IBM SevOne Network Performance Management (NPM) Reviews

Our client who is using SevOne is a large client, it's big. We have to create multiple instances to support their infrastructure on the platform because they are very huge and are on-prem as well as on the cloud. Because Turbonomics is unlimited, they can do certain VM levels. I think you can do 11,000. You can collect 11,000 metrics from the VMs and you cannot go above that number. So let's say if you have 9,000 VMs, you can handle it, but sometimes you become busy and you're doing a lot of collections, or if you start collecting the processes' metrics, that is going to be a problem for you down the line. So we have about eight instances to support the platform on-prem and I think 11 or 12 on the cloud.

In terms of how SevOne improved the client's overall functioning, they reduced the cost analysis for the people. They are not good with the forecasting. They have their own capacity performance management teams that can now rely on this tool. The other benefit they are getting is that they don't have live support. If any issue comes up, like a performance issue, then the VMs are going to scale up automatically, and it is the same as in Azure. In Azure, the problem is that it is going up and down. It's a problem. When you have the SQL Server, there is the issue that we cannot do that with it.

Sometimes we have a lockup. If you have a lockup of the VM in Azure, the scale-up and down won't work. So the benefit you're getting is that we have a maintenance window, and in that maintenance window we tell everybody that we're going to scale-up or scale-down these VMs, any of these issues, and we have the maintenance time to do that. That's the benefit they're getting on that certain time. But it is not doing it automatically because in Azure there is always an issue with that. As for the VMware environment on-prem, you can do it. It does it automatically.

The feature that I have found most valuable is the scale-up and scale-down. The scale-up is an operation where the CPU boosts-up and then the memory will boost-up. That works awesomely. But the problem is when you do the case analysis, like a price analysis. Let's say you have the price. When you go to market, it picks up the cheapest rate or maybe coupons. If Azure sometimes give us a very great deal, then the Turbonomics doesn't kick in to evaluate that price. So that evaluation is always an issue that comes up. They cannot do that. They always have differences in the price. They never get those things right. That could be answered with no problem for the cloud.

In terms what could be improved, they need to integrate and get a better price. They can do cost analysis with Azure. They need to have a live cost analysis for the discounts, because if you have multiple thousands of VMs that you're doing, of course you're going to get a discount. Correct?

If you're only doing a few of them, you won't get a discount. That's the reason why they have to value the discount and coupons. The other con is that they need to be better with the accountability. In other words, the accounts or reports are not better than the others, compared with vRealize. The other thing is that you cannot write any kind of script in it to customize it to get other reports. So I'm shifting the gear into reports now.

There can be a problem of Microsoft versus Turbonomics. Because Microsoft won't allow the bigger clients to know what they're giving as a discount and they don't want Turbonomics to know what kind of discount I'm giving them. So there are pros and cons. Because these companies have a monopoly, they don't want the information of their biggest client to get out and say, "Okay, these are the coupons and these are the discounts I'm getting and let's see what Turbonomics can do."

In terms of stability, if the box is getting hot, is it having a performance issue?

It is a stable solution. They don't have to call anybody. If anybody is having any problem or performance issue, it's going to scale-up from a VMware point of view. But in Azure, sometimes if the VM needs more memory, more CPU, it cannot do that upgrade because of the lockouts. Then it's SevOne and there has to be a call out to the technical support team who comes from the bridge and starts checking the issue. That is a possibility. You can consider this tool a stable solution.

Scalability is great, amazing.

The technical support is pretty good. They are very helpful. You will have some folks who have a lot of knowledge and some who don't. So you always have this pro and con there.

The initial setup is a little bit complex and you have to first create the main database. After you create the database, make sure you start collecting. Then you have multiple collectors that start collecting the information and send it to the database. They are really technical and it's Linux based.

The setup takes about one or two days.

Usually, when you do an upgrade it takes eight hours.

In terms of ROI, when we implement SevOne, issues and calls come in and there's the reduced cost of not having a person look at it because it does it automatically. When it does it automatically, you have a timeframe if the issue doesn't resolve automatically, at which point you may have to report to a person, "Okay, this application or these VMs or whatever are having problems right now." Then you have to take a look at it and see what happened. Sometime you can clear the logs and do all the other basic techniques like the other tools do. You manually clear the log and then you look at these things. Or you can create a policy and then the extra policy will come into place. Or sometimes the time doesn't match right or your timestamps changes and you'll face these kinds of problems.

If you're asking for technical comments, then I can describe it in detail, but this is more general. For example, the IT operation can continue working the way it is, but they have to integrate SevOne into their environment. How do they want to do it? We don't know. It all depends on the different clients.

