IBM SevOne Network Performance Management (NPM) Reviews

We use SevOne to manage about 10,000 network devices on our system. We monitor those devices with all the performance data, run reports, and see alerts. We have a manager of managers that sits above SevOne that actually displays all of our alerts, does some correlation and other things. We also provide some maps and reporting.

SevOne also enables us to detect network performance issues faster and before they impact end-users. We were monitoring the load balancers on our backstage passes for access to the network. And we can see, it went from around 3% to around 75% over a couple-of-week period where they had to send in all the remote access and change everything. SevOne really did a number for us, during the pandemic, of isolating which load balances were overloaded with users working from home. So that right there, was worth its weight in gold, because the management created all these reports for load balancers, for access for remote workers, and that's all they focused on, for a couple of months. So that was nice.

It has saved at least 50% because if we're just using ping and a couple of other tools, you can't really see that, all these devices went down at the same time, that segment, or that peer.

Data Insight reporting tool is the most valuable feature. They came up with it a couple of years ago. The most pleasing factor is the dark theme. You don't have a white background. It has templates that you can create for all kinds of reports that you can hit on the fly. It has a much better printing of the reports. If you want to send PDFs to people, the reports are actually decent. Whereas for years, the old architecture of the PDFs was rubbish and even our customers said, "We have to manipulate your PDFs because they all have bad margin breaks. SevOne fixed that a couple of years ago with the new Data Insight. It's fantastic. I would say the reporting of the new Data Insight is my favorite feature. 

We also have the Wifi Controller feature and we're starting to turn that up. That's going to be nice because we're going to be able to monitor wifi. Our group used to monitor wifi, about 10 years ago, maybe even longer, and then they took it away and gave it to Cisco Prime LAN. And they come to find out that Cisco Prime wasn't monitoring it as well as they thought. So we got some quotes from SevOne for a wifi solution, and now we're implementing that. We're excited about the wifi solution.

We also use NetFlow and Databus. It's not that new, maybe five years old. But everybody's starting to get on board where we just send our raw data to scientists. They correlate all the data into how they want to report on it. Those are a few of the new things that we like to use.

I would rate the comprehensiveness of SevOne's collection of network performance and flow data a ten out of ten. I've used Concord and eHealth before this. I used HP OpenView for 15 years. Right now, SevOne is top-notch for me because it's an all-in-one package, and it's easy for the operator to learn. If I can learn it, anybody can learn it. But it has a lot of features underneath that. I am one of the admins, but we have some really top-notch programmers that go in and get that in-depth data. I operate as an admin, I help people out, create policies, and everything. But when it comes to the in-depth stuff, I leave that to the scripters. I'd rather just click on the GUIs and let somebody else scrub through the comments.

It's extremely important that SevOne's collection abilities cover multiple vendors' equipment. We have F5 Firewalls, Palo Alto load-balancers, intrusion protection devices, ClearPass servers, Aruba, we got it all. SevOne has a good process. We also like the certification where we get the MIBs and the OIDs from the customer or the vendor. And they say, "We'd like to monitor this CPU key performance indicator." Or "These HC octets and the interfaces. If it's above 80% we want an alert."

With the vendors, we just take a new vendor like Aruba, they'll want to monitor the fan speed or whatever, we'll take that OID and send it to SevOne. Their certification team is top-notch. They have a 10-day turnaround, but for us, they always provide it quicker. We tell the customer 10 days but we sometimes tell the customer too, that they're always quicker. And they always are.

The process is easy. As long as the homework is done ahead of time, either by us or the vendor, we just provide SevOne with the OIDs, they provide us with a file, and we import it into SevOne. We apply it to the right vendor and all our key performance indicators are there. It's wonderful.

We're also just starting to monitor software-defined and streaming telemetry-based networks in our environment. We got a new manager and he's been pushing it. He loves SevOne. We use Data Bus, NetFlow, and we're doing the telemetry stuff. I don't really understand it, but we're working with some scientists on ride controls, to send them that data. When they started doing this, I told them "You better get some sharp people down here." And they did. 

