ITRS Geneos Reviews

I have implemented Geneos to improve business, management, engineering and support operations.

• We use Geneos to provide a business view of the IT infrastructure using its data to produce reports and dashboards that are ready for business management to view
• Management use Geneos to measure various stats on operations performance to ensure business and technical targets are being met.
• Engineering teams use Geneos for capacity and performance management
• The Ops teams use Geneos for process, log file, middleware, database, and custom application monitoring.

The Geneos monitoring solution is a mature industry standard monitoring solution, and is present in over 90% of the invest banks in the city. There are many reasons why it is the professional's tool of choice.

• The NetProbe carries over 100 samplers which are capable of monitoring hardware, OS, and the application layer.
• The NetProbe is a very light weight process typically uses around 0.3%CPU as it is written in C/C++ so no fear of it hogging your low latency machine resources.
• When it comes to custom monitoring the probe offers an easy to use open interface known as a toolkit sampler which is very simple to use or for more sophistication and control there is also an API.
• It is cross platform and will work on many different types of architecture such as Solaris, Linux, HPUX, AIX, and Windows.

I would like better access to the data that is being collected. ITRS are addressing this by using a KAFKA API interface to the gateway. Access to the data provides the ability to summarize, aggregate and correlate events and in many cases predict outages.

We had no issues with the performance.

It's been able to scale for our needs.

Customer Service:

10-10

Technical Support:

It's excellent, and by far the best third party support we get.

No

I have implemented Geneos for several banks and each implementation is different. The customers' requirements determine how the implementation is done.

In house

Pricing and licensing is based on the requirements.

I have looked at other products but they fail right at the start – these other products use Java or Pearl and this is not what I want running on my machines. As this product was written in C/C++ it does need many files to run or a complex environment to setup.

Keep the implementation as simple as possible.

ITRS helps us to identify a lot of production issues proactively. E.g., ITRS alerts for a critical process memory that grows beyond the configured threshold limits. The limits are set to alert before the process crashes. This allows support teams to recover the process in a controlled manner (usually a planned restart before the process crashes).

A State of the World dashboard that we built gives a bird’s eye view of the entire production environment. These dashboards are displayed on big screens that are monitored by support teams in multiple locations. This helps us to monitor mission-critical components more effectively. FKM plugins can monitor huge logs in real-time for errors/exceptions and other keywords. Alerts are triggered immediately when an exception is logged.

As far as I know, ITRS does not have integration with any version control system. ITRS monitoring configuration is defined in a setup xml which gateway reads on start up (setup.xml). When you are working on a major monitoring set up, you will have to make a lot of changes in the xml. ITRS keeps only last 10 versions of the changes. If I want to restore an older version then it will not be possible unless you are taking regular backup of the set-up xml. Integration with a SVN will allow every major change in ITRS setup xml to be checked-in. If i want to restore any version of the xml (a month old), I can do that from the SVN.

I came across an incident when the setup xml was mysteriously wipe off from the disk. So we had to restore last working xml from a SVN that was manually maintained outside ITRS setup. If ITRS can include an optional SVN configuration (like DB logging), it will be very useful.

ITRS can define rules to alert when certain parameters that you monitor breach a threshold. Rules can be configured to fire recovery actions automatically to clear the alert. However, if the alert persists for an extended period, then it has the capability to fire multiple levels of escalation email or actions.

It also has powerful visualization features to develop dashboards to display in big screens and share it via Webslinger (a web server that allows dashboards to be accessed via web browsers). It can log metrics (values) into a reporting database and generate historical charts for trend analysis. The Toolkit plugin can run scripts for custom monitoring requirements that cannot be implemented using standard plugins. There are features to suppress alerts for time-period - Snooze, as ITRS call it - or change the value/severity of the parameter.

There are a number of things that you can do directly from ITRS active console without logging into the server. Processes can be restarted and you can open log files directly from active console. It also has a built-in scheduler that can run tasks (commands that you configure) on multiple targets. The active time feature enables you to apply different rules at different times. It also helps to disable alerts during non-business hours (eliminates noise).

