Device42 Reviews

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).

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).

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).

We mainly use it to keep an inventory of everything, because we've got 77 offices and data centers globally. We use it mainly to keep track of assets we have in cabinets and the like. Also, some of the other teams use it for the auto-discovery and license renewals. Device42 tells you when a license is about to expire on a server. 

I'm sure there are a lot more uses but because I work in data center management, and from my side we mainly use it just for inventory. We're aware of exactly what we have, where it is, whether it's powered on it, whether it's in service, etc.

Before Device42, the company didn't have any kind of asset management software at all. So if there were to be a fire in an office, for example, and we would want to make a claim on insurance, we would have had no idea what, exactly, we had in that office. Now that we have Device42, we're integrating every single office into it so we know exactly what's where. That's a huge improvement.

It has also reduced the amount of time spent on managing our IT assets. It has probably halved the time it takes to do the management side of it.

I think the auto-discovery is very good. It works well. I don't use it too much myself, but from the feedback I get from other teams — they use it a lot — it seems to work really well. From what I understand it's very comprehensive because it picks up everything: all the IP address ranges and locations, as long as we've input the devices correctly. It is very comprehensive and picks up a lot of stuff.

Also, the continuous asset discovery is good because it means not having to manually input all the small data, such as IP addresses, leases, etc. It helps and saves us a lot of time.

The DCIM makes everything easier. If we need to do something remotely, or if we need to get an engineer out to a comms room somewhere, we can tell them exactly where it is, what it's called, and what's patched into it. It ensures that people don't make mistakes.

The overall speed could be improved. Sometimes it's very slow to do certain functions. General navigation is quick but if I want to delete an asset from a cabinet it does take a while. And if I'm doing it in bulk — say, for example, if we have one cabinet that has 20 servers in — if I want to remove all 20 servers, I have to do them individually, which is a bit time-consuming. If there were a way that I could just bulk-remove everything from there, that would definitely save some time.

Also, I know there is a function where you can add cables in Device42, as in you can say: So-and-so port on this server is connected to this port on that server, for example. But that's quite a drawn-out process, trying to use the spreadsheet just to add a single cable. I think that could be simplified a lot. You could just have a column for the device name, the port, and the end-device port. If it could be populated that way it would be a lot easier. At the moment, the spreadsheet that you have to use to add cables has a whole bunch of columns which I think are irrelevant and shouldn't be there.

I've been using Device42 for about 18 months now.

The stability is good. There have been a couple of times where it's been down for maintenance, but it's never down for too long. 

I believe Device42 has some software where it clears out old or redundant stuff after a while. We've had it happen that things we put into cabinets have suddenly disappeared. However, I'm not sure if this is actually a Device42 issue. It might be somebody on our end doing something wrong.

From what I understand, it's very scalable. It's very easy to scale up on it as well. But it's more the app team that would know that kind of stuff. I deal more with the DCIM stuff.

It's being used very extensively in our company. As I said, we've got 77 offices globally and about half of them have been populated fully in Device42. The rest still need to be audited, so we are going to be increasing the usage of it. It just takes a bit of time.

Technical support is excellent. I've used it a couple of times and it is really good. They always reply very quickly and they always give you a very simple way of doing what it is you need to. I would give technical support a 10 out of 10.

We have seen ROI with Device42. It might not be easy to see but, for example, when we have had stuff go down we now know exactly where it is so we can fix it a lot quicker. Before, we might not necessarily have known and would have had to do a lot more searching. There's definitely a return on investment in that sense, but I can't really put a monetary value on it.

Before Device42 we trialed dcTrack for a little bit, but it was over-complicated in terms of usability. You would really need to do a training course on how to use it properly, whereas Device42 is a lot more user-friendly. So we ended up going with Device42 because a lot of people in the company do you use it. It's not like it's a select few people. Most people have access to it: the server teams, the network teams.

Device42 is user-friendly in terms of navigating through all the pages. Everything's very simple. If we want to find out, for example, what we have in a comms room in Bahrain, we just click on the Buildings tab, scroll down to Bahrain, and it will have the comms room on there. We can then have a look. Whereas with dcTrack, doing that was a lot more complex.

Be very thorough with it. Make sure you put in everything you need to put in and make sure the auto-discover function works properly.

