IBM SevOne Network Performance Management (NPM) Reviews

We use it to look into performances in our system and different dedicated environments. We try to draw graphs that represent what we have in terms of time response, bandwidth, and input and output across all our data centers to see if the load balance is correct. We have some traffic flows that say if the traffic is dropping and being taken by another data center. There are a lot of reports all around about different points of our architecture.

It is deployed as a physical appliance on-premises. So, we have the SevOne appliance in our data center.

Based on some metrics, we have policies that will raise issues and tickets internally, in case thresholds are being crossed. 

We have benefited mainly from the use of the dashboard interface. It makes the network visually interesting for people who are not in the network. A lot of people are not network techies who understand streams in the network. Based on location, we have streams coming in and out. They can see visually when there is some problem. They don't need to understand all the network technology behind it to be able to understand if everything is working well or if there is a problem. 

The visualization doesn't remain in the network. It is available for everyone in production management, etc.

We don't use all the features so far because we are just using the product that was there without supervision for one year. So, with a couple of colleagues, we are doing a lot of work to put everything back on track. We know that SevOne can do a lot, in terms of hitting some baselines, especially with their new visualization software, SevOne Data Insight (DI). This gives a new perspective in terms of dashboarding. It is something more dynamic and flexible than the previous version.  

There are different types of reports based on the metrics that we want to monitor and check.

The most valuable feature is that we can draw reports with the historic value of data. So, we can see if there is a trend in the past or if something has been changing over the past couple of weeks. When we have an incident, we need to go back to the occurrence of this incident some time in the future. We can see if it is something that happens regularly or not.

Data coming from our system to SevOne needs to be comprehensive. This is the way SevOne works around data flows. So far, it has been good.

They support software-defined networks as part of another module. They have their main module, which is called NMS, then they have other side software which complements the main architecture. They also support software-defined networks, like Cisco ACI. 

We made assessments internally about the system, i.e., about what could be done better. There are a lot of points. 

With the administrative management of the appliance, if some object appears from SevOne because something changed in the network or whatever, then as an administrator you will not be aware. If you are using this object in a report, this object will disappear from the report and you will not be aware of it. So, if you have 1,000 reports, you cannot always check these reports everyday to see if objects are missing or information has disappeared. We don't have any information on alerts, saying that something is happening there and maybe we need to take action. If an object was replaced by another one, or if a link was replaced by another one, then the graph needs to be changed because it doesn't exist in the graph anymore. However, we don't have this information.

This is also the same in terms of the internal architecture that we put in place inside the system. We can tag our network device based on the firmware, some rules, or a manufacturer/vendor. But, it is not always clear when we add a bunch of devices that they will mark these categories. For example, we need to make sure that one device is from a specific vendor. We have to dig deep in each device to make sure they are really attached to the correct vendor. If they're not attached to the correct vendor, then information will not be pulled in the same way, and we might be losing information. So, small tweaks need to be made to the internal management, making it easier for me.

SDN networking is going from legacy towards object-oriented, so we don't have a choice. It is something that we are using and need. Unfortunately, our IT lead is not really into the SDN solution of ACI, as apparently it is missing some features in terms of deep analytics and monitoring of ACI hardware infrastructure as-is. In the future, we may use SDN infrastructure because I know they are releasing features every month.

We have had it in service for five years. I was not there when it was installed at the beginning. I have been handling it for a year and a halfs.

It is really stable. We don't have any issues, except when we do our disaster scenario a couple of times a year. We have to physically cut the connection between our sites for redundancy and compliance. Then, we can sometimes see that we need to ask the help of support to put back the database in a correct state because the replication is not always clicking well. But, that is most likely because of the technology used behind it. MySQL is always a bit sensitive in this kind of scenario. So, I am not sure it is really the SevOne application that has an issue. It is more the technology that lies behind it which can be a bit faulty in these kinds of scenarios. Besides the replication, it works really nice. 

Without disaster scenarios, we are reaching 100% of availability easily.

We just scaled it up a month ago because we were reaching some limits. It is quite scalable. It took a day to scale it up with the new appliances that were delivered. It is quite easy to scale.

We are monitoring 886 devices. That is infrastructure monitoring. There are more devices that we still want to monitor. Our plan is to reach 1,300.

We use the technical support quite often. It is good, though it depends on the location that is doing the support. There are several locations that do support, whether it's India, Poland, or the US. Depending on that, the support can vary as well as the response time, because we're not always in the same time zones as their support. Sometimes, it can take a long time to receive an answer if we have been redirected to the wrong support.

