IBM SevOne Network Performance Management (NPM) Reviews

• UI for administration
• Ease of use
• One price, use as we need, and no add-ons to pay for
• We can leverage JMX extensively as well
• Flow collection allows us to avoid having to use a packet-capture product often.
• The cluster of the solution allows ease of access for our users all over the country and world.

We have closed monitoring gaps and consolidated multiple point solutions from varying vendors as our company has handled mergers and acquisitions.

We have extensive visibility into the performance and tuning of our java via JMX. Historically, we had JVM’s crash, and had no idea why. Now we know and can tune accordingly via data from SevOne.

Historically, before SevOne, we had constant server crashes and locks due to storage volumes filling up. That rarely happens now.

We've used it for eight years. Currently, we use PAS (various models), vPAS, and DNC. We don’t use the log analytics solution at this time.

Initially very easy. The only delay that comes into play depends on the ability of an organization to configure the devices for SNMP if they are locked down. If SNMP is running and open as likely in many organizations, it’s fast and easy.

Compared to others I’ve used, it's very solid and support is extremely responsive if and when we have had any bugs or defects. At times, when we have lived on the leading edge of advanced release code we’ve encountered more, but if we stay back on solid GD versions, it's solid.

This one comes and goes as have the members of our account team. They have all been good at trying to understand our use and business, but some push the sale too hard and that is a turn off. I know this product and know what I need and when.

In the past I have used CA NSM, HP OpenView, Concord, Spectrum, What’s up Gold, Solarwinds, BMC products, to name a few. While some competitors have a feature here or there that might be better on the whole, this is the best solution for us on the market for the dollar with the simplest ramp up and ease of administration.

It was simple as the environment wasn’t configured tightly (no ACLs, etc. to battle). There were some firewall rule changes where we needed to get to the DMZ devices we measure, but that moved quickly here.

We implemented it on our own with SevOne support assistance. For that matter we have been with them long enough that the CTO did our POC work with us.

I don’t recall that we had a hard cost other than the license/purchase, it was soft costs (OpEx labor) and we haven't worked those out, as they are ongoing. We have one employee that spends about 80% of his time working on the platform today. We have two 40K pollers, two HA units, two 10K units with one HA, three VPAS, and one DNC flow collector. So roughly $50,000 in labor annually.

They should speak to other customers to understand how it was implemented and used. Think about best practices on the server/network side so standards and processes can be established at the start to prevent rework later.

We use SevOne to collect and report on network flows.

SevOne improves infrastructure planning by helping us analyze network traffic. We can look at bandwidth for specific endpoints on the customer's network and analyze traffic to identify issues. For example, maybe some connectors are unavailable. We can resolve those issues much faster.

I like SevOne's network flow reporting. 

SevOne could improve its flexibility because it isn't fully customizable and its out-of-the-box configuration doesn't cover all use cases. 

I have used SevOne for one year.

SevOne is a stable solution.

I rate SevOne eight out of 10 for scalability. 

I rate IBM support seven out of 10. There is some room for improvement.

Neutral

I have worked with many vendors as a system integrator, including ExtraHop, VMware, and Arista.

Deploying SevOne isn't complex. You can complete the initial deployment in a few days. It can take one or two weeks to design the reporting and prepare to use the solution. 

I rate IBM SevOne Network Performance Management seven out of 10. 

We use it for network firewalls, routing, and switch monitoring, including performance monitoring and triggering of alerts.

We have it in our internal cloud. It's an on-premises solution.

SevOne is like a Swiss Army Knife. Because of the architecture and its redundancy, when we acquire a new customer and we are figuring out the optimal monitoring solution for them, we can quickly—within a couple of hours—bring in and start monitoring their devices and showing them data with SevOne. We can monitor CPU, memory, bandwidth utilization, errors, and high octet counts. That is very important for our infrastructure and our business.