The manager is a great manager. He's holding everybody's hands to the fire, and I got a bunch of burn marks on my hands. But we're getting progress. SevOne was great, but we weren't taking it to the next level. And other people were coming up with other tools, saying "This tool does this." And we said, "Well, SevOne does that, if you want us to do a proof of concept." So we've been doing all these proof of concepts.

In the old days, reports had nice baselines and stuff that we could use for deviations. With the new Data Insight reporting tool, now we have percentiles that we could have in the old ones, but when you had a reporting tool that wasn't that good, you're not real excited about baselines and stuff.

With Data Insight, we can see baselines and deviations. We can decide how many deviations we want to view. We can do percentiles. We can do time over time, and the graphing in which you can separate the graphs. Data Insight is a game-changer for reporting. 

You can look at the reports and it's just a picture, so your brain can say, "Whoa, that's out of normal. There's the baseline and there's somebody making a backup in the middle of the day or something." So, the out-of-the-box reporting is very nice. Every time they upgrade us, they upgrade Data Insight and they add more templates that their team has decided that the crews could use out there. They're great. I always see the new templates and I just copy it all over to my environment and change the names so people don't see.

The dashboards are fantastic. I don't use them as much as I should. I just started creating some. I'm doing it in the new Data Insights. You can customize it to your customers. We don't do much of that because we don't have a big enough crew to manage all the users out there, there are hundreds of users. And if we had to be their reporting gurus, we'd be hung up all day long, just clicking on reports for people. 

I love the dashboards because you can put it all in the front. You can have heat maps on the CPU. If you want it to have a dashboard for all of F5 you could just have the dashboard for F5 and say, "Hey, we're having CPU problems. I just want a heat map. Show me something red that I can click on and go troubleshoot." It's so nice.

There are a lot of pain points. My main problem is that we don't have a high availability system. There are 20 peers. We're going to lose the end-of-life appliances that are old. If we lose a peer and it doesn't come back, we lose all that data. The reason we don't have high availability is because it's double the charge.

I wish there was some way that we could just get a snapshot of our system so that if one of our peers failed, we could go through the process and get it back to where it was. If we built another peer, and it took us four days to build another peer and get all the firewall rules and everything it would be nice when it came back if we had a snapshot that said, "Hey, peer two, that died." Then can we just slap all that data onto the new peer two and have all that historical data, as opposed to just importing it new, and it wouldn't have any data from the past. That's kind of a pie in the sky thing. But I would like some kind of backup system.

I've been using it for about eight years now, which is actually a long time. Usually, our applications come and go. 

The stability is dynamite. We are having some issues in our VM world, where we don't have visibility to our peers that are out in the VM world. Sometimes our teams might get a peer locked up or whatever, but it's never SevOne's problem. When we had our appliances, it was rock solid. There were no issues with SevOne. You had a disk array and if you had a disk that went bad, you just ordered the disk and dispatched somebody out. I'd give them a positive as far as stability.

Scalability seems to be incredible. We're adding peers one after another. We got the wifi solution and then we just added four new peers, two on the east coast, two on the west coast of the United States. We just order more peers and get them built. SevOne sends us the OVA files. We install it, we open up a case of SevOne. They help us bring it into the cluster. And boom, we've got another whole peer ready for another 1000, 2000 devices. So its expandability is very nice, much better than OpenView and the other things I worked on.

We previously used HP OpenView. That was my thing. I liked it because of the maps, you could have all kinds of cartoons and stuff in the background. That was fun for the graphic artist people. SevOne just blew HP OpenView out of the water.

We had four servers and around 10,000 devices out there and we just couldn't handle it, it was just too much for HP OpenView. HP OpenView stagnated because I used it for about 15 years, and the last five years it looked like it was dying on the vine, with the support and stuff. They changed systems and our people in charge of budgeting and projects, decided not to go the route that HP suggested and went the SevOne route, which I'm glad they did.

I was the sidekick for the setup but it seemed to be pretty easy. I had installed, from setup, HP OpenView systems with four D80 servers around the world. The SevOne environment was pretty good. We were small at the beginning.