Since it is something new, we are in contact with the vendor. We can give them some updates about what issues we are facing and if we are happy with the product so far. 

We are using another tool called EMC Smarts, but it is more for event monitoring. So, there isn't any drawing of dashboards. It is more only thresholds for SNMP Traps that can be received. Based on that, it distributes tickets. So, we cannot see the history nor draw the status of a link. 

A long time ago, I used Nagios, which is kind of the precursor to monitoring. However, I cannot compare it to SevOne because I used it about 10 years ago. 

You have to try it. The first step may be a bit harsh because of the layout. It's an older type of layout, but it works. Once you find your way with it, it is quite easy and straightforward. But, at first, it's not always easy to handle. But, it is a good tool that works nicely. So far, we don't regret it.

We need to master the system to be able to fully grasp what can be done. It is not for every end user who wants to go into the system and start monitoring whatever they want. They need to be able to grasp some content before that. Without training or previous knowledge, it is not always easy to grasp every concept behind the solution. It is a monitoring system so it's not a system where you click, then drag and drop.

I know they support telemetry. But the device on the end user side needs to be able to send telemetry information, which is not something we can do yet. We don't have enough devices doing telemetry to really use that feature to its greatest potential. So, this is something we have on our roadmap, and probably we will dig into it in a couple of months or years when our infrastructure is evolving in that direction.

Telemetry is something that we would like to invest some more time with, because it is different from having just simple SNMP polling, which is heavy on the system. It puts on a lot of overload based on the frequency of polling. By default, it takes five minutes. We want to have something with a frequency smaller than five minutes and maybe pause every 10 seconds, and SNMP can do it, but it puts a lot of overhead on the system. With telemetry, the big advantage of telemetry is a constant stream of information. There is no overhead. We just have a constant flatline of internal usage. We don't have huge peaks. We have fast information, close to real-time. We should have closer to real time monitoring in the future, instead of just being passive and waiting. There is still a ways to go for telemetry, but most infrastructure is capable of doing it.

Nothing is perfect. I would rate it a solid seven (out of 10) because a lot of points could be improved. I have a long list of small tweaks and customization that can be brought to the system. We give some of them to the customer support, but we are not their only clients. So, they go through prioritizing all their processes. Sometimes, our propositions are refused. It is a good system, but there is still some room for big improvements.

The reports and the graphics. With this tool it is interesting to show the info to the client and explain where the traffic is.

I can't, I arrived in the last days of the project, just to make reports.

The method of searching for SIP and the way to create the groups.

Four months.

No.

No.

Eight out of 10.

I didn’t do the switch, the company had the product when I arrived.

I didn’t do the setup.

I can´t answer that.

I didn’t choose the product but I had used others.

Although it is a very good monitoring tool, it can be confusing when you try to add devices and they don’t appear correctly. Then you need to check SID on the SevOne database. There it does not display when the error pops up.

Instant graphs, high frequency polling and the ability to create reports on the fly are the most valuable features we currently use.

We are able to see or alert on issues a lot faster.

I'd like to be able to stitch together multiple network elements or services for more of an end-to-end view of network performance.

I have been using this solution for 1.5 years.

I have not encountered any issues with stability.

I have not encountered any issues with scalability.

I would give it a 7.5/10.

I previously used a different solution, but the report rendering was extremely slow.

Licensing costs can add up quickly, so know what you need to monitor and what you don’t.

• The ease of device certification – self-certify or have SevOne certify devices for me.
• Stability has been pretty good for us over the years – it’s a pretty stable platform.

We are actually using it for commercial use. We can see where customers are disconnecting and their orders failing, which results in us continuing to bill them and having to reimburse them. SevOne enables us to look at the data and see that the customer has disconnected so we can stop billing and reimbursing them. We also can discover outages before the customer complains.

I think that the upgrade process could be improved, which can be painful at times. SevOne knows it's an issue and they're working on it.

I've used it for eight years.

We only encountered issues during upgrades. The initial deployment was not a problem as we just deployed three new servers a couple months ago. There was one minor issue which should have been picked up but which we found out later. Typically deployments are pretty smooth.

No issues with stability.

So far the product has scaled to our needs. We broke it early on but the past few years it has scaled to our needs.

8-9/10

7-8/10

We used EHealth (a former CA product). Because of the upgrades and device certifications, we had to switch.

Setup was straightforward.

We implemented through the vendor and they were very good.