And SevOne has helped with the planning of transitioning of our network services. It helped us to know how many objects were involved and what was needed, and let us understand how it was going to impact the installation we had, with respect to installing and using the Universal Collector. We were also able to identify the growth needed for our current infrastructure and to secure and install the licenses. It helped us expand the clusters that we have to support the planned growth.

In addition, the solution enables us to take any network metric and convert it to an insight into what's going on, without having to use a bunch of tools or manually determine things. SevOne's ability to convert that information into insights saves us time and gives us a one-stop-shop.

The integration of SevOne data with our ITSM has saved a lot of time with SevOne being the source of truth for most network device states in the organization. We're able to aggregate alerts, as the ITSM tools aggregate notifications from other vendors in our infrastructure. And SevOne's ability to clear itself when a condition is retired, and to notify the ITSM tools, is very helpful. It helps with automation as well. For example, when a router interface goes down and SevOne notifies the ITSM tool, it equally notifies the tool to retire the alarm and clear it when the interface goes back up. That is great. The ITSM integration has also helped to automate the creation of tickets for customers and internal groups.

Among the most valuable features are the detailed data and performance metrics that are stored in the database. It's implemented well, enabling us to access that data over long periods of time.

Also, the event notification helps us understand the health and state of our network.

In addition, on a scale of one to 10, SevOne's data collection functionality is a nine, because of the redundancy and high-availability design of the data storage, and because of the integrity and choice of the database.

It also gives us the closest thing to real-time insight into network performance that we have, with just a 10-second delay. It's very important for us to know the health of the infrastructure very quickly. SevOne has a feature called its High-Frequency Poller. Standard polling is every 300 seconds, but using that feature I have been able to cut that to 10 seconds, giving us the ability to know about a network event no more than 10 seconds after it happens. That helps us to detect network performance issues faster.

And the dashboard is very easy to use. I do a monthly lunch and learn and everybody who joins always learns something. And they always compliment the solution on how easy it is to catch onto and use the tool.

In terms of SevOne's device support for giving us a complete view of network performance, it supports more network monitoring protocols than we support. It is a great tool with support for almost everything we need.

Another useful feature is that SevOne helps us to understand what is normal and what is not normal across our multi-vendor network. Most of the NMS objects are designed in a hierarchical order. There is a standard interface that is universal. However, below that, there is a sub-interface with object types for multiple vendors. So all the objects or metrics are aggregated to a universal object type. It is very easy to identify performance across multiple vendors. And where there are differences, SevOne has a cross-object calculation tool, where you can bring in the same kind of metrics for different vendors and the calculator is able to aggregate multiple objects from them into one object.

It's also easy to integrate SevOne network performance data with your ITSM. It's easy to configure and manage trap destinations, and that's what we use inside SevOne. It's very easy to manage, easy to maintain, and easy to edit. It's a top-down approach where you can configure it for the whole infrastructure cluster, or you can configure it by device groups below the cluster.

High-frequency polling is data-intensive because you're pulling more. If SevOne could figure out a way to manage the impact of high-frequency polling on the system, that would be very popular.

I've been using IBM SevOne Network Performance Management for eight years.

SevOne is one of the most stable monitoring tools I have worked on. It's stable because every database and every appliance is backed up three ways, which is a little bit more than most companies do. Each appliance is backed up by its peer and also backed up to the cluster master.

It's very easy to scale because you just add a peer. It's been the easiest to grow. Internally, that is one of the selling points to other teams. If we need to grow with a new appliance peer, the turnaround is very fast.

We have more than 1,000 users because all the network engineers that have LDAP access are automatically integrated into SevOne. Other users' roles include technical account managers who manage the relationships with the customers whose infrastructure we monitor. We also have internal security teams that monitor the security equipment with SevOne, and network management systems engineers who use SevOne to troubleshoot problems in a network.

We use the solution for a lot of our large customers, to monitor their infrastructures for them. We use it to monitor almost every network asset in our company as well. We use it extensively.