I use a lot of tools, actually. Here are the things I can recommend about Turbonomics: Scale-up, scale-down. But again, for reporting purposes, sorry, no recommendation there. The customizations are very hard. The person doing it has to be very good at analytics and has to be very good in all languages, like C-Sharp, unless you want to use the Python tool. I don't know if the Python evokes the scripts in it. I think it does, but it's very, very hard. You need a developer to write the customized reports for whatever you're looking for. If a regular person were using Turbonomics, like admin folks, they wouldn't be able to do that, unless they are a programmer.

They have to make it better for reporting. That's the first thing. Also the discount, like I mentioned about the Azure discount. It would be good if they could just get the number right.

On a scale of one to ten, I am neutral because it is not too good and not too bad. I would give SevOne a five.

In order to make it a 10, they would have to get their staff members highly active and focused on the customer's issues, and just focused on the product, on saving money. On-prem, they need to focus more on the Azure side of the house and cloud. The need to improve their internal technical knowledge and expertise. They need to hire really top-notch folks in Turbonomics.

• Flexible architecture: You can extend the system and its capacity by attaching another cluster pair.
• Very intuitive management interface: Adding and discovering new devices is a very simple process.
• Very useful and flexible end-user GUI interface: Reports or statistics can be prepared by a person who has no knowledge of performance monitoring.
• Automatic reporting: You can very quickly prepare a report to be periodically sent to recipients.
• Very fast reporting engine: Even very complex reports are generated in seconds.
• Many predefined Top-N reports are available out-of-the-box.
• Grouping capability: Each device can be assigned to many groups, which means you can report any interesting network factors according to the multiple group allocation.
• Baseline: The functionality that allow us to monitor a particular factor (like throughput or CPU load) based on some historical data (the value of the factor at similar period of day should be more or less the same)
• Virtualization of network elements: Many physical interfaces that exist on different physical devices can be aggregated as a single logical device with many logical interfaces. This is very useful functionality for network operators.
• Trend analysis: The system predicts the value of the traffic in the future based on existing behavior.

We provide customer internet access services and the 95th percentile is our target. Every month, we prepare a detailed report per customer that shows the current percentile value (does it exceed 95 or not), and we have to prepare detailed traffic reports that show the real traffic graph in the last month.

All of this was done manually. With SevOne, this process is fully automated and the reports can be sent directly to business customers (after a simple verification performed by another colleague).

Our version is quite old. In version 5.3.3.0, we see a lot of room for possible improvement. However, from SevOne support, we received confirmation that most of those expectations are met in version 5.4.x or higher.

Therefore, we have to think about upgrading to the later version as soon as possible.

SevOne should work with the graphs legend functionality. Now, you are able to put a part of the graph description as a customer description, but most of the original description stays unchanged. This means that sometimes the legend under the graph is unreadable (indicator names are sometimes not humanly readable). It would be nice to have a solution similar to the one in Cacti, where you can replace (or rather overwrite) an existing description with your own string.

It has now been almost one and a half years.

Currently, we are using version 5.3.3.0, but we are now just upgrading the system to version 5.3.10 due to several minor issues.

Not, over the last one and a half years.

Yes, but this was caused by special and very uncommon expectations from our side.

Together with SevOne, we implemented the solution which allows us to automatically add any new network device that is added to our external (independent from SevOne) database.

We use the SevOne API to add those devices and interfaces to SevOne. In case of devices with a huge number of interfaces, more than 100, SevOne was not able to load them into its own database.

SevOne recommended an upgrade to a later version to resolve this limitation.

This is the part I am happiest about. Their response is great.

Of course, I sometimes have to wait a week or two, but mostly that is because of the nature of the problem and its complexity.

Most problems are resolved within two to three days.

In our case, the SevOne platform was implemented by a third-party integrator. So, at the beginning, our contact with SevOne was very limited.

Now, for simple or medium issues, we contact SevOne directly through the SevOne support webpage because it speeds up the problem solution time. However, for more complex issues, we still contact the third-party integrator.

We were using Cacti and Zabbix (both open source solutions). We decided to switch mainly because there were some business expectations to have a platform that would prepare reports we can show to business customers.

On the other hand, we would like to have a tool ready to prepare reports on demand and by the non-technical staff.

In a standard solution, the instalation is very simple. In our case, we decided to integrate SevOne with an external database (an external application). All network devices devoted to that application should be automatically inserted into SevOne database.

The integration interface was the part of the solution that was performed by a third-party integrator in cooperation with SevOne.

From the operator’s point of view, it is quite painful to have to remember that every device costs us some cash if added to SevOne (CAPEX and, later, yearly OPEX).

