ITRS Geneos Reviews

Most enterprises have multiple sites with deployed, disparate resources, and varying data requirements. Geneos gives a real time global view of both resource usage, coupled with headroom availability is powerful information for both right sizing budgets and identifying projected choke points. Recent improvements of the Gateway publishing feature strengthen its position as a top as an enterprise monitoring solution.

The ability to logically normalize data gathered from multiple types of sources via pre-built plugins is extremely powerful. This functionality, coupled with the ability to import custom data via the Toolkit plugin allows Geneos to be leveraged to monitor every system in the enterprise. The use of Attributes within the enterprise facilitates very flexible grouping and viewing of this information. Enterprise scalability is also an important feature of Geneos. This is very important as gathering enterprise data metrics is only the first piece of managing the system.

Software is continually updated with enhancements - normally client requests - every couple of months. Due to the maturity of the product, this means the software is feature rich and targeted at the modern environment.

The strengths of the product is data capture and ease of configuration. However, data visualization – real time and historical – is a weakness. This is being addressed with VALO and ITRSInsights but this is not production ready yet.

We had no issues with the performance.

Scalability is built in to the product

Customer Service:

Excellent and very reactive

Technical Support:

Knowlegable with their own product but also with how it interacts with client software

I think that the configuration is fairly straightforward and much simpler than other management systems.

I rated this product a 9 due to how much I used it and how useful it was to us. It has allowed us to provide immediate support where needed, reducing business impact.

The visualization layer and the config editor (with host of out of the box plugins) that makes setting up monitoring on any application quickly and efficiently covering infrastructure and more detailed monitoring points like middleware, messaging and database.

It has helped us re-define the Monitoring operating model which in turn has made support teams more efficient by using features like commented snoozing on various levels, use of knowledgebase articles associated with each alert cell, metric logging for capacity monitoring etc.

I would like to see more integration support via use of APIs. They have released openAccess for the same but hasn’t really picked up. Also, more flexibility in creating own customized plugins (not just using toolkits) and deploying on agents. Also, more data analytics capability would be helpful.

I've been using it for six years.

There is are issues with the compatibility of plugins with AIX servers.

There were performance and stability issues in running gateways and net probes on Solaris servers.

We have had no issues scaling it for our needs.

Customer service response is really good through raising tickets on their online support portal.

They generally respond within couple hours for a normal ticket and can respond even urgently depending on the level of escalation. They are happy to come on site as well to work on bigger or more specific issues.

The reason for choosing ITRS Geneos was the availability of its wide range of out of the box plugins and its visualization layer that simplifies and represents the application components well.

The process in itself is simple to setup but getting it working through the corporate securities and restrictions can be a pain, but I guess that would be the case for any new tool setup.

It is a bit expensive so it may not be feasible if you are planning to use it for a specific application(s). But if you use it across a range of applications (like within a whole department) then look to combine the licenses and then it can be really worth the money. Moreover, this way it standardises the monitoring platform to have consistency across teams and set up a standard monitoring operating model.

It may be tempting to get it working quickly using the root, but I would highly advise against it. Create a new user and give it appropriate permissions by identifying what access it may require to run plugins. Due to its ease of usage it can be abused by application support teams so I would suggest to review the setup regularly and make sure there is only 1 or 2 admins changing and updating monitoring otherwise it can get quite messy very soon. Try to rely on watching the visual interface and not on emails as that can grow huge as well. If you do stick to only absolute critical ones.

Try to pilot the project in a small area and learn as much as you can before deploying it across a wider estate. Use ITRS support as much as you can at least in the beginning. Also, have a experienced Geneos professional implement it.

As a user its UI is very easy to understand, nice to look at, organised easily, and also very quick at alerting. This makes it stand out above its competitors, which in my experience are slow and ugly.

As a company looking to onboard, its capacity to monitor just about anything from Unix log files and processes to database memory, and even run queries and provide results. It can be used as a one stop shop for all your monitoring needs if you understand how to utilise it to its fullest extent.