ITRS has setup XML that holds the entire monitoring configuration. Only the last 10 versions of the setup XML is saved locally on the gateway server. These 10 versions get overwritten quite easily when you are working with a big configuration change. I would like to see ITRS integrate its setup editor with a SVN to check-in setup XML after major changes.

I have not observed any stability issues so far. ITRS has a transparent failover mechanism. If the primary gateway fails, the secondary gateway takes over. I have seen the active console freeze while it’s failing over, but everything recovers within a few minutes.

I have not observed any scalability issues in an environment with 60+ servers, 1000+ processes, 5000+ logs to monitor.

I am very satisfied with the level of technical support I get from ITRS. All the queries that I raised around monitoring setup and configuration issues were closed in a timely manner. We also have a ITRS technical support specialist visiting our office twice a week. This is very helpful to discuss some of the complicated monitoring solutions that we wanted to implement in person.

I have used Wily Introscope and Nagios, but they are not as comprehensive as ITRS.

Initial setup complexity depends what you want to implement (e.g., building a dashboard is complicated). You will need a basic training session to start working with the initial setup. Depending on what you want to achieve, the rules and actions can become a bit complicated.

We have 20+ applications monitored in ITRS and the implementation was done in-house. ITRS has features to import template setup. This will save a lot of effort on the initial setup. If you are starting from scratch, create a setup template which can be re-used on the new gateways that you create. (E.g., default rules/samplers, etc. can be defined in a template and imported.)

I don’t have much visibility to the pricing, as this is negotiated at enterprise level. I heard that enterprise-level licensing is quite expensive.

I would definitely recommend this product for monitoring mission-critical applications.

ITRS is the best monitoring tool I have used so far. It comes loaded with a lot of built-in plugins to monitor almost all of the parameters that you want to monitor in a production environment – i.e., processes, memory, disk space, CPU, keywords in log files, daily feed file generation, web service monitoring, MQ, Database, FIX Sessions, etc.

ITRS ActiveConsole provides a powerful interface for monitoring the environment. The gateway setup editor makes it easy to work with the monitoring configuration.

It's a monitoring tool. It's watching for all of our alerts, including high use of the server or running out of memory.

It's catching things that are going wrong before they become catastrophic, in most cases. It helps us avoid long periods of downtime and gives us a view into when things aren't quite working properly so that we can get in and fix them. We've seen those benefits from the day it was implemented.

One of the best aspects of Geneos is that it has a broad scope and can cover a lot of use cases. You can write your own scripts to monitor really specific things. And the rules that you can put in place can be quite complex for the alerts. Those two things are quite good.

The deployment method for upgrading is a bit tricky. It takes a little bit of manual effort. If that could be a bit more automated, it would help us a lot.

I'd also be interested in seeing some intelligent analysis of log files, along the lines of AI. It would be nice if it could start correlating events from all over the estate.

I have been using ITRS Geneos, in different companies, for about 15 years.

It's fairly reliable.

There are always glitches, but they seem to be fixed reasonably quickly. And, in general, it does what it says it's going to do.

Once you've automated it, it's very scalable.

For us, the hardware is in London and the solution is across multiple departments. We have about 30 to 40 users.

I expect our usage will remain steady. We are changing our platform, but it's the same size as the one we're on now.

The support is very good. It's quite immediate. I don't think I've ever had an issue that hasn't been resolved.

Positive

What we had, and still have, was more low-level than what I would have been involved with. It would have been more on the operating system level.

We added Geneos because we needed more visibility into the application. The other solution only looks at whether the machine is there and running or not.

The initial deployment can be complex. It depends on how much you want to get into it. It's the sort of thing that grows organically. If you have a problem, you then add some more features to cover things so that you don't have the problem again. But when you first implement it, you will probably make it quite simple.

Including the provision of the hardware, it takes a couple of months to deploy. It's just a matter of installing the system and getting all the networking working.

The number of people required to deploy the solution depends on the size of the organization. For my current organization, it would take a couple of people to do it.

Maintenance involves upgrading it every now and then. License file replacement is another task.

Our biggest ROI is that it has saved us downtime.