Prices per license are not huge, but they exist.

It is very visible when we connect a big number of network devices (due to some new company acquisition). At once, we have to connect 100s of network elements, and it is hard to find extra money for that.

On the other hand, the existing model is very flexible from a financial point of view (pay-as-you-grow).

Yes, but there was a tender, and I am not authorized to provide such information.

I can only say that there were a few big players in the area of performance monitoring system vendors.

• The grouping capability is very simple and a very important issue in terms of system reporting capability. You should do your homework carefully so you will have a flexible reporting tool in the future.
• Enabling baseline functionality: We decided not to enable it at the beginning and very quickly decided to change our minds. It is a very useful mechanism for data comparison (today’s traffic to the week’s traffic, to weeks before at the same time, and so on).
• Report preparation: It depends on the agreement, but SevOne is ready to prepare some predefined report at initial integration. Let them do this to save you time, but it requires some time to think about your expectations.
• In SevOne, you pay mainly per object. Do not enable all object pooling by default. In a case with 10,000 devices, if you decide not to pool ICMP (not to ping devices to check availability), you can save 10,000 objects, and save real money. (We did so and we do not regret that decision, but it depends on the particular expectations of the company implementing the product.)
• The same as disabling ICMP pooling, you can decide to disable memory and CPU monitoring (if it is not necessary). Money that again stays in your pocket.

The platform is as flexible as an open source system can be. It has a very useful end user GUI interface, which means working with the system is very easy and intuitive.

Our primary use cases are for network alerting and reporting.

The out-of-the-box reports helped speed up its time to value. It's very important to make the tool usable, so you can prove to management that money was spent wisely.

SevOne has improved my organization by taking us to a single pane of glass for alerting on the network reports. For NOC, they only have a single pane of glass they have to look at.

It can be very thorough and very complete if you buy all of the appropriate modules and you have enough licenses to cover all the gear on your network. Some of the niceness is the flexibility of the tool and what you can do, but some of the complexity is due to that flexibility. The tool can be very complex depending on what you want to do, but that complexity makes it flexible to see things in different ways.

It enables us to detect network performance issues faster and before they impact users. Looking at IP SLA metrics and seeing that something has exceeded the baseline before users actually call up and say that there's a problem.

I've found Data Insight to be the most valuable for mining the data that the tool collects.

Without data insights, it's really hard to mine the data out of the NMS tool. Data Insight makes it more flexible.

The network data collection has been very flexible for us. It's been thorough in areas that were lacking. They have a team that I've worked with to add other pieces to it. So if it's missing something out-of-the-box, they work with me to add it. I was able to collect that data. It's not perfect, but it's pretty thorough.

The ability to assess the comprehensiveness of the solution's collection network is important. I wish they had some things in there that they don't for us to sunset some of our homegrown tools, but it's not a showstopper.

Its collection abilities cover multiple vendors' equipment but that's lower on our priority list for our deployment. We mainly have one vendor for the majority of our environment but we do have some others, so it is nice having the ability to look at other vendors.

The out-of-the-box reports and workflows for automatically helping to understand what is normal and what is abnormal in our network are very poor if you only have NMS and that is the only portion of step one that you own. DI makes things a lot better. 

DI actually lets you get to the data in a way that is easy to view without DI getting the data out of NMS. NMS is great at harvesting the data and storing the data, but it's terrible at giving managerial style views to see the data, as well as reporting is hard to mine the data in the reports. It's a very old-school feeling. DI puts a modern view on top of the tool, allowing you to get to the data in a cleaner fashion and faster data mining.

We use its ability to edit and customize out-of-the-box reports. It's been easy to edit, but I've run into some bugs. I'm focused solely on DI because NMS reporting is not very good. DI is a newer tool for them. I've run into several bugs that have slowed me down. It's easy to use other than I've run into the occasional bug that has caused problems.

I've given the firewall team reports that only look at their gear versus NOC is able to see all gear. I have done team-specific views. 

It provides continuous analytics of our network. I find it helpful, and I believe other people on my team find it helpful to be able to see all of the stats in a single tool. They can see an alert and then they can see the stats for the gear that was associated with that alert. I think that is very helpful.

NMS has several areas for improvement. It should be more user-friendly inside of NMS for some of the functionality in there. It's been getting better the last version or two, but there have been bugs in there whenever I've gone to new versions. 

There have been some features that were advertised that I would have that weren't actually there yet. They were kind of there, but even their tech support team didn't know how to use them because they were so new, and the documentation wasn't very thorough around those bleeding-edge features.

I have been using SevOne for two and a half to three years. 

It is very stable. 