The biggest lesson I've learned from using Device42 is the importance of keeping it up to date and taking out redundant stuff. Especially with the auto-discover, if I've decommissioned something but not taken it out of Device42, the auto-discover will still think something is there and that creates a bit of a problem for us internally.

In my department, there are only two of us in data center management. But the whole network team use Device42, as do the whole server team, as well as security and the app team. Company-wide, some 150 to 200 people have access to it. I'm not sure how many of them actually use it often; probably about half that number. 

In terms of updates — as in if we get new assets coming in or coming out — that's mainly my thing. In terms of the monitoring side of it, that would be the network team. They use SolarWinds, which is linked and will alert them if any device has gone down and that is linked to Device42.

Also, any time we do an audit of IT assets, the results are updated in Device42. We try to maintain a complete record of exactly what we have, although that's proving a bit difficult in certain offices which are harder to get to. We have offices in places like Ecuador and Chile and we're having to rely on people onsite, but there isn't always an IT presence there. We're having to rely on general office staff to try and give us an audit of what's in there. So from our side it might not be fully comprehensive.

I would rate it at eight out of 10. It's very good but it's not perfect. Nothing is. I'd probably give it a ten if it were quicker at doing certain things or if certain functions were more simplified. But it's a very good product.

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).

It's a configuration management database that allows you to track assets and identify potential points of failure. We wanted a tool to map which servers were connected to what network devices so we could troubleshoot if a device went down and know what the dependencies were. Device42 can also monitor service configurations.

We had hoped to use Device42 to solve IT problems faster, but I was laid off before we fully implemented it. 

The topology layout is the most valuable feature. The IT asset discovery was fairly thorough. Device42 is still a growing technology, but it has an active user base and decent customer support. The data center infrastructure management features are essential.

Configuring rPDUs in the data center for Device42 required us to add multiple discovery jobs. The rPDUs were referred to the ISPDUs and daisy-chained. They would automatically assign a unique SMP port, but Device42 didn't allow SMP ranges, so we had to create a discovery job for each rPDU individually. We submitted a feature request to mitigate that.

I have used Device42 for about nine months.

I rate Device42 a 10 out of 10 for stability.

Scalability wasn't an issue.

I rate Device42 support a 10 out of 10. They are professional and resolve issues quickly. 

Positive

We installed Device42 on a virtual server and deployed remote collectors. The initial setup was easy. We handled the deployment in-house. After the deployment, it ran by itself, but we had to install periodic upgrades. 

I rate Device42 a seven out of ten.

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).

In the beginning, we were looking to use it as an IPAM device but we saw all the benefits in having control of the assets, the racks, and how the physical servers are connected to the switches. We set up our data center with all the racks inside and all the devices inside the racks. 

So at first, we used it for IPAM, but after that we constructed the building with the rooms and the racks. So IT inventory is the second purpose of this tool. We use it to track how VLANs and our different virtual devices are connected and to inventory VMware and Xen virtual machines. 

But the main purpose is IPAM and inventory of the physical devices. In the case of networking devices, we are using SNMP, and with virtual devices we use an administrator-user to check different aspects of the ESXi in VMware.

The solution itself is a virtual machine over a SAN server and it's running in our data center.

We were working with Excel sheets and they were not automatic and were difficult to administrate and update. It required manual work every time we needed to add new hardware or new virtuals. With the automatic discovery in the tool, we have been able to leave these Excel sheets behind.

The continuous asset discovery is great. For example, a few months ago we installed new racks with new servers and, with automatic discovery, all the new racks are showing inside the tool. The people who have a password to get into the tool can check what kind of hardware was installed and how many virtual machines are inside the servers. That's great.

The solution's CMDB, ITAM, and DCIM features create a single source of IT truth in our environment. For us this has had a very good impact. It's easier for our managers and others who consume this tool. We can show to the rest of the teams how things have become more visible throughout the company.

Device42 has also saved us a lot of time, not necessarily in managing the devices but in collecting the devices. And with the inventory tool, we discovered that we have a lot of old things configured in the devices. That saved us a lot of time because, for example, we had old VLANs around that had been forgotten. With the tool, we can discover which devices have old configurations and we can remote to them and remove these configurations. If we didn't have the tool, we might have to go into each, device by device, numbering in the hundreds or thousands of devices, and check if they have this configuration in them. But with the Device42, we have this information in a few minutes. A task that might take two or three hours a day can be achieved in 40 minutes.