Without the planning and everything, just when we got the devices and turned them up, it took around a week or two. We were in our own little lab, testing.

We had a database and we were taking Cisco devices first. Once we had all key indicators identified that they wanted to monitor, we did it. Then we slowly brought in each vendor with the certified files and checked them as we imported them. It was a good plan.

We've used SevOne any chance we can get. We call them in all the time. They have a really tight relationship with my boss. They bring them in whenever there are questions on anything. And their support team is fantastic. We open up calls and get our tickets taken care of nicely.

SevOne is definitely earning its money because different departments are requesting SevOne monitoring for certain situations. And it's extra-billing, of course. I never see any of it, I just see the devices and we add them and we charge them. So they're bringing in money. 

They're getting their money back.

They were constantly looking at other products. I don't look at them. I don't even have time to think about other products. They looked at NerveCenter but NerveCenter is different. My customer is constantly looking for other replacements that are cheaper. Everybody's looking at their budget and asking "How can we get cheaper?" 

At one time they suggested ThousandEyes. It's much cheaper and easier. Well, they had ThousandEyes monitoring a little section of their network and they realized that there's no way ThousandEyes can do it. It's just too big of a network. ThousandEyes can do little stuff but overall, I work on changes all the time and I do my SevOne stuff, and the guy does his ThousandEyes stuff and his stuff is not quite right. 

My advice would be to read the PDFs they have and then look at the videos on YouTube. That's what I do. I'm not a voracious reader, but I go to YouTube a lot. 

I would rate SevOne a nine out of ten.

We are using this solution for monitoring the network for performance and availability. We have about 25 SevOne peers that are monitoring almost 8,000 devices. These devices include routers, switches, firewalls, etc.

On any outage, SevOne is pretty quick to send an alert. We've got an operations center that consumes the alert and sends it to the device owners so that they can minimize the time of impact of that alert. Such outages happen at least once a month, and whenever there is a real outage, SevOne is the one to detect it.

The comprehensiveness of SevOne's collection of network performance and flow data is very good. For NetFlow, I would rate it a 10 out of 10 because it collects everything that NetFlow delivers. You can also customize the reports to show only what you'd like to see or what your customers would like to see. For network monitoring, I would rate it a nine out of 10 because you can collect all the information and slice and dice that information in whatever manner you feel necessary to consume that data. We've got an operations team that subscribes only to the alerts. So, we've got tier two and tier three people who are looking at reports, and they slice and dice those reports however they like.

Its collection abilities across multiple vendors' equipment are really good. If we don't have an SNMP OID for a particular vendor, the only thing that the architects at my company need to do is to supply us the SNMP OIDs and/or MIBs. We send these to SevOne, and they certify it. We can then install it in the SevOne system, and it'll start monitoring that equipment. Its collection abilities are important because we've got multiple vendors in the network, and each specialty, such as a firewall or a router, has different collection needs. We're able to meet these specific collection needs based on the device types.

For our operations, the dashboard is very important because that's how our customers are making day-to-day and long-term strategic decisions, for six months to a year, about their network. We're not using any reports for capacity planning as such, but this is an idea that is going to be put in place shortly.

It provides continuous analytics of the network, which helps our customers in making smarter decisions and ensuring that things are up and running.

In terms of the integration of network performance management data with our ITSM tool, we don't have a direct integration with ServiceNow. We have integrated SevOne with Netcool, and Netcool is integrated with ServiceNow. It is pretty easy to integrate. We've got people on our team who are responsible for Netcool, and if we want to define a new policy or alert, we show them what alert we're sending over, and they integrate it in a matter of a couple of hours.

Its ability to monitor practically any type of network device via SNMP is most valuable. This is the main functionality that we're using. If a network device exposes a metric, such as interface utilization, SevOne will monitor it for us.

The reporting is very good in SevOne. We have static thresholds that are defined by our architects. They give these static thresholds to us, and we implement the alerting policies based on those static thresholds. We also have the capability of doing base-lining or deviation from normal or mean, but we haven't implemented that in our network. 