Scalability has been good. It apparently has the ability to scale very broadly as long as you have the resources to deploy more instances of the tool, it is very nice on that front. The scalability is good.

We have around 30 users. Some of the users are in network operations and network engineering. Obviously, the network management team and some management use it to be able to get their visibility into how the network looks.

We have essentially two people managing the environment and they're both in the network management team. It eats up a fair amount of their time in order to really take advantage of what the tool can do.

It is used pretty extensively for the gear that we have deployed it on. We bought it for the monitoring. There are plans to expand, to include more of our network gear in the tool. I have no idea of the timeline, but I would say it's used pretty extensively. The gear that is modeled on there is only mounted on SevOne. We've taken off of all of our other monitoring to get down to a single pane of glass.

I would give their tech support very high marks. Tech support has been very helpful.

The initial setup was straightforward. 

I don't know that we've ever finished the deployment. The tool is flexible so we're always trying new things. But getting it off the ground and running and alerting, I would say took about a month and a half to two months.

We deployed it in parallel to our existing monitoring tools and then took devices out of our existing monitoring tools as we proved that they were inside of SevOne.

We did not use an integrator for the deployment. 

I have seen ROI. 

Be careful of how the licensing works. From the administration side of things, I am a propeller head. I do not know anything that has a dollar sign in it. Those are numbers I do not know.

We looked at large, standard NMS tools as well as open-source options. 

My advice would be to plan exactly what you're trying to get before you do the deployment and do as much research as you can before you go through the week-long training session that they give you with the initial purchase. There was a week-long training that we got as part of the initial purchase, but the training came before we even had the tool onsite. So I was not able to ask questions intelligently.

With flexibility comes complexity, and the other is going to be management. See everything that SevOne can do, they are going to ask for a lot. So you need to get management understanding what the tool can do with what you have deployed right now. Don't promise them the world. Filter down what management's expectations are.

I would rate SevOne a seven 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.

This is mainly used for network performance monitoring and availability alerting. Also, we are using SevOne to help with the troubleshooting of any issue. For example, whenever there is a service outage, we have a look into the graphing data. Mainly, we are using the SNMP data and NetFlow. Other than that, we are using the ICMP availability, which is just an availability check. These are the major areas that we have been pulling.

It is a physical box installed in our data centers.

We are not building the reports. We just give the reports some basic things. It's kind of self-service for the engineers. They have access to the tool and build their own reports based on their requirements. So, they explore whatever is available out-of-the-box, like the performance report, topology, or any other kinds of alerting reports. Nowadays, they have started concentrating more on Data Insight.

Whenever there is an outage, the first thing they will do is come into SevOne and do security data analysis. They will then contact the next level (the support groups) for troubleshooting. We also get a deep dive into which host is consuming more data and utilizing what protocols. These are all NetFlow, so it is all pretty helpful. It's helping with the day-to-day operations. We have a separate team who consumes the data for the operational analysis. Whenever they do root cause analysis, they look into the data.

SevOne offers multiple integrations. They also have their own collectors and have business partnerships with other enterprise-owned companies, like NetApp. They have efficient integration which comes with the existing support, and we have been working with SevOne to implement it.

Sometimes, there are multiple issues outside of our network, but we have visibility into that kind of data.

It is pretty much a tool which provides all the data sources. You can integrate with multiple other platforms, like SD-WAN. They also do integration and offer the app data. Therefore, you can pull data from many other sources that can be used for visualization and analysis purposes. Also, they have Data Insight, which calls the SevOne API and gets the data in real-time. This is an additional model that gives a direct view into the metrics and imports critical KPIs.

We have a dedicated SevOne appliance for the data flow. The overall comprehensiveness of the data is good. There are no false statuses. Whatever it reports, that pretty much matches the actual device performance.

SevOne provides support for all universal connectors. They internally work with other data sources to get features implemented. We have an SD-WAN implementation and use other app data to monitor performance. If you pull that data into one centralized location, that is very useful for management.

The solution supports software-defined networks. This is required in terms of analyzing any sort of integration or performance issues, which are all very critical metrics.

The out-of-the-box reports help out and have a good design, which provide us with more value. We can import/export them. You can save a report based on your requirements. You can build some templates, and using those templates, you can then build multiple reports. So, their template option is really helping us out a lot. We use the reports out-of-the-box most of the time. We are not customizing them as of now. 

The dashboard is all based on the object indicator and different devices. They have a hierarchy where users create a report and select the required indicators to pull out some data. It is all pretty straightforward and flexible.