In terms of maintenance of the solution, for the last five years, I have been the primary person responsible. SevOne allows me to do my work, which would normally take about five people to do. I am able to do it very well with all the help that I get from SevOne support.

I've worked on this platform in two major telcos and I've worked with newer support staff as well as seasoned support staff. If their staff doesn't have the skill for, or understanding of, what is needed, they respond very well to the critical level of the ticket and bring in any resource necessary to help identify the problem and turn it around very quickly. That's been very helpful and very rewarding. They deserve a 10 out of 10.

Positive

The initial setup of SevOne is very straightforward, due to the architecture of the platform.

We have different installations of SevOne and they do different things. The quickest deployment took about a month, including planning and securing internal virtual environments and licensing. But with respect to SevOne itself, the turnaround for deployment is about two weeks.

Our implementation strategy is to work with the support staff and the SevOne developers to run with it. All the assets, meaning the virtual environment, are secured internally and all the firewall ports needed are implemented internally. But we do the deployment of the instances hand-in-hand with SevOne support.

We have definitely seen ROI using SevOne. For example, the tool has the ability to put the devices that we're monitoring into a maintenance state, which automatically puts the SevOne alerts into "snooze." We have customers that work with us during their maintenance, and they notify us to place their devices in maintenance states inside SevOne so that they don't get notifications. That has helped us to build better, continuous relationships. It's another opportunity for a relationship with our customers.

It also comes with out-of-the-box reports, and they help with time-to-value.
They serve as a proof of concept or a proof of configuration that we can use to design other reports. It's really great to have those examples, out-of-the-box. And we are able to quickly edit them.

For the value that you get from SevOne, it's worth the price. There are a lot of cheaper alternatives on the market, and even free options. But they require more staff, more resources, and engineers with more advanced knowledge of monitoring. That's what makes SevOne worth the price.

In addition to the standard costs, we pay for support. And because we have installations in a number of countries, especially in Europe, there are additional costs for the installations in those regions, costs that are based on the different forms of taxes. If you just have an installation in one location, the cost structure is straightforward.

Locate a SevOne sales engineer in your region and identify which products you need, in the suite of NMS tools, for the problems you're trying to solve. Work toward a proof of concept to realize the value, and usually, you'll easily see the benefits after going through those steps.

The biggest lesson I have learned from using SevOne is its ability to support SNMP, ICMP, and different data across objects, and to support custom objects. There is no limit to solving any problem because it supports custom and non-standard networking protocols. It's amazing, and SevOne makes it very easy to do that. It makes it hard to look at other vendors if they don't have all these capabilities.

Our company provides managed services to our global customers for our networks. We also sell our WAN networks and provide managed services on the LAN network. We use SevOne to look at the performance management of the networks that we sell to our customers including routers, switches, and network links as they go up and down. We have installed more than 100,000 devices on the non-SD WAN side of SevOne.

We can determine the performance utilization with metrics of the devices including fan speed, temperature, and other generic health checkups. If the utilization is high we raise an alarm in our ticket managing system and then our service desk can start looking into them.

We use SevOne quite extensively. We use all the modules extensively both internally and externally with our customers. They log in and use SevOne to access the tools.

The modules and the performance management reports that come with data insights are two of the most valuable features. I also find the reports for Wi-Fi, Netflow, LAN, and WAN for monitoring to be very good. 

SevOne Network Data Platform could improve its SD-WAN side. The system is still maturing. Cisco is always changing their product and new products are coming to market, they have an opportunity to focus and forge a good relationship with the SD-WAN product. They could build a strong product to provide services to SD-WAN.

I would like to see live maps as an added feature. Also, build modules on AI and EML to provide better data insights that would proactively tell us what we should be looking after.

I have been working with SevOne for three years.

There are no issues regarding scalability. You can scale horizontally as many as you want. We are able to deploy across customers. We have a regional deployment model. For one of our customers we have deployed it on their cloud so that they can keep it close to their customers and have better performance.