The out-of-the-box reports are of quality, and they would get you up to speed faster than having to build custom reports. I wasn't here when the reports were created, so I haven't, as such, used the out-of-the-box reports.

We are able to use SevOne's analytics, reports, and workflows in a single dashboard. Its dashboard is very easy to use and put together. It is also really easy to understand. If I had to give it a grade, I would give it an eight out of 10.

In terms of having a complete view of our network performance, I would rate it a nine out of 10. The reason for not giving it a 10 is that there is no packet capture associated with SevOne, but we do have other tools in place to do that.

In terms of stability, because of our move to VMs from physical appliances, some things have become a little unstable. It doesn't seem to be a SevOne issue, but we had to have a lot of calls with their technical support to figure out what's going on with it, but overall, it is pretty solid. 

I have been using this solution for one year and two or three months.

Overall, it is pretty solid. We've made some changes to the SevOne infrastructure, and we moved to VMs from physical appliances. Because of this transition, some things have become a little unstable, but we're working on these issues. It doesn't seem to be a SevOne issue, but because of the change of infrastructure of SevOne, we have had to have a lot of calls with their technical support to figure out what's going on with it. 

It is extremely scalable. We're managing almost 8,000 devices, and if we need to add 8,000 more devices, we just need to add a commensurate number of peers to handle that load. It is horizontally scalable, which is nice.

They're readily available, and they work with us in a very friendly way. They are very willing to help us. Some support desks, especially in performance monitoring, push you to solve your own problem, whereas SevOne's support is the exact opposite. Everyone I've worked with has been helpful. I would give them an A. 

I think they used HP OpenView. I have no idea about the reasons for switching.

I was not involved in its initial setup. For its maintenance, we've got two people in the US and two people in the Philippines who help us. They do network monitoring. The two people in the Philippines work part-time on it because they also support other tools. So, we have three people in total for 8,000 devices.

I would advise evaluating it thoroughly to make sure it is right for your network, and it meets your administrative needs. This should be a major or key element of your decision process.

SevOne supports software-defined and streaming telemetry-based networks, but we are not using any of that. I've also not customized out-of-the-box reports. I've only created custom reports for various customer groups that are consuming the data.

I would rate SevOne Network Data Platform a nine 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.

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. 

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. 

My use case at the initial startup was very simple. I had a carrier, which was a backbone globally implemented, and I needed a monitoring solution. The type of solution I needed had to capture SNMP traps, poll my equipment, perform traffic analysis, deal with historical data, and things like that. This requirement has remained constant through the entire seven years of implementation with them.

At the end of the month, we're ending our relationship with this vendor for a variety of different reasons. Among the problems is the pricing model that they have, although a lot of it has to do with the fact that their virtualization solution isn't compatible with our Kubernetes environment.

SevOne has enabled us to integrate network performance management data across ITSM and our business decision-making tools, predominantly through the ServiceNow platform. We also did a Salesforce implementation where SevOne leveraged Salesforce to determine if a circuit was production versus non-production. Essentially, this distinction implies whether we should care about it, or not.

The integration with Salesforce was pretty easy, where most of the work was on the Salesforce side. It was probably one of the simpler integrations that we did for the platform.

The comprehensiveness of SevOne in terms of collecting network performance and flow data, when we started using this in 2013, was very limited. It was developed predominantly for a Cisco network and I'm a hundred percent Juniper. As such, it required a lot of work to get the platform to not only understand it but to speak in terms of Juniper MIB files, and even the nomenclature. For a Cisco network, it would have been a situation where you opened the box, plugged it in, and walked away. With Juniper, it was very much not that.

At this point, our collection capabilities are limited to just Juniper equipment. This is restricted by the tool that we have, which only covers Juniper networks.

With respect to streaming telemetry, we do not have it implemented. We were working with them to try and understand what they could do in this regard, but I do not believe that they supported streaming telemetry at the time.

The most valuable feature as of late has been the API integration with ServiceNow. Honestly, the biggest bang for the buck I've got out of SevOne has been this development. The bi-directional integration with ServiceNow has saved me a lot of money in man-hours, over the course of the last few years.

