Device42 Reviews

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.

Our use case for Device42 is to capture all our infrastructure in a single tool. We need the ability to have that view of where our infrastructure is: servers, storage, network equipment, and applications sitting on top of servers. Our use case is to have that single pane for where all that is.

When we're doing patch management or when we're reviewing kit (end-of-life), it gives us the ability to manage the data center from a desk. Before we had Device42, we'd have spreadsheets or somebody would have to continually to go to the data center and physically have a look at what's available where. If somebody bought or wanted to buy new kit — if they needed, for example, six U's of space, 10 network ports and five power ports — we'd have to visit the data center and have a look at where we could fit that in. With Device42, we don't need to do any of that. We just need an internet connection to get to the Device42 appliance and we can see where the space is and what the power availability is, as well as what network capacity we've got, in which rack. Everything is there.

The continuous discovery of the infrastructure means we are able to review, and we are able to mitigate things in a quicker fashion than we would have previously. If somebody had asked us five years ago how many Server 2008's we have, because we've got a vulnerability and we need to know how many servers we need to patch, it would have taken us some time to find that out. We would have had to go through all the different platforms and find out where we're hosting 2008 Servers. With Device42, we can go in and, within 10 minutes, tell the business how many servers we need to patch.

Also, the solution's CMDB, ITAM, and DCIM features create a single source of IT truth in our environment. These too make it a lot easier for the operations team. When incidents come up on the operations monitor, that team can easily ascertain who the owner is of these devices, where they sit, and who's responsible for them. They ensure the correct people get things looked at much quicker.

In addition, we're currently on a cloud project, so we have been using the solution to assess what we have in our environment, what we want to take to the new environment, what we need to drop in terms of hardware, the age of the hardware, as well as end-of-life operating systems or applications. It has helped us a lot with getting that kind of data.

We use the solution’s Application Dependency Mapping and that gives us some insight into a number of things. For example, if we're looking at a server that currently has a problem, the operations team can look at the Application Dependency Mapping and see what the server is part of in terms of the service. There may be a number of things that are connecting to it or that it's connecting to. That mapping gives us that insight into how parts of the infrastructure are talking to each other.

Previously, when it came to asset management, people would have been updating spreadsheets or documents about where they've moved things or what they've been doing, or they would have had to visit multiple areas to find out certain information. Device42 turns that into a hands-off approach to everything. We know it has been doing discovery continuously over evenings and weekends. So whatever data we are pulling out is fairly up to date. The time saved by using Device42, across the teams, is easily equivalent to a couple of people at least. A full-time member of staff would normally work seven-and-a-half hours every day so you're looking at 146 hours a month of savings, times two, of people not having to visit data centers to do things like capacity planning, auditing, etc.

We also use Device42 for internal audits. In that context, it saves a considerable amount of time. If we were to do it manually, we're looking at a couple of weeks' worth of work, but if we're doing it in Device42 we're probably looking at a couple of days' worth, maximum.

Device42 can be used for network discovery, migration, CMDB, and data center infrastructure management. It discovers your on-premise and cloud infrastructure. 

You can deploy Device42 on the cloud or on-premises. It's a Hyper-V or VMware virtual machine. Customers typically deploy it on VMware, but it can also be in AWS or Azure. You can put it wherever you want as long as you open the ports on your firewall.

Customers deploy Device42 to discover their entire infrastructure. It can be based in one location or several. You have a primary appliance and remote collectors. If you've got multiple data centers, you can place a remote collector in each that talks back to the primary appliance. If you want, you can deploy the collectors to specific sites or areas of the network. It's entirely up to the customer.

Device42 has a module called Utilization that runs on devices to show you how servers are being used. If you migrate to Azure or AWS, you can see the resources the server is using versus what has been allocated to the device. For example, if a server has eight CPUs and 16 gigs of ram, Device42 can tell you whether you need that capacity after you migrate to the cloud. I've run the utilization tool on customers and found they have multiple unused servers switched on and consuming power. They can turn those servers off. 

It has a new component called Insights+ that includes some preset dashboards and they plan to release more that are tailored to specific customer needs in the next few releases. It's a visualization tool that executives can check themselves, so I no longer need to output reports to an Excel spreadsheet and send them to the CEO. 

Insights+ saves some time. I know where to find the data, but it's more convenient for management because a CEO or CTO only needs to input the server name, and all the information comes up. You can see an overview of all your devices, like the number of virtual machines, laptops, desktops, etc. It is all visualized, so it's easier to find all the data on the dashboard than in an Excel spreadsheet. It doesn't necessarily save me time because I'm not the one viewing the reports, but it saves management time because they're easier to read. They don't need to comb through multiple worksheets of data to find what they need. 