The pricing seems reasonable. We're happy enough with it.

There are a number of add-ons that come with extra costs. We use some of them. We have a license now in which most of the features are included, but there are some special extras that have to be added on.

Do a proof a concept and definitely look at how quickly other systems alert when there's a problem. With Geneos, it's pretty instant. With some of the other solutions, it's not that obvious, and can be a number of minutes before you get an alert.

We use it for application monitoring.

The people who monitor the applications, the operations staff, are not typically developers. The operations staff can, by themselves, configure that monitoring to react to an issue they've seen. They get a very short and tight feedback loop where they see an issue and they can incrementally improve the monitoring themselves.

The operations staff have a good understanding of the behavior of the application in real life, so they are best placed to update some of that monitoring and they are able to do that when it doesn't require development skills. You'd normally put highly paid, experienced developers on the call face to monitor it in the middle of the night.

One of the most valuable features is that it can be configured by non-developers. It doesn't require development expertise to configure it. 

The ITA, the post-incident analytics, could be improved. They know that. I'm sure they're working on it. That encompasses a whole facet, a whole dimension, of the product.

The stability is quite good. It's what I expect. It's commensurate with a product of that flexibility and price point.

We've used horizontal scaling effectively. Horizontal scaling, by having more of it, more systems, and more processes, works quite well. That horizontal scaling allows us to delegate the administration as well. We've not hit scaling problems ourselves, but if people wanted a big, humongous instance, and they used vertical scaling, I imagine they would.

We've not had problems, but I could imagine some people, if they go the vertical direction, would have problems. That's not uncommon with software technology. I was watching a Google presentation last night and they were saying, "If you go vertical, you will almost certainly hit problems, whereas horizontally, you can just keep scaling forever.

Technical support is excellent, very good. They're very accessible, with them being specifically London-based. Unlike if you went for one of the big providers - which, if you did, you would have to be a very big customer, in a top-tier bank such as ourselves, to have regular meetings with them - we can talk with the product managers, we can get our points across. They're accessible. It's good, we're happy.

In those days we only used home-baked solutions, but nothing commercial. Someone else made the choice to go with Geneos. It was prior to my involvement. We thought, "That looks okay."

The initial setup was straightforward. Just put your head down and do it. We got it knocked off in a day. It's fine. It was a long time ago, but it was fine. Straightforward.

My implementation strategy at the time was roll my sleeves up and get stuck in. With it being a practical product, one that you can improve and make changes to, there's not a long ramp to get value out of it. You can get value very quickly out of it. Then you can incrementally build off that. 

You don't need months and years of training to get anything out of it. You can get something out of it, literally, on day one. Then you can increment and improve, as you understand your own requirements, and as you understand the product, and as you mature as an organization.

On all aspects, as you understand more of everything, you can improve your monitoring. So the good thing is you get something out of it day one, you don't need years of training, and then you can build on that.

The deployment was done by just me. 

Once deployed and configured, we distributed maintenance, in that people maintain their own areas. It's not that it requires a certain number of people to maintain it, rather, a lot of different people have input into the rule-setting. Currently, it is just me who maintains it. A very small team would suffice for maintenance.

We've seen increasing stability. Given the problems and issues that software invariably has, we've had the ability to quickly react and identify where those faults lie because we've had monitoring. The return has really been our ability to have confidence that things are good and, when things are bad, our ability to work out quickly and focus on where they are bad.

I believe they went back probably another decade. It went back to the very early market-data days. There wasn't much choice at the time, if any. There was open-source software, such as Nagios that we had looked at. There was some open-source software, but nothing really in the sensible commercial space.

It would be sensible to use experienced staff. Although I say you can get up and running with little or zero experience, and then go on the journey yourself, if you want to get up and running quicker, then use experienced staff. It's not essential, you don't have to, but if you have a choice... I don't necessarily mean experienced in terms of the product itself, Geneos.

Use staff that has higher experience in production support and in seeing problems first-hand. They're the ones who will know what to set up and monitor. Use someone who has real-world experience in seeing what those problems are, and maybe even supporting it themselves. They need to be at the call face or inside of the call face, and the daily problems.