I don't have an exact figure for how much money I have saved, but I can say that it's hundreds of thousands of dollars. What it comes down to is when you're able to automate the console work with the ticketing system, you're saving people from copying and pasting, and other such menial tasks. For example, you are able to auto-populate tickets, update tickets, change the status of tickets, and also do verification to see if something is valid. You can make determinations such as whether there is a ticket currently open or whether there was a ticket previously open. Automating things like that, so a human no longer has to do them, can save hours a day per human per shift.

The out of the box reports and workflows are very sufficient for helping to understand what's normal and abnormal in the network. Out of the box, the reports were certainly there and even though it didn't necessarily understand Juniper, the minute we turned it on, we had a bunch of data. In fact, there was a lot of data that we had never previously seen before on the backbone, made available to us just by virtue of turning it on. It just needed to be cleaned up and polished.

We were aware of the reporting when we decided to implement SevOne, as we had done a lot of pre-sales work with them to make sure we knew what to expect out of the box. Even if we needed to do a lot of customization, it was certainly expected, and that's what we saw. It was important to us because we needed to immediately show some sort of value with all of the work that we'd invested over the course of the implementation. I needed to show almost a day-one value, and that certainly did help.

With respect to customization, the reports themselves didn't take too much effort. We have had a resident SevOne engineer help manage the platform and tend to those apps throughout the entire implementation of SevOne. From my standpoint, it was simply a case of asking the resident engineer for what I needed or what I expected, and whether it was a function of hours or days. Shortly after, I would have exactly what I needed.

An example of how we have customized reporting is the top talking report. It is important because we have a lot of customers that are very bandwidth-intensive. This report is for aggregate bandwidth and it is from a trap-generation standpoint.

I also have a performance metric where we monitor a specific group of circuits that are notorious for having capacity issues with customers. Essentially, it is a top talker traffic graph where I get the top ten circuits for the past 24 hours, and it's a live graph. I get it as a report, but I can also watch it in real-time.

SevOne provides continuous analytics of our network and it's important because if you're in a network where you're polling every three minutes or every five minutes, then you could be missing important events. There's a lot of stuff happening and it can be very damaging in a matter of seconds. If you're not polling or collecting data to absorb that frequency or that duration, then you're not doing anything. You're completely overlooking the important stuff. Being able to see in some form or another, not always in the graph, but being able to see that real-time activity and have it called out to a human is exceptionally important. Again, it doesn't need to be a graph, but that's one of the things we leverage SevOne for.

With respect to giving us a complete view of our network performance, it's been very good. I don't know how many times a week I have a STEM vice president come to me and ask me what's going on with the backbone or how the backbone is performing with a certain world event or corporate event. Whatever it may be, I can get a very good visual summary, very quickly, just by virtue of logging in. It's just a matter of making sure that you have the right graph. You have to tell SevOne what you need and have it presented to you in the right way. Otherwise, it doesn't know. Once you accomplish that, it's immediate.

SevOne has enabled us to detect network performance issues faster, and before they impact end-users. It is very good at capturing those events, documenting them, opening a ticket, and letting a human know about them. There is a definite ability of proactiveness with the tool.

If I consider where we were in 2013, it could take several hours or days to detect events in some cases. I have examples of catastrophic events happening that we never even knew about, that SevOne is able to capture. I estimate that we are 60% faster on average at capturing and actioning events, hopefully proactively.

Their virtualization solution is not compatible with our Kubernetes environment, which is one of the reasons we are ending our relationship with them. I didn't spend a lot of time evaluating with them why it was the case. It was simply not a roadmap item for them, so it was a pretty quick conversation.

We have been using SevOne for approximately seven years.

This product is very scalable, especially if it's just a matter of growing the network. You add more devices, make sure your licensing is in check, and the system ingests it as that equipment is green-lighted.

If you're changing technology, adding layers upon which you want them to monitor, it is still scalable, although it takes a little bit more work.