We rely on technical support a lot. We use them for upgrades as we can not upgrade ourselves.

I have many clusters deployed so it is difficult having to rely on them for these upgrades. It can take six to nine months for me to complete the upgrades across all the clusters. It is not just one component that requires the upgrade, there is also DI, NMS, and Wi-Fi as well.

I would prefer that SevOne release service upgrade modules that would allow our team to conduct the upgrade rather than relying on them.

The relationship we have with SevOne is good. They have maintained a good relationship with us.

We have been deploying to various customers over the past three years. we face some challenges in the SD WAN space but with LAN, WAN Wi-Fi and Netflow deployments.

We have evaluated LiveAction. LiveAction has a good interface and navigation screens for SD-WAN.

I am impressed with their LAN side, WAN side on the Wi-Fi domains, but  the SD WAN has room to improve.

If not for SD WAN, you can blindly use SevOne as a solution.

I would rate SevOne Network Data Platform an 8 out of 10.

SevOne is used mainly for network monitoring. In my company, there are different services that include mobile data, voice, and broadband. SevOne is being used across all of these three services, and it also covers our corporate network.

SevOne is also being used for business reporting and capacity planning.

SevOne provides a comprehensive view of network performance data. It supports multi-vendors out of the box, which is very good. In 90% of the cases, new devices are plug-and-play, so when a new version comes out then SevOne has support for it out of the box. This is the case with either network monitoring or NetFlow data. In the worst-case scenario, they have an open framework that we can use as the next step. It helps us to get it up and monitored fairly quickly.

The ability to support multiple vendors' equipment is very important. In fact, it is one of our top priorities because this compatibility saves us time and money, as we are able to get new equipment set up quickly and without much effort. That's a key thing for us.

I'm not able to quantify our savings in terms of monetary value but in an ideal scenario, we save two weeks of time. When we add a device, we get data out of the monitoring points. Nine times out of ten, SevOne works immediately. In the exceptions, we reach out to the vendor to clarify what they need from an SNMP point of view. After that, we take it up with the SevOne certification team. With any new vendor that comes up, SevOne provides a 10-day SLA for the free certification. That's a pretty good saving.

It is very important to us that SevOne supports streaming telemetry-based networks. As with any other company, our network is evolving and we are moving towards telemetry. We are in a pre-discussion phase with SevOne to use the telemetric components so hopefully, in the near future, we will have it in our product suite.

We do have SDN but as of today, not with SevOne. That is something that we have aspirations for and will look to in the future.

The out-of-the-box reports and workflows help us to understand what is normal and what is abnormal in our network, and this helps to speed up time-to-value. This is one of SevOne's strong points as I compare them with other vendors that I have seen over the years.

SevOne gives us the ability to edit and customize the out-of-the-box reports and we do that quite a lot. We take what SevOne has provided and we change it to fit our needs. For example, when vendors change their versions and release, we fine-tune them to accommodate these things.

It is fairly easy to customize the out-of-the-box reports, although one needs to have a bit of knowledge to do that. I see it as any other product, but there are some limitations to it. There are complex structures from certain vendors such as Cisco that are not easily supported. For instance, Alcatel-Lucent provides multiple SNMP profiles but that cannot be supported in SevOne. This had to be accomplished using other means. It is cases such as this that highlight why you need to have the knowledge but once you have that, it's fairly straightforward.

Cisco is a vendor that we have had to customize reports for. With respect to temperature monitoring or CPU reporting, some of the out-of-the-box reports don't fit that specific vendor version, so we had to modify them to use the latest MIB and SNMP OID.

We use SevOne for high-frequency polling, where we can quickly flip it on and the network operations team is able to easily troubleshoot issues.

SevOne has enabled us to integrate our network performance management data across our ITSM and business decision-making tools. All of the data that we collect is also shared with other consumers, instead of just retaining it and reporting it. This is done via the Data Bus, which is running over the open-source product, Kafka.

