Device42 Reviews

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.

We use it for asset tracking, cabinet modeling, data center modeling, and we use it for asset disposition and to keep track of our spare parts.

It makes it easier for anyone to find an asset in a cabinet and it makes it easier for me to figure out if I have room and/or power in a cabinet to rack servers.

It has also reduced the time spent managing our IT assets by a good 40 to 50 percent. We have also used the solution in conjunction with audits of our IT assets and, in that context, it saves a lot of time when everything's right there at your fingertips. I would estimate that it saves 50 to 60 percent, in terms of time, when doing audits.

The most valuable part is the ease of use. There's no training involved. It's pretty simple and straightforward.

I also like the inventory functionality. I don't know that we're using it exactly how it's made to be used, but it works for us.

The asset discovery goes out and finds new devices and puts them under Unknown Devices, and then we go in and have to fix it and change it to what it is. It works really well. The fact that it's continuous is convenient. We don't have to worry about it. It just works.

My biggest problem with the product is the upgrades. First, we have to do them manually and second, not this last time but the time before that, we actually had to build a new VM to deploy the solution again. We had to back it up and then restore it to the new version. That was inconvenient.

I would also like the ability to bulk-delete. The application is great, for the most part. There are just a few little bugs and quirks that are annoying to me.

I've been using Device42 for almost five years.

I have no complaints. It's still working.

My boss loves the fact that he can run API commands and get information that way. He's a huge API-guy, so he loves it.

I've used Device42's technical support. It's okay.

They had something called Rack Monkey. It was the most trivial program I've ever seen so that's why we looked for something else.

In the beginning, I didn't really know a whole lot about it, so it was a little complex. But once I got a good understanding, it was very intuitive.

We were up and running within a couple of days and when I reached out for some assistance, Raj Jalan actually called me. He's the CEO of the company and it was really nice to get that kind of support.

Our implementation strategy was to get it up and running as fast as possible.

I deployed it myself and there are two of us who maintain it. One guy on the network team does all of the discovery stuff and I'm a senior infrastructure engineer.

I would think we have seen ROI with Device42. It saves us time every day when we need to look up stuff. I can't put a price tag on it but it's very useful.

We evaluated other options but that was quite some time ago. We chose Device42 for its ease of use and quick stand-up.

My advice would be "do it." It worked for us. Made my life easy.

You get what you pay for. It's a good product and I enjoy it and we don't mind paying for it.

I, myself, don't use the IP discovery a whole lot. One of the guys from our network team uses that. I know it helps them a lot. Similarly, with the Application Dependency Mapping, I know my boss has looked at it a couple times. I can't really say that we use it, but it's there. It's a great function that gives us a very good view of our network.

There are 2,500 to 3,000 users who have access to it. They're mostly just adding and updating inventory. When they deploy a new server they go in and give it a name and add stuff into it.

As far as I know, we don't have any plans to change things. Device42 is our solution.

I use the solution for physical assets management, IT management, and application dependency mapping.

There was a lack of information about what was installed in the data center and how they interconnect with each other. We had the information in Excel before. We installed Device42 to get the information from our environment into the Device42 database.

The solution supports our compliance and audit processes. We take a lot of advantage of it. We use the reporting to audit institutions. We can send the queries and get the reports directly from the tool. I rate the process an eight out of ten. I would have rated it ten if the product had AI features.

The solution is agentless. Application dependency mapping is a valuable feature. These are the two reasons why I believe the product is very beneficial. Before, we had servers. Every time we made some changes to the service, there was a gap between what was expected from the server and what the server was doing.

Network visualization is a basic function. The information is gathered using SNMP. It's not different from others that I've known before. A main aspect of network discovery is that we use it to manage the IP addresses. We use that feature because it is part of the core module.

The product must provide AI features. It would be very useful if I could create datasets or queries from an AI interface.

I have been using the solution for six years.

I rate the tool’s stability a ten out of ten.

The tool’s scalability is very nice. We must speak to the vendor, and they will send a new key code. We can install it and start working. It's easy to scale the product.

The technical support team is very responsive. Everything has an answer. If something can’t be done, it is because the product doesn’t do it.

Positive

We were using another tool. We wanted to integrate an asset management solution with it, but we couldn’t do it because we had to manually set the relationship between all the assets. It was time-consuming. So, we switched to Device42.

The initial setup is very easy. I rate the ease of setup a nine out of ten. It would be very easy to set up if we knew how things work.

I will recommend the tool to others. Overall, I rate the solution a nine out of ten.

It's our CMDB for the whole company.

The way Device42 has improved our organization is that we now have visibility into our on-premises infrastructure. Previously, we didn't have any access to or visibility into it because we had consultancy firms. With this solution, we're able to see what is going on inside. That visibility helps us understand the impact of a problem.

It has also saved us money because we no longer have to pay the baselines of the contracts with consultancy firms. It is saving us 2 percent, but that is a lot.

The features that I have found to be most valuable in the product are the

• service discovery
• business applications
• application mapping between services.

The agentless discovery is very important because I don't have to install agents on every host.

Also, the Insights+ component is useful for us because it does business application mapping and helps us visualize it. It saves us time because we don't have to hunt for data. When I get a request, I go to Device42 and get the data. It saves me the time of writing emails to different people to get the information.

The breadth and depth of the solution's discovery of IT asset information means the system does most of the work, but they need to work on improving the database discovery part, especially for Oracle Exadata.

Also, the analytics reporting is very good, but there is a little bit missing when it comes to documentation about custom queries.