We have approximately two dozen users in the organization.

Their technical support is very competent. We have had an immediate reaction to our issues, even without the resident engineer involved. Their technical support is 24/7. That said, I've actually had very minimal interaction with them, aside from some hand-holding during software upgrades. Other than that, the platform has been rock solid.

Prior to using SevOne, we were using an internal homegrown solution.

After we got done building it, it largely sat idle until we started onboarding customers. As customers grew, a need for a focused operations group, tooling, processes, and procedures arose. That's where SevOne came in. We needed a legit platform to monitor the backbone rather than use existing processes and procedures that just didn't work or didn't apply.

Essentially, with the growth of the backbone and the responsibility of it, we realized that we needed an enterprise-grade solution.

The initial setup was pretty straightforward. We knew that the biggest hurdle we had to overcome was the Juniper compatibility, so that's where we focused the resources in the planning.

The means of actually getting it installed, upgrading the software, and then actually discovering the network worked as expected. It crawled, it discovered, and it did everything we needed it to. It just needed to be tuned for a 100% Juniper network.

Of course, the Juniper tuning took many hours of post-sales engineering support as well as a resident engineer. It took a lot of work on the SevOne side to actually get it to that point.

In total, the deployment took approximately three months.

I and a colleague were responsible for deployment.

Maintenance requires one FTE.

In terms of ROI, I don't have a whole lot in terms of metrics. However, I would say that with DI, someone has definitely started to come around from a visualization standpoint. Not only do you get an alert with an indicative color like red, orange, or yellow, but it is well represented for different stakeholders. It is not only useful for the engineer sitting at the desk but also for the tier-three that supports that engineer, all the way up to the vice president, who just wants to know how things are going.

They've come a long way in developing that. Back in the day, all people wanted was something that told them the status; red is bad, green is good, yellow means that you should look into it. That was all the information that they had. These days, people want predictive analysis and they want to be able to trend failure. They want to be able to dig into the numbers a little bit more and graphically represent that. To this end, DI is actually something that they're doing to chase that down and fill that void.

Historically, that hadn't been the case. I think DI came out approximately four years ago, and I think that's something that they're really doing to try and add value to the platform.

The pricing has not evolved with the market, which is one of the reasons we are moving to a new product.

When we implemented SevOne, we had been evaluating other options for a couple of years for varying needs, although not necessarily the backbone. During that process, we had noted that SevOne would be the most accommodating and capable for our needs.

At the time, it just wasn't possible for us to implement it.

SevOne is capable of bringing together its analytics reports and workflows in a single dashboard, although I don't actively use that specific dashboard. The stuff that I use with SevOne is very specific to a need at the moment and as such, I don't require the use of a collapsed view. In my world, it's hard to summarize everything in one place. Everything is going to be compartmentalized, so I have multiple dashboards with different data. It isn't that I don't want to use a single pane of glass but it just doesn't serve any purpose for what I need on a daily basis.

Overall, this is a good product and we had a really good relationship with the vendor. When it all started, I had a pretty basic need that I was unable to get any support internally for. We had spoken with them before, and at that initial time, I had some internal obstructions to bringing them onboard. The problems were not financially related and over time, as usual, things changed and the obstructions were gone. Once that happened, I was given the opportunity and the power to develop my own tooling suite for my team, and SevOne was a pretty easy discussion at that point in time.

The relationship continued to be a really good one up until a couple of years ago, when we were growing and of course, they wanted in on that, but their pricing was not adapting to what we were seeing in the market. They were still doing pricing from 2013 when we bought in. Naturally, anytime I expand tool usage, it works in my best interest to make sure that what I'm using is still the best implementation for not only the cost but also, the scalability at the time.

The biggest lesson that I have learned from using SevOne is that leveraging your platforms to do more work in place of a human, isn't always a bad thing. A lot of people think that you're just trying to replace humans with automation and software. What it really boils down to is that you're enabling those humans to do something else that is more important. It's not a function of eliminating jobs. It's letting the humans work on more important, complex items, and let the software and the automation do what they can to contribute to that equation.