This was fairly easy to deploy and then open using the various device groups and object groups. Once it is open, data can be sent to other consumers. There is no need to do a lot of work. You just quickly enable the component and open it.

These integrations are key to our organization, where there are a lot of users and a high need for the data. For instance, capacity planning. A bit of analytics outside of SevOne has also been implemented, taking the data from different areas including ITSM, network inventory, configuration management, et cetera.

This performance data is key, and having such integration means that we get value out of SevOne fairly quickly. We don't need to invest time and money developing in-house products or looking for other solutions. Of course, the SevOne database component comes with a cost, but it's directly related to what the business needs.

SevOne helps us to detect network performance issues in advance of them impacting end-users through proactive alerting. The monitoring system contains threshold policies that have been configured using the dynamic thresholding approach. Specifically, it looks at a few cases to develop a baseline and calculate the standard deviation. If there is any breach or any high utilization in the specific service of a network, SevOne will provide alerts according to the severity level. It will go to our ITSM and then out to the operational users who will keep an eye on it.

We are using the basic NMS product, and we use it with DNC pretty heavily. These basic monitoring aspects are the building blocks for performance management, which is key for any organization. It is important to do network monitoring and capacity planning, which SevOne is very good at.

The Data Bus feature allows us to share data with other consumers, such as other teams in the company.

The reporting is pretty straightforward but this is an area for improvement. The reports are easy to configure but they are a bit outdated in terms of appearance and visualization. SevOne has some alternatives where you can use Data Insight and it's easy to configure, yet outdated compared to other reporting mechanisms out there.

As we are moving to virtualization, it would be helpful if there was support for Kubernetes or microservices. If this added in the future then this might help us to better manage SevOne in a virtual environment.

I have been using SevOne for nine years.

The stability is pretty good. It is the best when compared to other products on the market.

Given the peer-to-peer architecture, scalability is outstanding. You can both vertically and horizontally scale. We have approximately 60,000 network devices.

We have three or four people in the company who work with SevOne in at least a limited fashion. I am an architect and there are two advanced SevOne developers. We don't manage only SevOne but other products, as well. There is nobody who is entirely dedicated to managing SevOne.

We use SevOne support quite regularly and in geographically different places. Our agreement includes 24/7 support, which is helpful when we have to reach out. Generally, they are very good in terms of resolving the issue or providing any technical approaches, and they're friendly in nature.

Overall, the support is outstanding.

Prior to SevOne, we used another product. There were challenges with the cost and the growth of the network. Our existing solution couldn't cope, which is why we switched.

The initial setup is complex by nature but comparatively, it is simple when I consider a few of the other vendors that I have seen. Our deployment took between three and six months to complete.

When we deployed it, nine years ago, it was on a peer-to-peer architecture with physical machines. We slowly added a few instances to cover its predecessor. We continued adding appliances and within a year or two, we doubled the estate. Then year after year, we have been adding 20% to 30% to it.

Some of the services and functionality are adapted for SevOne via open-source, and the cost is very high. For the price that they are asking, it cannot be justified.

If the vendor can look into reducing the cost, and then have a different licensing model based on the usage, that would really help. A blocking point is the high upfront cost because it is challenging to get it accepted and the purchase approved. If the cost were lowered or alternatively, if they can split it over several years, for example, that would help to get the product in the door and get going.

When we first selected SevOne, we evaluated between 10 and 15 products on the market.

SevOne was the peer-to-peer technology, from an architecture perspective, which is the first reason we chose it. The second advantage was the good out-of-the-box reporting. Finally, the pricing was comparatively better.

We combine our analytics reports but we don't use SevOne in that case. We have data that comes from a non-SevOne system, we take the data feed and we have a reporting layer on top of it. Sometimes, this process takes data from SevOne and helps to provide a high-level service dashboard view. However, we do not use a SevOne dashboard to display it. Rather, we rely on the reports. 