Instead of migrating a server, we perform migrations based on applications because many live on the same servers. Device42 uses application dependency mapping to show incoming and outgoing dependencies from a server 

When you're migrating, you start with one application and look at the servers within that application. One application might turn into four, so you end up migrating four applications to save the customer time. Instead of having one server down four weekends in a row, you do it all on one weekend and migrate all of the servers within several applications. Device42 is an efficient migration tool, and you can leverage the utilization tool to see everything inside the device that's being used. The migration features can save you 30-40% of your time because you can see what you're doing. 

Device42 helps us troubleshoot issues faster. For example, in one of my last projects, I was discovering network switches. We got an error during discovery, so I told the customer that the switches were down before they knew themselves. It isn't a monitoring tool per se, but it can do some monitoring that helps the customer. 

It doesn't help you monitor daily, but it helps you understand what you have and the communications between each device. That's where it will help you rather than telling you when a device goes down. It really depends on how you want to use it.

In addition to discovering all your assets. Device42 has built-in CMBD functionality, so people can consolidate their applications. You get CMDB and IP address management built into Device42, so you can get rid of other applications. Other customers use NetBox, but Device42 includes NetBox information, so they got rid of that. 

Device 42 is an upgrade from those other tools because it knows what you've got. There is integration with other tools, but Device42 is close enough to real-time that the integration could potentially be once a day. If something gets upgraded and your information is sent over to ServiceNow, it will always be behind depending on how many times you sync with ServiceNow, whereas Device42 is written in real-time.

We use Device42 to report and manage all the assets on our company's private cloud and compile information on infrastructure like network equipment, virtual machines, etc. 

It's part of the toolset we use to investigate what happens when there is an event or a problem in a customer system. For example, we had a customer environment with 20 or 30 servers. Each server can be online or offline and has various resources. Device42 displays all that data in real time. If a customer has downtime, we can tell what is happening within Device42 and other monitoring tools.

We have hundreds of users. Some work directly with Device42, pulling information from the reports, but we also have some indirect users working with automations Device42 is running behind the scenes.

Device42 is a core solution at my company. Everything uses Device42 data. People in the company use Device42 to understand our needs in the cloud and define automated tasks. It is our source of truth for data manipulation and management in the cloud. We are unaware of what's happening in the cloud without it.

It helps with migration and many other projects involving large amounts of data. Device42 is also our tool for those jobs. It is one of the primary resources we use to execute these projects successfully.

Device42 helps us with decision-making about resources like CPU, memory, hard disks, etc. Using information from the cloud, we can determine if we need to buy more equipment or decommission and replace outdated devices. It significantly speeds up daily tasks. It's hard to quantify in a percentage because it's comparing a manual task to automation. Without Device42, we had to run scripts manually to understand the data assets on the basic level of it. 

We had a customer who was interested in using this solution, and I was involved in the implementation, installation, and support of the tool. One of the customers already had Device42 in their environment and wanted us to support their Device42 environment. They had a clustered environment.

I have also used this tool during the migration process. One of the customers wanted to do a migration. Discovery is the first phase of every migration. For discovering the environment, they used Device42. It was helpful for the migration process. It provides a good level of information from the infrastructure side as well as from the application side. It creates good reports, which are helpful for the cloud migration journey. It also has good dashboards. It supports DOQL. So, you can write SQL queries and get the data you need from the infrastructure side or from the application side. All these things help in the migration process.

It is helpful for asset management. We can discover customers' environments and see the pain areas. The infrastructure of one of the customers was big and segregated. They had one data center in the US and one in India, and they didn't know about the types or number of devices they had. We could collect all this information by using the Device42 discovery tool. It gave a holistic view of a data center or infrastructure. We could see the kind of devices they had and how they were interconnected. We could also see how many data domains they had and how the domains were interconnected. Once we had all this information, we could integrate it with CMDB. 

The best thing is that you can integrate it with different kinds of CMDBs. You can integrate with ServiceNow, BMC Remedy, or Jira. After integrating it with a CMDB, you can push all the discovered information about the servers and network devices into the CMDB, where you maintain all the asset details. CMDB is nothing but an asset management system. All the asset details are coming from the Device42 discovery tool. It is the main and holistic source of information for any asset management system. It is required to update your CMDB or asset management system because the scan happens on a regular basis and you get updated infrastructure details. Therefore, a discovery tool like Device42 is very helpful in your environment for getting the updated inventory of your infrastructure.