It's not that it's necessarily been a challenge or an obstacle for me, but it is important to consider it when explaining the process. When you explain to someone that we're changing this process because SevOne can now do a certain aspect of it, with human involvement starting somewhere further down the line, you have to be able to sell that as an improvement to the process. Ultimately, it's allowing that human to focus on other things that have previously been neglected.

This problem of automating a task that is historically done by a human has been a lesson that I've learned with SevOne. The reality is that you have to let automation do what it can, and let humans do the more important engineering work. Getting away from that stigma and letting the software do its job and really focusing on releasing that, allowing the humans to do the more technical and engineering-level work, is really an act in cost-savings and from a Human Resourcing standpoint, you're getting more bang for your buck out of it. You don't want to pay people a lot of money an hour to sit there and say that red is bad and green is good. If you can get away from that, you're going to be more efficient.

I would rate this solution a seven out of ten.

Sometimes we get requests that a customer needs CPU or disk or memory performance or utilization graphs. We add those servers or devices into the tool and then we can generate the graphs and provide them to the customer.

Customers also ask us to create alerts. The tool generates alerts for CPU utilization when it is close to, for example, 90 percent utilized.

It is deployed directly on servers as well as on virtual machines.

One of the benefits is its ability to transform raw network performance data into actionable insights. That's one of the keys for us. When something goes above a threshold, we can see it in the alerts and take action. Likewise, we can see graphs and reports and we can judge what to do before something goes wrong.

Some of the teams that are using our graphs from SevOne, and the capacity team that uses the data it generates, are able to make decisions before something bad happens.

We use SevOne to monitor a multi-vendor network. We have a lot of different kinds of devices in our scenario. We have Cisco switches and network devices from various vendors. The alerting and reports that we can generate help us see if something is not the way it should be.

• Reports
  
• Alerting

These are the most valuable features for us because the customers in our company primarily want to see performance and usage graphs, and they are always concerned with the alerts.

Another useful feature is that SevOne gives you real-time insights into your network performance. It polls every five minutes. That is important for our customers because there are some network teams that are always monitoring their networks. There is an option for setting the polling frequency to less than five minutes. That means you can monitor your infrastructure faster and we do that for some of our devices.

And the data collection functionality, using SNMP protocol, is good. It's doing its job.

I'm not really sure if this was the software's fault or a server issue, but a couple of years back the disks were failing on our SevOne physical server every month and the server would go down. The secondary server took over from the primary until the disk issue was resolved. That was annoying.

I've been using IBM SevOne Network Performance Management since 2013.

It is resilient. If the server goes down, all the data and functionality is taken over by a secondary server. In our scenario, there has been no data loss.

You can add as many devices as you want, but I think you need to buy more licenses to add more devices. But scalability is not an issue. We have seven to eight clients and we monitor more than a thousand devices for each one.

There are no new clients in the pipeline, but if another comes along, we will definitely recommend SevOne to them.

The SevOne support team is very good. Whenever you have a strange issue or a big issue, something you have never seen before, when you reach out to them they are always available. They are very fast and always help us.

Positive

I deployed SevOne on a virtual machine a couple of years back. The deployment was easy and straightforward. The installation wizard helps, giving you all the details of what is happening. There was no confusion. And it was fast as well. It took roughly two hours.

Someone from our deployment team helped me. He told me to just "apply this, do this, do that," apart from what the wizard showed me. I believe he was in touch with the SevOne guys.

I can't say anything specific about the investment in the solution because I'm not given that data by my company. But our clients are still using this solution after many years with our company. That is a good indicator that they must be getting a good return.

There are other tools that we have used, like eHealth from CA. It also gives you graphs but we don't like that tool. We like SevOne. It is older than SevOne. We are using it for some clients that have had it from the beginning, so we cannot remove it. But eHealth has bugs. With SevOne, I don't have any complaints.

Definitely go for it. The interface is user-friendly, and it provides so many reports and alerts. It gives you a good, total package. And the support team is also very cooperative.

I can't think of very much that the solution lacks. Everything looks okay to me.