At this time, we don't directly integrate with ITSM but we have aspirations to involve SevOne in the whole ITSM process. Ideally, any information that has been collected for ITSM can be accessed by SevOne. Also, it's a bi-directional take on the idea, where ITSM can share in the data collected by SevOne.

My advice for anybody who is considering this product is to test it, hands-on, before jumping to a conclusion about whether to implement it. It is important to compare products from other vendors to see how they perform.

Unfortunately, you have to try SevOne using different components that include the basic NMS plus Data Insight, to get a really good feel of how it collects the data and presents it. I'm confident that at the end of the evaluation, SevOne will stand out in that space.

I would rate this solution a nine out of ten.

• Quick response on reports
• User interface
• Scalability of the monitoring
• Reliability

Given the ease of access to the information in a few clicks, the user base of the product has increased tremendously. As the word of mouth spread, the increased reachability of this for the performance reporting space within our organisation increased.

Keeping up to date with market trends, new vendors and with network vendors’ product support.

More than three years.

Our installation is a very large scale one. We initially had issues getting the product to accommodate the number of network devices to monitor. After a set of fine tune steps, we did not need to turn this part back on.

We are one of SevOne's large appliance base customers, and we have not had any issues so far.

8/10

The predecessor was not up to the race! Over the years of it use, it failed to meet the expectance organically. Hence the need to look for a product with better returns in many aspects.

Straightforward I must say… Just get the appliance set up as a vanilla installation in the management systems. It’s sort of plug-and-play. It covered 75% of the network devices and servers farms out of box from day one.

SevOne has a decent pricing model, so far, for production & solutions on the shelf. Given the “object” licensing concept, it simplifies the pricing model in many ways, and gives flexibility for customer to decide.

Thoroughly evaluate what needs to be monitored from SevOne, you’ll look at it as a different ball game for the cost of what needs to be monitored.

Solarwinds – Orion, Nimsoft, IBM TNPM, Netcracker, HP Performance Insight, OPNET Net One, Previsor, TBD Fusion (Vital Suite), Watch3Net, ScienceLogic, Cisco – Prime, Network Instrument – Observer, ZenPM - SysMech.

Clearly outline what needs to be monitored from SevOne and what you aim for your organization. I don’t recommend monitoring everything.

Please engage the SevOne SME’s. It will make the implementation easier in many aspects.

We are a VoIP company and we use Cisco BroadWorks as our voice platform. SevOne monitors all the servers, the uptime, the bandwidth being used,  and everything else. It also monitors the trap that it gets from these servers.

It's running on VMware.

If we did not have this tool, we would be virtually blind. We wouldn't know what's going on with all the servers. We would end up having to rely on someone calling us and saying, "Hey, this thing is not working." Then we would have to deep dive into the problem to find out what was broken. Having SevOne monitoring all these different aspects of our platform really helps. Based on the graphs, we are already aware that something might break and what might happen. We are not blind anymore. It is one of the most important systems we have in our environment for monitoring devices.

We usually look at a 24-hour graph. If the graph was around 2K yesterday, and it's about 1K today, then we obviously and immediately know there is something wrong.

We are able to monitor our multi-vendor network switches, including Juniper, and Cisco, as well as our BroadWorks systems.

We also use SevOne to integrate network performance data with business decision-making tools. One of the tasks we were recently assigned was to figure out our user growth and to make sure we have enough resources for that growth. It was so easy for us to look at the SevOne graph and figure out what our users' patterns are and how they will shape up in the future. We came up with an estimate for every month over the next few years. It helped us figure out what kind of resources we are looking at. If the graph tells us a server is reaching its peak, we know we need to build new servers and add them to our platform.

And while we don't really heavily use the network, it helps us figure out which gateway is using most of the traffic.

One of the most valuable features is the graphs, which you can build instantly. I have used some open-source platforms in the past, but they are not as good. With SevOne, the sampling in the graph can be every few seconds, not just every few minutes, and that's really helpful. It's really fast.