Don't use a developer in the back room who just gets a problem ticket every so often, but someone who is involved in the firefighting so they can see the real problems that you're trying to solve. Those real problems include having issues being picked up in a timely manner, and what's needed to quickly focus on where the problem is. Someone in a back room who receives a problem ticket isn't going to understand all the processes that have been followed to raise that problem ticket. You need someone at the call face who sees all the arguments between the different teams, each one saying, "It's not my problem." They need to see people scratching their heads and thinking, "I don't know where this comes from." All those real-world problems.

To sum it up, use someone who has real-world experience in dealing with production support first-hand, or in direct sight of first-hand. I feel that quite strongly.

In our organization, the solution is extensively used, and we're happy with that coverage. It's used across seven business divisions. We have a complex licensing arrangement. The number of users is in the hundreds. We don't have plans to increase nor demise. It's stable, it's serving a purpose, and we're happy with it.

It's always dangerous to give a solution a ten out of ten, because it can strive. And a seven is pretty neutral. It's got an area where it could improve, in the IT analytics, so I'm going to give it an eight because there are two steps for improvement to get that IT analytics done.

The primary ability is to monitor systems in real-time. Many alternative monitoring systems use a polling system – so a short incident that occurs for a couple of seconds or less and resolves (such as a line outage or data gap). The small outage could have major consequences. Having to wait up to 60 seconds for the message can also mean valuable time is lost in resolving the issue.

The ITRS development team constantly works to make plug-ins and samplers, ensuring that when I implement new technologies – servers/black box solutions etc. minimal development has be done on my side. We can simply download the specifically written plug-in to the gateway and deploy the probe to the new technology. This ‘off the shelf’ approach beats onsite resources developing solutions that already exist.

Dashboards & auto execution – a few years ago the staff supporting our systems would have multiple windows open into various server applications. Not any longer. We have created powerful dashboards which on one screen shows every part of the system we need to see, going into the end applications is a rare occurrence and only for senior third line team members. Auto execution provides the ability to fix issues from the monitoring system. This allows us to have Geneos monitoring and incident management as our ‘core skillset’ – knowing how to support hundreds of applications via only needing to know one. Training is now far easier and staff can support more apps.

We support various versions of view the software at various institutions. The latest version is compatible with Linux/Solaris and SPARC. The probes (which deploy on end user systems) work on most OS including Windows. Consoles to the gateway to view status are Windows based and also various web based tools use modern versions of browsers such as IE, Chrome and Firefox.

We can only respond to issues once we confirm that the issue exists. An analogy we sometimes use is likening our role to that of Formula One pit mechanics – we work hard to ensure the engine is tuned and running, but we can’t stop unexpected issues ‘on the track’. Once an issue happens, we need to be working to resolve it instantly. Any solution that does not monitor in real-time is a non-solution for both CJC and our end clients. As we can see the moment an issue occurs reaction times are quicker. Events are logged and so trend analytics can be used for performance benchmarks; so month to month or even day to day we can review the system heath with a view to improving our performance and refine our monitoring.

CJC require an enhanced level of visual reporting for our clients, specifically due to the large datasets we need to analyse and the importance CJC place on capacity and upgrade management. CJC created a new visualisation tool utilising the existing ITRS Database. This was done with the full support and assistance of ITRS for our specific requirements. I have found that ITRS are aware of their client’s requirements and work towards platform improvements to benefit individual clients and the community as a whole.

I first used the solution in 2009 however CJC have been working with this product since 1999. CJC has to provide 99.999% availability on mission critical infrastructures and it would be incredibly difficult to do this without Geneos. Our clients have a similar requirement of ITRS and so require consultants trained in the product to support their systems. We have assisted in the support of real-time infrastructures at 15 tier one to tier two banks along with brokers and vendors.

From a software Installation point of view no, however all deployments come with their own challenges, especially when migrating away from an existing system as not one infrastructure is alike. CJC has historically upgraded a client from a legacy monitoring system on over 600 servers to ITRS, replicating thousands of bespoke rules and alerts. Migration has to be done with ITRS standing ‘shoulder to shoulder’ with the legacy system. ITRS during this time provide specialists and technical support to replicate rule sets.

