so full tracking of the device lifecycle. We use Device42 mostly for asset inventory, including physical pieces of hardware and virtual devices as well.

We expected we would use a SaaS version but it was not possible, so we use the on-premise version.

We have more than one instance of Device42. We have four implementations of it in our company. Each of them is dedicated to a single environment: government, our AWS environment, co-location, and corporate co-location. There is no possibility for each of these environments to speak with each other, so that's why we use four different Device42 instances in our company.

Device42 is a source of trust for many things in our company, like IP addresses. In the past, we tried to have IP addresses centralized in an Excel spreadsheet, but now we have built automation to get information from Device42 with an API call. As a result, it's possible to deploy a new VM in 15 minutes and all the information is pulled from Device42, by our automation, to build that new VM.

It's the same for load balancers. When we want to create a new virtual IP for load balancers, we have it automated with an API call and Device42 provides all the information needed to get the job done. So Device42 helps us to build automation into our infrastructure.

Device42 is also a source of trust for our security scan. When a vulnerability is detected in our system, the system automatically looks for information in Device42 to find out who owns the server that has the vulnerabilities and what the contact email is for that team, etc.

The continuous discovery for us works daily. We can be sure, if a device has been updated, that information will be correct in Device42. We are tracking which devices haven't been updated in the last few days and, for each of them we try to understand why, and to fix things so that the discovery does update those devices' information.

I don't know if we can say it has reduced the time we spend on asset management, but in that same amount of time, we now have reliable information. In the past, we were not confident about the information we had. Now, we expect that the information we have is correct.

Also, we have many audits each year. Each audit requires us to provide evidence about how we manage our assets. There are inventory questions and it's easy for us to provide an audit report. When an auditor asks us information, we just have to a share-screen and show him, in 10 minutes, how we manage our assets, and he understands that everything is correctly managed. The audit is very quick.

We use asset management and program management. For some implementations, we also use the software management.

We use the automatic IT asset discovery for different things, like VMware discovery and SNMP discovery for network devices. It helps us to keep hardware information up to date in Device42, and the VMware discovery helps us to keep virtual device inventory up to date. It helps us ensure that we don't have more entries in Device42 than we have in our actual co-location and that we don't have more virtual servers than we have in Device42. We are sure to have 100 percent of our devices in Device42. Not more, not less.

The agentless approach to asset discovery is a good option. Sometimes it's better off to have agents, but in our environment, for most of our servers, it's really good to have the agentless. For a few of them we would prefer to have an agent because, from the network perspective, it's sometimes difficult to allow external Device42 discovery to have access to some devices for security reasons. The security team does not allow certain kinds of access. That's why it's easier if the secured server can have a call to an external service, rather than an external service calling the server.

Device42 is a main part of our processes. We need reliability, not only in terms of the data but with the solution itself. It's really difficult when we have 10 minutes of Device42 downtime because none of our teams can work for those 10 minutes, and it's more time lost if there is longer downtime. An improvement would be to have a cluster implementation of Device42 to have high-availability and ensure that we don't have downtime in case of failure.

Also, when we do an upgrade, it's mandatory to shut down the application. It takes 10 or 15 minutes to upgrade and it's once a month. It's not a big deal, but if it were possible to have no downtime, that would be better. We can plan for upgrades, but we try to have 24/7 availability in our organization, so there really isn't a good time to shut down service. Doing so always has an impact. We have teams around the world.

We were early adopters and we have used Device42 since 2013.

The scalability is pretty good. It's possible to have many devices in Device42, but we can see some limits. For a very large organization, it would be a little bit difficult to use Device42 because it's a single server. It's not possible to have scalability by load-balancing the load onto different servers. That's one of the reasons why we decided to have four different implementations, to be sure that we do not have everything on the same server.

We have more than 1,000 users in Device42 and most of them use it for the password management. Some users are using it for audit purposes, for asset management, and to be able to provide reports to senior management.

We have deployed Device42 everywhere. If our organization does not expand the number of devices, we won't need to extend Device42.

Technical support is pretty good. Each time we need them, we can have a call with them. They respond quickly. It's good support.

Before we used Device42 we had nothing except Excel sheets. We began our asset management with Device42.

I was one of the main stakeholders when we decided to choose an asset management tool. When we decided to use Device42 it was mostly because of its ease of use and that it is easy to implement. We had some meetings with other companies that provide asset management tools. With all of them, there would have been months of implementation with an implementation team to help us. It would have been a big project to implement these applications. With Device42 it was easy. It was easy to install, it's easy to manage, and easy to understand how it works. That's one of the things we like with Device42.

Our implementation of Device42 took a few months. After one month we had 80 percent of our infrastructure in Device42, and the last 20 percent took a little bit longer because we had to discuss things with security. Within three months we had 90 percent in the solution and, after six months, we had 100 percent in it.

We were looking to have automated discovery to be sure that when new devices come in, they would be automatically ID'ed in Device42 and we wouldn't need someone to add them. In one month we automated most of the implementation.

We did it ourselves, and that's one of the reasons we decided to use Device42. All of the other products asked us to use an integrator or a reseller or someone who would help us. Device42 was easy, so we decided to run with it. We were able to manage everything by ourselves.