In addition, its data collection functionality is really good. The solution also has a lot of built-in templates, and those are not available with open-source solutions. They help us build graphs or reports out of the data that is collected. That's really helpful for us. 

And we love the SevOne dashboard for monitoring network performance. We mostly work from home now, but when we were in the office we had a big, dedicated TV monitor and had a dashboard on it with all the graphs. Every now and then we would look at it to make sure there were no alarms. The dashboard in SevOne is really useful.

One thing that comes to my mind is that while I was playing with the SevOne, when I started using it, I tried adding one of the BroadWorks application servers into SevOne. SevOne has all the templates for BroadWorks, but what happened was that it created thousands and thousands of objects from that one application server and we immediately ran out of license. That shut down SevOne. It was a huge pain for me to go into each object and disable and delete it from SevOne.

It would help, when new objects are discovered, if there were a way to categorize those objects and to pick the part of the object you need, rather than just discovering thousands of objects and adding them into the database.

I started with my current company in 2019, but the company has been using it since about 2017. I come from using an open-source tool. I don't have much experience with what other paid solutions can do, but my experience with SevOne has been really exciting.

It is definitely stable. We have only had a few instances where SevOne froze and they were probably related to the small number of resources we had allocated to SevOne when we initially installed it. As the number of objects grew, we didn't upgrade the VM resources.

There have also been a few bugs in SevOne and we have worked with SevOne support to resolve them. But overall, it is definitely stable.

It is scalable, absolutely. The VM was initially built with a small number of resources, and we didn't upgrade those resources for four or five years. But our devices and objects had grown a lot. It is definitely scalable in that sense.

At the moment it's just our engineering team, about five of us, who are using it, but we use it very extensively. In the future, we are planning to give access to the TAC team so that they can have a monitoring dashboard as well. We will probably have 20 users in the future.

We also plan on expanding our usage. In the past, we had only an instance in one of our data centers. But we have a second data center for our applications and if we had to use that data center we would be virtually blind. I believe we have already obtained a license to build a SevOne instance in our second data center. We are struggling with support in getting that built up.

My experience with their technical support has been pretty good. Every time I log a ticket, someone gets back to me within a day or two, and they find a solution pretty quickly. If it's a bug, they give us a work-around and they put the bug fixes in newer versions within a few weeks or a few months.

Positive

I wasn't involved with setting up our production version, but we recently got a lab version. One of my colleagues got involved with SevOne support to install it, but I was involved in adding new devices, and that was pretty simple.

In terms of implementation, you just put up a VM, get the license, install it, and then add the devices. It's as simple as that.

We had to get in touch with support because there was one technical problem, something to do with MySQL, but other than that we didn't need any help. We were already using it in production and were familiar with it.

We don't really need to do maintenance on it at all, unless there is a bug and we need to get in touch with support.

I would definitely recommend the product.

Monitoring is the key to being successful. Without a monitoring platform, you don't know what happened yesterday and what things look like right now. With a monitoring platform and the graphs, you can go back four weeks or two months and look at the patterns. Without a monitoring platform you are blind.

We are a system integrator, so we help the customers implement SevOne NPM and provide first-line support. When the customers have issues, they call us first, and we open a ticket for them if they need SevOne support.

Most of my customers are in banking and finance, so they are more conservative. Some of them are in a period of transitioning their infrastructure to the cloud, but they still have an on-prem solution. In the next few years, some customers may transition to virtualized or nextgen network services, but not at this moment. Some telco customers still have the on-prem appliance to monitor the circuit server-level connectivity or for NPRs.

There are three typical use cases. First, most of our customers use the SevOne platform for network performance monitoring, including network devices and connectivity. Customers like the high availability, unlimited scalability, and fast-forwarding. 