It has been helpful for cloud-migration projects. It provides a lot of good information that is helpful for preparing your cloud migration plan. You get good hardware-level and application-level information. You also get all the dependency information. Device42 also provides the current sizing of the device. By looking at the current sizing of the device, you can plan your target sizing. This information or reporting is helpful. There is basically a remote collector that does all the discovery work. It also provides you with the cloud readiness report to see which device is ready to move to the cloud, and it also provides you with a comparison such as which cloud is suitable for the device or whether it should go to Azure, AWS, or Google Cloud. The cloud readiness report helps you to do better migration planning.

The most challenging part of a cloud migration project is the discovery and assessment phase. If you don't have good tools in your hand for the discovery information and assessment report, it takes a lot of time. In a cloud migration project, most time goes into the discovery and assessment phase, but if you have Device42, within 20 days, you get all the discovery, dependency, and sizing data. You also get the cloud readiness report. So, you save 80% to 90% of your time by having all this information readily available to you. If you do all these things manually, it would take you almost six months to collect all this data. 

It has helped to solve day-to-day IT problems faster. Device42 is the main source of information for any CMDB. In the previous IT era, the support team used to do monitoring manually. If a server crashed, they would raise a request or a P1 incident in the ITSM tool. With Device42, all the server information is in the CMDB. We can create automation where if any server is having an issue or has crashed, it can check the details of that server from the CMDB, and through the orchestration tool, it can create a ticket. It raises an alert, and through that alert, it creates a ticket in ITSM. That ticket is automatically assigned to the support team. The support team gets the notification that a P1 ticket has come to the queue and resolves the ticket. If there is a known issue, the orchestration tool can also automatically resolve the problem. For example, if it is a RAM issue and a particular service is stopped, then through automation, you can automatically start that service, and your server is up and running again. So, a lot of time is saved through this automation. It has saved about 70% of the time.

It helps to save costs. You have all your infrastructure information in one place in a CMDB. So, you are not managing anything manually. You are saving the money that you would have had to pay five to six consultants to manage your CMDB. Managing infrastructure is not easy, and you need to put a team together to manage your infrastructure. Device42 manages your infrastructure automatically. 

Its reports help you to consolidate things and close any gaps. It provides a utilization report through which you get to know which server is under-utilized and which server is over-utilized in the environment. You can decommission the servers that are less utilized and save money. For the servers that are more utilized, you can increase the RAM or CPU. So, it helps in reducing the size of your infrastructure and consolidating it. If one server is running an application, you can put that application on another server and decommission the server. You can consolidate the applications that are running on different servers and save money through this approach. Similarly, if you are using multiple network devices for the same purpose, you can consolidate those. You can remove the network devices that are not being utilized or are not useful. By looking at the reports and seeing the information that Device42 gives, you can create a consolidation plan for the server side, as well as the infrastructure side.

We were using Device42 for its configuration database manager, so we imported all of our devices into Device42 and tracked the changes that we made on our devices. We assigned them to owners. We used Device42 for mapping items. 

We tested Device42, moved it to production, and did all our dev on it.

The most helpful feature in Device42 was the import feature, where you can seamlessly import your information into the configuration database manager. It was straightforward to get everything in there. It was also easy to find basic information, such as the RAM and device information.

We have a pretty unique use case, one that isn't used by a lot of companies. We have Azure, AWS, as well as Google Compute Engine in the cloud. We want to have all of those in one central station. That's why we're using Device42, so that it can track all of our IPAM in one place.

We have it on-prem in our data center.

The fact that the solution provides continuous asset discovery is key to our operation because we treat our instances like cattle, not pets. If something breaks in the build or along any step of the way, or something just stops responding, normally we just shoot it and spin another one up. So we have to have something that notices that something remotely changed, and that can then pull that back into the records inside of Device42.

The solution's CMDB, ITAM, and DCIM features absolutely create a single source of IT truth in our environment. That's why we use Device42; because that is what we have to have. When I worked at Bluehost, we were using Act! tables and they were really painful to use as a source of truth because they were never kept up to date. Device42 is much easier to keep up to date. And because of the way it works, and the reports that it has, we all trust it as our IP address management tool. It's the best IPAM tool out there.

And deployment of the solution has definitely increased our security posture because you can only secure what you know about. If you don't know about it, you can't make sure that it's secure.

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.