We have an integration with ITSM event management, ticket creation, and alerting. It provides good options in terms of REST API and SOAP API. You can follow the trap to the destination whenever there is an alleged violation. They have multiple options for integrating with any other ticketing tool as well as event mapping tools.

We previously have had discussions on some reporting enhancements. So, we raised a feature request, which was delivered from SevOne.

I have been in this domain for almost 10 years. When it comes to SevOne, I started using it two years ago.

The stability is 100%. It is very stable.

All the stakeholders in the organization are using it.

We have two administrators for the solution who are responsible for the application. 

The technical support is great. They are very quick if we get stuck and they need to provide resolution. They are experienced with the product.

We have regular calls with the sales and technical teams.

When I joined, I started using SevOne and it was already implemented. We have done some version upgrades and configurations. I am just managing it because it was already running on-premises.

SevOne offers multiple integrations. They also have their own collectors and have business partnerships with other enterprise-owned companies, like NetApp. They have efficient integration which comes with the existing support, and we have been working with SevOne to implement it.

SevOne has excellent support. They are pretty much available whenever there is an update. That is not run by us. They also work with us to complete any planned upgrades.

Before the upgrade, we have a precheck and evaluation call so we can plan the upgrade. This is based on the SevOne advisory for the version update. The upgrade is seamless, not complex.

We have definitely seen ROI. We are adding more value. This is the primary tool used, in terms of support. So, it does a really good job in terms of getting the data and our current use cases. It keeps us stabilized as well as up and running.

When comparing it with other products, those have multiple installations, e.g., for NetFlow, you need to have a different model, but also you need to have a different application. SevOne is the one tool which provides multiple features. The servers or databases have different plugins. It can be used to monitor various components of the network, applications, etc.

It is a very simple, flexible tool with an easy graphical user interface. This is a great tool for having all the SNMP and ICMP reporting in one place. There are a lot of integrations for this tool.

They offer good monitoring and reporting.

I would rate SevOne as a nine out of 10.

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.

This is a new tool for our company. This project is the first one on which we're using this tool.

It is inexpensive compared to other monitoring tools and it provides agentless monitoring, where we don't need any kind of installation of servers. SevOne has a feature which is a policy browser. We just assign the policy and it will automatically apply it to all the servers, and it will create the thresholds as well for each and every server.

The automation feature is good because if your CMDB is OK and it is already in sync, then the automation part is good to go. Auto-closure of the ticketed issue is resolved and ticket will auto-close, which is very helpful.

There is no service mode setup in this monitoring tool if you want to snooze alerts for any specific amount of time, to account for any activity change or major incident. That is one of the drawbacks.

We have also faced some issues regarding SNMP traps.

Another difficulty is reporting. There is a limitation, per report, of 1,000 servers. Consequently, if your environment has 5,000 or 10,000 servers, you have to create separate reports, and each report will have 1,000 servers. That requires us to compromise with customers, that each report will only show 1,000 servers.

SNMP can't page exact disk utilization. So consider Unix servers. Unix servers' utilization is around 95%, and their reserve space is 5%. So SNMP will not page that extra 5%. it will only page the rest of the 90%. So from the OS end, it will see 95% usage, but in your tool you will see 90% usage because SNMP doesn't page that 5% of reserved space. That is one of the drawbacks that is not tool based, that would be considered as SNMP.

One other thing. Log monitoring is not possible from SevOne and that's why we are still using another monitoring tool. URL monitoring is also not possible.

No. There is high availability. We haven't had any issue like appliances going down or the server going down.

The alerts are also properly generating, as per the policies. So if you correctly create the devices and correctly ID the devices in your tool, then I think you will get proper results with this monitoring tool.

No problems here. Regarding reports and alerts, everything is good in this tool. The only thing we faced is SNMP traps, like snoozing the servers for a specific time, which is a maintenance mode issue.

Previously we had two other CA tools. But we wanted to do everything, like automation and all types of URL monitoring, in one tool. So that's why we considered implementing this tool in our environment. Only later did we come to realize that not everything is possible through SevOne.

Setup was simple. It was not that complex because one server, one appliance would be the performance server and another would be a high availability server. The selection part was smooth.

But creating a policy, thinking with LDAP, that part takes some time, but in a good way.

This was a management issue. I, being on the technical side, was not involved in this.

If you want one tool for everything this should not be considered. For example, if you want to monitor logs, if you want to monitor URLs, that is not possible from SevOne.

If you only monitor networks, if you want to monitor appliances, you can go with this application. It's good to go with SevOne because the creation of thresholds, of policies, the grouping of servers, that is easy.

One other thing. This is mainly a web console, it's not like any appliance application that you have to go into some server and open an application. That kind of thing is not there. 

• 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.