Fortunately the system is very stable - we have never seen an application level incident with the monitoring system itself. The gateway has a redundancy mode which we enable so we have a live/live environment.

None, once the server gateways are setup it's simple to deploy the probes. We adhere to ITRS guidelines and monitor the servers themselves to ensure that we are not adding unnecessary load. The gateways run a fairly low footprint on entry level server specs.

The ITRS accounts team are passionate about the product and are client focused.

Generally we work direct with the developers as CJC staff are at an advanced knowledge level with the application. The development team quickly understand our requirements and work with us to achieve the goals we require.

We have historically supported many different monitoring systems, however one of the major reasons for switching was a previous system was not being developed further due to an end of live announcement. ITRS Geneos is commonplace on client sites and our teams had prior exposure or expertise. New staff can be trained on Geneos in a short amount of time and a solid user of Geneos can pull much more out of the system than previous alternatives.

The product is straight forward to install and configure along with the deployment of probes to servers. From out of the box installation to a point of monitoring systems can be done in less than 24 hours. Installing new servers/applications into an established system can be done in minutes. ITRS Geneos is very well known in the financial services community as being the best platform to monitor real time data infrastructures and the application does what it says on the tin. Industry peers reflect this sentiment. ITRS are very good at adding plug-ins to various new software and technologies/black box solutions and also provide order flow monitoring.

However, it being both straightforward AND complex is the key. The system is easy to setup from a software perspective, but you need a system architect to design the system initially. Geneos is ultimately designed for mission critical servers supporting real time infrastructures, high frequency trading, low latency and order flow (and much more). Even with a fairly small footprint – setup not done properly could cause huge exposure. None of this can be reflected on the software, as deployment is always straightforward, however the day to day operation is where the platform form is judged.

Generally we work through vendors however in most circumstances they provide CJC the freedom to setup the system how we require as ultimately we are doing the live support. We work with vendors/clients who have both a hands off and hands on approach to monitoring. However in both cases the understanding of why they would utilise ITRS Geneos shows their understanding of their own infrastructure needs.

It’s the primary tool to detect and start end to end incident management and system analytics so it’s a key part of our company offerings.

Our clients pay for Geneos directly from ITRS.

We found the best alternatives to be open source systems, however the development costs to get these to the standard of ITRS meant that open source was more expensive. Many clients have also done internal investigations and have come to the same conclusion. I would prefer not to name these systems simply due to the confidence that they do a fine job, however, I believe they are not best placed in our fast moving industry.

My logic is ask for a proposal – they cost nothing! If you don’t ask, you don’t get. It’s up to those looking for top level monitoring to go to the various providers and weigh them up both in terms of functionality in cost. I’m confident ITRS would be competitive for commoditised IT and non-mission critical environments.

The tool is highly customizable and can be tailored to your requirements. Dashboards can be created if needed and database logging can be enabled for analyzing trends and monitoring performance.

It has assisted the team to identify issues pro-actively, i.e. prior to a business user reporting them. This would ensure that the issue is identified and fixed in a timely manner. Also, the tools assists with stability as we are monitoring application infrastructure – application (all O/S), databases, middleware and much more.

It would be good if there were documentation on the ITRS website such as tutorials or plugins which are available to download.

I've used it for three years.

We've had no deployment issues.

There have been no issues with the stability.

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

I have not spoken to the vendor directly.

It was straightforward, due to the automated tools created in-house to assist teams with the installation and set up.

In-house. Several tools were created by the Tech Services team to ensure the Geneos Netprobe installations and other key processes are simplified; easy to understand and use by all teams.

Ensure some of the samplers and types (for monitoring infrastructure i.e. disk space, hardware, memory etc ) can be used by multiple servers to prevent duplicating things. In the Gateway Setup Editor, follow the same generic folder structure and set up for all your applications (if you have more than one). This will make the Gateway easier to manage.

We have automated some manual system checking processes.

We have monitoring tools that allow us to view individual systems health and issues on its own.

