IBM SevOne Network Performance Management (NPM) Reviews

It has several features, but the ones most valuable to us are--

• Basic Network monitoring;
• Reporting (performance metrics, third-party data, status maps, device configuration, etc.);
• Scalability (monitor devices and metrics, and maintain speed); and
• It's Linux-based.

Delegate some of the networking monitoring work to SevOne.

The reporting capabilities provided important metrics and data that helped in the oversight of our system, network, and overall IT infrastructure, both in terms of applications and hardware.

It needs a platform to add portals. Some of the low-level features and how they work could use some improvements.

A cause-and-effect kind of pattern would be helpful.

There have been no issues deploying it.

It's been stable. We've had no issues with instability.

We've had no issues scaling it for our needs.

Their technical support is really top notch. We've had several instances when our trouble tickets have been responded to quickly and with sufficient fixes.

The initial setup was straightforward. It was simple and quite intuitive.

Make sure you have good, clear requirements for what you want SevOne to do. If you do, then it will do the job very well. If not, you should consider something else.

We currently use SevOne for monitoring our entire infrastructure, including Network Switches, Router, VPN Sites, Servers, SAN, Databases, Connectivity to ISP, etc.

This product is able to monitor a lot of different products within on tool.

As an IT Manager this tool helps me sleep better knowing that SevOne is my eyes and ears watching the entire infrastructure.

Ability to monitor wide variety of systems with one tool eliminated the need to have many different tools to monitor our infrastructure.

Enhanced baselining capability would be an improvement.

We use SevOne to display all the information from Cisco IP SLA regarding the delay, voice quality, etc.

It's a great solution for highlighting and discovering useful information regarding our network's elements.  There is a cheaper solution available,  but in general, SevOne is a good solution for analyzing network information. It's also very easy to use.

As I mentioned before, there are cheaper solutions available. Earlier, our management team only managed ICMP, like IP SLA. That's why, at that point in time, we decide to use Cisco IP SLA.

Well, I don't know if it's in development at SevOne, but some similar solutions offer end-to-end visibility, both regarding the server and also the network elements.

Other solutions also include the server and some additional layers, like an operating system or database, and in some cases, the application, too; their network elements are designed for management-level.

I don't know if SevOne plans on incorporating these features into their next release, but they should.

On a scale from one to ten, I would give SevOne a rating of nine.

I have been using SevOne since 2016.

SevOne provides us with great stability in the production environment. It's also very scalable, too.

From my personal experience, the support has been good.

Initially, we wanted a specif look and feel regarding our SevOne solution. That took some extra time, but that's to be expected. In general, we got some useful information right out of the box with SevOne. Overall, it's easy to set up.

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. 

Very quick graph generation.

Previously, we used a customized MRTG solution. Graph generation was painfully slow. With SevOne, we are able to generate graphs and reports quickly.

Features like SMS support and a faster way to create objects in calculation editor would be good.

1+ year.

No issues.

No problems.

Very good.

SevOne has much faster performance than our previous solution.

Initial setup is straightforward.

SolarWinds and Cisco Prime.

For performance monitoring, give SevOne a shot.

SevOne excels at gathering performance metrics and then making them quickly accessible in ways that I want to view them.

Setting alerts and thresholds is easy and reliable.

The data remains granular--not rolled up into averages--so viewing past metrics maintains the same detail as current data.

The platform easily scales to monitor millions of objects.

Ease of use enables us to troubleshoot quickly and reduce MTTR.

Dashboards display important info which provides the NOC insight to the network and applications.

Continual UI improvements are needed to reduce number of clicks needed to produce a chart.

We have used the product for about 8 years.

SevOne experienced some growing pains in recent years, but have now invested properly to enable appropriate attention to the customer experience.

Like customer service, tech support has continued to improve and proper business attention is being paid to ensuring improved support and professional services.

Scalability. I have never had to worry about how to handle really big environments.

The GUI: both the dashboard/user view and the admin tool.

More than five years.

No, very stable.

No.

There are some differences between the Bulgarian and the American support teams.

Not applicable.

Very easy to setup the first installation. It is easy and fast to achieve the basic level.

Choose a SevOne partner who can provide SevOne as a service and can deliver professional services and maintenance.

I evaluated from a reseller perspective to find the best product on the market at that time: CA eHealth, Nagios, OP5, InfoVista, etc.

To get the best value, find a good partner to work with who has experience from more than one product vendor. Then, you can get a second opinion and comparisons.

SevOne's ability to report metrics on specific objects very quickly. Whether it is a week, a month, or a a year's worth of data points, SevOne has improved by leveraging short-term vs. long-term memory to provide necessary statistics so we can alleviate network impacts quickly.

We integrate heavily to SevOne via API. This allows us to tie our customer performance metrics data to our customer portal, so it is a self-service function.

I think SevOne can improve by providing more details in their release notes regarding enhancements and changes. If the information can be organized in a way that highlights bigger changes it will help customers identify what areas will impact their operations most.