Another area for improvement is being able to distinguish the services on the individual machines. There's a lot of data and you can't map it. We need to clear the data. Because there is so much, we're not able to get what we want.

I have been using Device42 for almost two years.

It's stable.

We haven't tried to scale it. We use the solution across multiple locations, on-premises and in the cloud, and for multiple teams and organizational units. The number of end-users who access the Device42 dashboard in our organization is about 20.

The technical support is okay, but the response times are a little bit slow.

Neutral

This is our first such solution.

The initial setup was straightforward and very easy. We have the main appliance on GCP, with the agents distributed all around: on-premises and in other cloud environments. The deployment took half a day. I did the deployment myself, and then the networking team opened all the required ports and did the user creation, et cetera.

There is no maintenance required, as far as I am aware, other than making sure it's up to date.

We have not yet seen a return on investment.

It's in the top-three most expensive solutions in terms of cost, but it has all the features that are needed. The pricing is okay. It may be a little bit expensive for other companies, but we had the budget. That kind of pricing is normal because the product has a lot of functionalities.

My advice is use it, but carefully evaluate the database side because it does not support a lot of database types.

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.

The tool helps with network scanning and the discovery of asset management. 

We faced outages in the data center before implementing Device42. The tool has improved it and helped us with asset management. 

I like the tool's agentless discovery feature. The tool configures the devices based on the documentation provided. I am also impressed with its auto-discovery feature. The tool also keeps on tracking and finds whatever is in the environment. 

I would like to see API management as an additional feature in the tool's future versions. It will give more API security. 

I have been working with the tool for five months. 

The tool's technical support is very knowledgeable. They helped me with my queries. 

Positive

I would rate the tool an eight out of ten. You need to use the product for one month and see if it offers the best value for your company. 

I used Device42 for security purposes during my internship over the summer. I was tasked with trying to figure out a way to manage and secure the assets that the company I was working for had. We noticed that most of them were actually not secure, and also found out that Device42 was not up-to-date either.

Because I was using the solution to track our assets and see which ones were secure and which were not, so that we could better secure the latter, just having them all in one place definitely made it easier in some ways.

If I hadn't had Device42, I would have had to manually go through each asset, and that would not have been fun.

The most valuable feature was the ability to look up the different assets and see the different attributes that each one has, as well as being able to compare them to other assets.

It's also very important that the software provides agentless discovery.

In addition, I really enjoyed the dashboards and visuals. It was easy to navigate.

A lot of our assets didn't have information, which either meant someone wasn't keeping things up-to-date or just we didn't have enough information to go on. But for what we did have, the analytics were decent.

It was hard to know which assets I'd already looked at because if I looked up another asset with a similar name, they would still pop up. I would have to make sure I was looking at the right asset. The search function should be improved.

I used Device42 for about four weeks.

Device42 did crash on me a couple of times. I'm going into the security field and I'm an information systems major, but you can't really be working on a website designed for security and have it randomly crash on you.

This may be very cliche, but do your research on it first. Not every solution is perfect, we all know that. But if it doesn't match your needs, then it's probably useless. Having to go back and redo all the work you already did would be a disaster.

We primarily use the solution for asset management and use inventory management and asset discovery quite frequently.

We haven't been used to it for a long while, however, it's actually essential for our customers. 

Device42 is a really impressive tool. Their discovery seems to be really coordinated, in the sense that we have different types of discoveries we can actually run. That's one unique aspect about them. 

The way they manage the assets, in general, is actually impressive, and the way they recognize, the software is good. 

The fact that you really don't need to put an agent on is helpful. That's really an impressive aspect of the product overall.

The initial setup is easy.

The stability is good. 

The pricing is reasonable.

They always say and recommend that we should run one remote connector, and one discovery service for about 500 to 1,000 devices, which actually means the productivity of this remote connector. Even then, probably in different subnets, they'll also advise you to have different connectors. If they could make it so their remote connector could do as much as 10,000 devices, that would be better. Just one remote connector to manage about 10,000 devices and still not reduce its productivity would be perfect. That would be a bigger picture item. Then, we wouldn't need to install or set up more than one remote connector on different subnets. That's one thing they could do to improve their services.

It would be nice if they could add support tickets into IT service management.

We've been dealing with the solution for a while. We've been partners for years now, and are quite comfortable with the product.

The solution is quite stable. We haven't had issues with bugs or glitches and it doesn't crash or freeze on us. 

Technically, the solution scales. The only issue I have with this is that it needs various remote connectors to get as much information as you need. Depending on the number of assets, you can just add connectors and you're good to go.

Technical support is okay. I'd rate it at a six out of ten. The device response is quick.

The initial installation is easy. Where it gets complex is when you're configuring the environment for the customer. The initial installation, therefore, is really straight up. It's just handing the IOS to the virtual machines, and you're good to go. It's the subsequent configurations on the platform, where you have the platform, and there's configuring, you're discovering assets, et cetera, that's when it gets difficult.

I'm a reseller.

I'm more on the technical side and don't really handle billing and payments. Therefore, I don't have any details on licensing or costs. 

That said, my understanding is that it is cheaper than other enterprise products on the market.

This solution would work best for organizations with 1,000 to 2,000 devices. However, large organizations, that may have 10,000 or 20,000 devices may not be best suited to this product. 

Most of the organizations, especially the financial institutions here in this country, are always on-premise. That includes our organization. 

I'd rate the solution at a seven out of ten.