The second use case is to provide a central platform for infrastructure monitoring, including the network server and some application monitoring. About 60 percent of our customers use it for this. The third is for server monitoring only.

The use cases are a bit different. In the old days, IBM, HP, BMC, and Microsoft required customers to deploy agents in the server to monitor them. However, the servers used SNMP. And although there are advantages to using SNMP to monitor the server, customers prefer to use a server platform for monitoring. Most of the use cases fall in the first category. The second accounts for maybe 12 percent, and 10 percent of customers only use SevOne for server monitoring.

SevOne NPM helps our customers detect performance issues faster. The solution has a polling engine to check the normal behavior of a given device in an area. It helps the operations team, but you need to configure it properly. It all depends on the implementation engineer, and the operations team must fine-tune the monitoring policy. Once it's properly configured, SevOne will help you address some issues right away. 

Without the solution, the operations team would need to manually check each device when something goes wrong. With SevOne installed, we get the alert right away, so you can say that it cuts the troubleshooting time by one to three hours, depending on the situation. If you properly configure the policy, you can proactively address potential performance issues before a failure occurs.

SevOne has multiple out-of-the-box options for reporting. They have the old reporting portal and the new one. The new reporting portal has more out-of-the-box functionality, and it looks great. It helps the customer gain visibility into the network.

SevOne's Data Appliance, unlimited scalability, and fast-forwarding are the most distinctive features. In particular, our customers like the Data Appliance because they don't need to install anything. 

Once you deploy, you can configure the IT elements and start monitoring the network or server right away. With fast-forwarding, you only need to configure one device to the lever or the server to the second level. It's amazing. The new reporting dashboard is also a lot easier to use.

SevOne NPM is good at data collection, but I think IBM needs to improve the solution's actionable insights. Many other vendors have machine learning or AI that pinpoint the potential problem for the customer or drill down to the root cause. I don't think SevOne has these capabilities at the moment. The cloud monitoring functions are also lackluster. Everyone talks about how good SevOne's cloud monitoring is, but I found it underwhelming. 

Telemetry is hot these days, and IBM can improve SevOne's support for telemetry correction. Reporting is another feature that could be better. It provides the bare minimum functionality, which is good enough for most engineers, but the management isn't advanced. The new portal provides a much lighter view and better visualization, but the management is not so good. 

You can use SevOne to monitor a mixed multi-vendor network, and it provides a baseline. It's a good platform, but we must rely on the implementation engineer who has the necessary knowledge to configure the monitoring policy for the customers. It would be better if they had some out-of-the-box policies that could help the customers.

We've been using SevOne NPM for almost eight years.

I rate SevOne eight out of 10 for stability. Our customers are happy with SevOne's stability because the system is quite robust. Some of our customers have been running it for years without issue.

I rate SevOne support nine out of 10. We've had great feedback from our customers about SevOne support. They're willing to set up a remote session upon request. You have to go through three tiers of support with most vendors, and they ask a lot of screening questions before they will do a remote session. You need to spend a lot of time before an engineer will host a remote session to look at your problematic system. 

When there's an urgent case that affects server performance, like corruption or instability, they respond fast and fix the issue right away. The support engineer can quickly sort out most issues that affect the user experience. 

Positive

The installation is fast and straightforward because you only need to configure the network interface with the proper IP to get the system up and running. It's really quick, just like flipping a switch.

The total deployment time depends on the customer's environment. It takes a little time to set up high availability and configure some aspects of the labor interface, but you can finish all the configuration in a day.

Some of our customers request integration with ITSM tools like Service Cloud. For a typical engineer, it isn't easy, but it's not that difficult, either. Some other solutions on the market have built-in integration with ITSM, but you need to use the command lines to integrate SevOne. 

The license was quite expensive in the old days, but I think the price is okay for an enterprise customer. However, SevOne is still more costly than competitors in the small or medium-sized enterprise market. 

I rate SevOne Network Performance Manager seven out of 10. The support is excellent, but the features are average.