Geneos gives us visibility on all of our systems at once and we can build dashboard views to monitor transactions moving from one system to another. This has greatly assisted with troubleshooting and helped us understand how the system behaves when issues are imminent leading to proactive prevention.

• Custom script toolkits
• Data aggregation
• Alerting rules to emails
• System APIs

Backward compatibility with deprecated features and in system documentation on what configuration areas are needed to be updated: There is a bit of this in place already, but it can be improved.

I've been trying to update to version 3.5 but the gateway will not start up because my configuration contains deprecated features. The error logs are not very helpful and I've been using a tedious trial-and-error process to find out which part of my configuration is disagreeing with the new version.

I could start with a lower version and then work my way up but that would mean upgrading over 50 servers multiple times which is something I'm trying to avoid.

Technical support is great. They have an online ticketing system for support. I find them quite responsive any time of the day.

This was the first product I used, so I do not have a comparison.

The initial setup was done by the ITRS consultants. They designed a fully customized solution for our system. The basic out-of-the-box monitoring is quite straightforward. The custom solution involved uniquely written scripts to read our application log files.

We started with the vendor team, and then they handed over to me and I became the in-house team. A tip would be to have a dedicated team and give them time to play around with the program. Try all of the features and settings and ask a lot of questions. Geneos has a lot of features and it grows very quickly. Geneos is very flexible. Be sure your Geneos team has a balanced skillset; creative skills as well as technical.

I don't have the figures unfortunately. But the ROI has been growing slowly. We do have a number of other tools and our systems are quite big and complex. I've also met some resistance in the adoption of another monitoring tool from the users. Expect a slow start on ROI with Geneos. In my case, it is finally gaining popularity after catching a number of critical issues that their other monitor tools missed.

It's a lot of work to get started but worth it.

Our primary use case is to monitor services and networking. We monitor applications like the processor, CRM, and next-gen Gateway which is a Windows service.

Geneos is responsible for collecting and monitoring data from our computers. It's helpful for us to get data and to get good information about the health of our systems. The data it provides is very helpful for us and for our work.

ITRS Geneos provides peace of mind by mentoring our processes and applications. It's in the most amounts of environments. Geneos has encouraged real-time analysis and monitoring.

Geneos is very easy to use. They have an interesting dashboard and the app's console is very easy to understand.

It's also easy to implement. The implementation of Geneos is very easy and interesting. It's not complicated. It's very quick to implement. The installation is very easy. There are many topics about ITRS Geneos that explain more about the features of the function of Geneos. 

The architecture is very comprehensive.

It provides us with real-time data. We use the dashboard, we can remotely monitor the services, and we can reach the data, the percentage of CPU and memory with real-time monitoring.

We previously used Nagios. It would take us thirty minutes to get an alert. With Geneos, you can use the access time so we can monitor the analysis and we can receive the analysis when we want and with what we want, every 15 minutes or 10 minutes. With access time it is a very good way to monitor the alerts, to receive analysis. We also get alerts based on real-time data. 

There is a part of the rules for monitoring alerts. I want to understand more about how to choose the samples and the requirements for the rules. That is the part that I want to understand better and get better training for. 

I have used Geneos for six months. 

It's stable. If it goes down, we can use the Geneos backup.

We have around 100 devices that we are monitoring. There are three administrators who administer it. 

Their support is very proactive. When I raise a request, I have an answer immediately. They explain the solution very well. They provide us with a good way to research the information. I like the technical people who work at Geneos.

I worked with other monitoring tools like Nagios and I found Nagios is a bit hard to enter in the agents and to understand the services. But Geneos is very easy and it's very interesting to understand and to work with it.

I work with Geneos now because I switched companies. 

The deployment took around one hour.

We have not seen ROI yet. 

I think Geneos is really expensive, even compared to Nagios.

If you want a critical, secure, and regulated environment and to do powerful and flexible rules, you should choose Geneos.

I would rate Geneos an eight and a half out of ten. Not a ten because when the Gateway was very overloaded it was very hard to monitor the alerts, especially for the product services. The situation would be very critical. Otherwise, it's a very good, excellent tool.