It's difficult to say if we have seen ROI. We need the functionalities so we pay for the service. It did not replace something that might have been more expensive.

We pay $100,000 per year. There are no costs in addition to the standard licensing fees.

The biggest lesson we have learned from using this solution is that if we want to have clear asset management, we need to have the same processes, policies, and rules in each part of our organization. If each part of the organization works only on its side, it's really difficult to reconcile asset management. That's why each technical team that owns devices has to share their processes and work in the same manner. When that is done, it's really easy to have good asset management.

We don't use the solution's Application Dependency Mapping. In our organization, it's too difficult for a team to be able to provide information on application mapping and to be able to reconcile what Device42 discovers with what we have. So we decided not to use it.

Device42 does not affect our security. We try to use it so that it fits within our security requirements.

In the past, one person was working on maintaining Device42 and that was enough. But now that Device42 is critical for our organization, we have two people working on it to be sure that when someone is on holiday, a second person is there in case of trouble. They work as managers of asset management.

I would rate it at nine out of 10. It's difficult to give a 10 because it's always possible to do better, but it's a pretty good solution.

We wanted a rich database of all of our assets and multiple teams were keeping different Excel spreadsheets, etc. About two years ago, a consulting firm recommended Device42. We took a look at it and have been using it ever since. We collapsed a lot of information into it, then week by week more teams adopt it.

We are using the latest version that they have out right now.

Having general software inventory in one location has helped us tremendously, even around Service Desk. Our Service Desk tool integrates into the asset management. When a user calls with a problem, we can link their device to it. Then we see a history: 

• Do they have old, aging hardware?
• Does it need to be replaced?
• Is this model continuing calling in for issues?

We have been able to make educated decisions about replacing hardware and software due to this solution.

We are doing discovery of cloud asset management devices. This has given us more rich enhanced data to make decisions on where to place things based on like-minded services.

I have used the solution in conjunction with audits of our IT assets. I am able to pull reports in minutes instead of it taking days of putting everything together.

It has helped us identify some areas of security enhancements.

The asset inventory and software inventory are the most valuable features. The asset inventory is great because previously we had devices all over the place. We have been able to do multiscans to find devices that we didn't know about, which was great. From the software aspect, we have been able to keep a detailed history of software that has been installed on machines and version controls. Then, we are able to make educated decisions on, "Is this software being installed as a one-off and part of the corporate image or should it be deprecated as the software gets older where we plan to do upgrades this way?"

The solution’s automatic IT asset discovery and inventory functionality was great when we first implemented it. We made some changes that didn't allow us to use some of those automated discovery tools. However, the software was good and adapted to our needs. We just went in a different way using the same software. The asset discovery is very comprehensive. We found a lot of information that we didn't even know we had.

We use the solution’s Application Dependency Mapping. It has been able to help us with troubleshooting. We now have a deeper understanding of how our applications talk to each other.

It would be nice for the agent to have an installer versus a single file across multiple systems.

It'd be nice to have the reporting be a bit more user-friendly. The workflow could be a bit more intuitive. Though, the support has been great on helping us when we have ran into educational issues.

About two years.

It is very stable and updated on a regular basis with new enhancements and features using a very agile approach. Every week, we can get a feature in the pipeline that we/they have needed.

We require two people for deployment and maintenance for Device42: a network administrator and a dedicated system admin.

It is very scalable and have had no issues. We are running the device across multiple divisions, organizations, and regions across the globe. Device42 is everywhere in our company. There are 30 to 40 users, e.g., help desk administrators and auditors. We will potentially be using it for vendor management down the road. Also, the DevOps teams is using it for information.

In the beginning, the solution did not reduce the time spent managing IT assets since we didn't do any management. There was a lot of turnover of teams with every team doing it differently. Therefore, we had to focus a lot on it. Now, it's part of the day-to-day management.

We previously used Excel spreadsheets.

I took over the solution last year. I set up the whole thing up again from the ground up at that time. The setup was straightforward. The documentation was there. You just followed a few steps to get it up and running.

When we redeployed, it took approximately a week. It took a half a day worth of build, then a week to discover all our assets.

Our implementation strategy in the beginning was to start with each office and redefine what their needs looked like, then scan each network which had devices on it.

As we have grown the system, less time has been focused on managing managing IT assets. We don't need dedicated teams to do this anymore. We have been able to reduce this role to a shared resource across multiple teams.

We have seen ROI. We have been able to streamline multiple teams having different options on how to do asset management and doing different things into one process for every team.

Our licensing costs are on a yearly basis.

You should definitely implement this product. In a normal environment, it is a set and forget it type of thing.

In the beginning, the solution’s agentless approach to asset discovery was very impressive because we heavily utilized it. However, as we made decisions on the network to not trust any device unless it was on VPN, agentless didn't work for us. They had a solution that was good for us, so we were able to pivot to an agent getting that same deep, rich information. In some areas, we do run it agentless. It's just more often we are relying on the agent because of our own infrastructure changes.

Asset management is a difficult, time consuming thing. However, Device42 has helped me streamline that so I can focus on other areas that need improvement.

I would rate this product as a 10 (out of 10).