We're managing it with one person so the cost is cheaper than some of our other tools.

We looked at other solutions, but management chose SevOne because of its cost.

Test it out in your environment – it all depends on your environment, but it fits very well for ours.

There are several valuable feature, but the ones most useful for us are:

• Capacity monitoring/reporting and graphing
• Netflow stats gathering
• Infrastructure availability monitoring

It's given us the ability to accommodate our company's entire global network infrastructure (routers, switches, load balancers, firewalls, etc.) and provide historical trending analytics for interfaces and network traffic and general production graphing and reporting over a chosen time period.

The graphing function can be tailored for all levels of management reporting.

Also, the ability of the product to integrate into other vendor management platforms to allow the polling and alerting streams to be maintained.

The product is perpetually evolving with a number of complimentary products in the pipeline. However, the basis of the product remains stable and any improvements are regarded as ‘enhancements’ and based upon industry market research at a given time and the facility to provide enhancement requests from individual customers.

The initial setup must be planned well to fit your environment.

I've used it for four years as a mainstream strategic management tool. In total, seven years.

The deployment is reasonably straightforward and documentation is good.

Only a few minor issues which were resolved by SevOne support.

One of the key benefits of the product is its ability to scale. There were no issues with regards to scalability. You can add more licenses or more SevOne appliances into your cluster as needed.

Customer service is excellent. This can be provided via a SevOne TAM (Technical Account Manager) program if the size of the SevOne cluster/estate warrants it.

Technical support is excellent.

Tivoli ITNM for availability monitoring - Too complicated/over engineered and too much of a support overhead to justify remaining with it.

Tivoli NetView for capacity monitoring - An out-of-support legacy tool which had limitations for what our company wanted to do with respect to reporting.

The initial setup was straightforward. Because initial solution design is very important, planning the initial setup with respect to you own environment is key. Ensure that all required IP connectivity and product specific UDP/TCP ports are open and available.

The implementation was done via both vendor and in-house teams. The vendor team’s expertise was excellent.

Our ROI is excellent. The product captures production issues and streams events to service teams who monitor our infrastructure. The product also provides pre-emptive production reporting so that any potential issues can be caught before causing a potential outage.

The licensing is based upon a network element of a device. An element is a single SNMP entity. The product can be tailored to manage to the number of elements that are managed on a device. So start off by identifying what elements are required to be managed and base your licensing on that, allowing room for future growth.

We scoped upgrading our existing product suite.

Evaluate and research to ensure your requirements are met.

• Scalability
• Speed
• Integration of performance and flow data

It allows us to see metrics and immediately map to who is causing an issue so we can react faster. It improves our mean time to resolution.

I would say that incorporating other technologies, we have great performance data, but if it started doing intelligence and looked at the patterns or correlations, that would be great.

I've used it for almost three years.

No issues with deployment – it's fairly simple and quick.

It's been great with no issues.

It has scaled to our needs; if you need more you add an appliance and off you go.

Fantastic – responsive.

The engineers are well trained – have been fantastic.

We were using EHealth (CA) and NetQOS, but we left those products for greater scalability and speed, as well as being able to consolidate those two products into one.

Pretty straightforward, but complex due to the size of our organization. This is not an issue with Sevone.

We did it in-house.

We just evaluated this product based on what we heard and we initiated a POC.

I would say spend the time to learn the product so you can fully leverage it – theres a lot to the product. If you push the solution, it can solve a lot of problems.

• Near real-time raw data availability for two years for analysis
• Scalability of architecture
• Ease of build
• Installation of virtual appliances

It diagnoses and separates network issues from application issues based on flow analysis.

This is my favorite part of a review, so I am providing many ways to improve the product:

• Application session tracking
• Improve virtual appliance scalability
• Dashboard and report delivery
• Integration with service management (ServiceNow, Remedy) should be an out-of-the-box API

In my current organization, SevOne is fairly new. It is being built up to be used in the production environment. But as an architect, I have used this product at various mobile telcos.

No

No

Excellent

I previously used CA and HP solutions. The main reason for switching was the latency in data collection and presentation. Also, the level of customisation required to change the reports resulted in a high capex cost to organization, each time the customer requested any change.

Initial setup was very smooth; we used a virtual appliance.

This product needs a lot of handholding and close collaboration with network design resources, in terms of choosing the appliance and the number of licenses. Otherwise, SevOne may look like expensive, which it is not.

It was chosen over CA eHealth.

It is a very good product, easy to stand up, and a good tool for network engineers.