In security, we can check specific things that have to be configured in devices. While the security team is not 100 percent involved in the project, they have started to use the tool to check different security things on the networking devices. With the inventory check, they can see if a specific configuration in various routers has already been configured.

The most valuable feature is the part that enables us to draw or build our rack and represent all the devices and interactively click on a physical device to "see" inside it. We can see the virtual machines inside a given server and all the details about them, with the storage connected to them, etc. From a global, data center perspective, you can see the rack and you can click and see all the virtuals running inside. That's a cool thing.

Overall, the automatic IT asset discovery is very comprehensive.

The solution's agentless approach to asset discovery is very important for us because installing agents on physical or virtual devices is not easy in our company. We have to escalate these kinds of things to different levels of security. Not having to install agents makes it easy for us.

While the automatic IT asset discovery is great, the first time using it can be confusing when you are configuring the SNMP. I don't remember for sure but I don't think it said "SNMP community," it said "password". The first time I used it I was thinking about communities but the tool said "password," and when you say "password" in SNMP you are thinking about SNMP version 3. This is the only thing that is confusing, although there were some devices that were not included in the discovery.

If we count the PoC time, we have been using it for about one year.

For us, it's very stable.

There were some problems at the beginning because the Xen server was not supported. We started with VMware, but we were migrating from that where to Xen. But the problem lasted for two days and then we fixed it quickly.

We haven't reached the solution's limits. The solution's collectors give it very good scalability because you can separate the manager from the collectors.

We continue to check its capabilities. We plan to expand to another, small data center, a location with, say, 10 racks, with a rack dedicated to communications — such as a firewall, router, and switches — and the rest of the racks for servers. Expansion depends on the plans of our regional offices in other countries. The idea is to test if we can install info-collectors in these offices to give us information about their assets. We are planning these kinds of projects. Maybe we can expand our usage in this way.

Technical support is very good. The support person we talked with was very kind. For example, we opened a ticket for a specific case and the support person who took the case explained more than we asked about. That was good.

The setup was easy. We are used to using these kinds of tools — not specifically inventory or IPAM tools — but we have installations of solutions that collect things and give us information. So for us it was very easy.

The PoC was ready within one week, where the data was in the system and we got information from it. In production it has taken more time because we have different kinds of devices and every device or every brand requires a new configuration. For example, HPE enclosure devices take a lot of time to configure, although VMware was easy to configure as were network devices. But when you move to a new brand you may have more complex tasks to do.

When we did the PoC, we focused on it as an IPAM solution. In the PoC we saw the benefits of the hardware inventory. So we changed plans in the middle of the PoC. When we focused on IPAM at the beginning, everything looked fine, it was quick. But when we saw that the inventory is available in this tool we moved the PoC toward the hardware inventory. So the deployment took more time than we planned because of the change of plan.

We did it ourselves.

We have seen ROI because it saves us a lot of time, and time is money.

For our budget it's okay. It's not an expensive tool, although we are not used to paying for software because we are using a lot of open-source software. But within our networking budget, we needed an IPAM and it was easy for us to justify this kind of tool, given its cost.

We evaluated KiwiTech, but only for IPAM. We also checked out some free tools.

The main advantage of Device42 was the ability to have IPAM and another solution in the same tool. The rest of the vendors had different tools for different purposes. There were different KiwiTech tools for IPAM and for hardware inventory. It's not easy to administrate four or five tools. It's easier to administrate only one tool. This was an important advantage for us. Also, the discovery process was very easy with Device42 and more complex in the other tools.

Test it. You may discover that tools that you hadn't thought about. As I said, we tested it only for the IPAM, but we saw that we also needed the hardware inventory. If you do a PoC, you may discover that you need other features that are part of Device42.

The biggest lesson I have learned from using this solution is to stop using Excel sheets. That was number-one. And the visibility that we have made available with Device42, to the rest of our company, has had a very positive impact on our team.

In terms of the automated asset discovery, we have had to configure and customize some things because, for us, some aspects of the virtual machines and the physical devices are important and these were not reflected in the inventory. Since then, everything has looked good. We achieved visibility of all the parts that we need to see.

There are five administrators using Device42 in our company. These five participated in the development of the solution in our company from the beginning and they maintain it. There are also three networking guys, two sysadmin guys, and the rest of the technical area's team members are users, including security and security compliance users.

I would rate Device42 at seven out of 10 because we need to fix it to find the devices that are not discovered.