It has improved our efficiency in many ways. Management and user information are now on self-service as we can provide them dashboards which give them live updates on what they want to know when they want to know, rather than running a query every day and e-mailing it to them.

We can configure it to send us email alerts for errors, and set up pop-ups so we do not have to constantly monitor something. We now have control of what we monitor so there is no reliance on external teams to send us alerts.

Like any product there is always room for improvement, and although their documentation is good, I would say better documentation is always one to aim for though, and I believe they are doing this.

Technically, I believe the dashboard functionality can be more configurable as some shapes are very limited with what they can do.

I have worked with multitude of versions for a year and a half. All of the versions I have used are very similar, and it has very much added value to every team that has used it.

I was involved with the deployment of NetProbes onto the app servers to collect data. This was a simple process and easy to do.

We had no issues with the performance.

I was not involved with any of the other processes although I would say from my knowledge and experience it shouldn’t be that hard to deploy or scale up though I think depending on the size of scaling you would want to strategize how to handle the workload.

The Customer Service is one of my favourite parts. They are always helpful and point you in the right direction. They are also very quick to respond and have a forum for self-help. This is definitely one of their strong points.

We previously used a monitoring system that sent alerts to our phones or sent emails to us. We also have a team dedicated to monitoring and sending us mail. It was inefficient and a worse form of monitoring overall.

I was not involved in the initial setup.

Often I find that people who are not a fan of Geneos had a bad experience with a terribly configured gateway. It needs to be understood that being very configurable has its negatives as it needs to be managed properly to make effective use of the tool. Ground rules need to be set and changes need to be controlled, otherwise it can get messy very quickly and ruin user experience.

I am sure you have the ability to sit and consider options, both positive and negative, before choosing a product. I strongly suggest that if you do not have a visual and easily configurable monitoring tool then use this as a comparison for other tools. If you feel the other tool is better than Geneos then it really must be good or the sales man for the other product has done a great job

• Excellent set of plug-ins for the financial industry.
• Easy to extend and to incorporate existing monitoring scripts/programs.
• Publishing monitoring data to many users is simple due to webservers included in Geneos.
• Attribute-based viewing tree allows different views of your data for different purposes/users.
• Very good maintainability due to groups/types: very effective build and change of configuration.

• Trading desk has continuously updated view of full quotation process. Issues are displayed and alarmed about in near real-time instead of going unnoticed for longer periods of time.
• Depending on the issue, the relevant group of people is informed in case of a problem and has already a head-start due to the specific information sent by the monitoring system.
• All teams (operations/IT management group/users) have a common information base consisting of the generated dashboards and drill-down web pages leading to each running sampler. This immensely improved communication in case of production problems.

5 years

No issues. Deployment is very easy also for large number of hosts due the feature of "self-announcing netprobes". This makes it possible to deploy to hundreds or even thousands of servers without manually configuring the connection between monitored server and Geneos gateway (where all data is sent to for evaluation).

No issues.

No issues. If a gateway has a high load it easy to set up additional gateways to get headroom on each gateway again. If a netprobe has too many servers one can parallelize by running several netprobes per monitored server. Resource footprint of Geneos is generally very small.

Excellent. If you address to the help desk you are immediately in contact with very knowledgeable personnel. There is no "first-level" support which can only handle easy problems. You can get right down to the issue at hand without being transferred (see tech support).

10 out of 10. Service requests are usually acknowledged (by humans, not mail robots) within minutes and answered depending on the difficulty of the question but mostly within 20 minutes, often faster. The quality of the service is very high. You get code examples or links to the relevant sections of the large body of online documentation (videos, manual etc.). If needed your configuration files are proof-read and possibly corrected.

We used Icinga (a Nagios-Clone) before and currently still do in various areas. Geneos has been introduced due to the need for real-time monitoring and notification and for the excellent possibilities to publish monitoring results via web servers.

Initial installation was relatively easy even though - due to the nature of the task - numerous components had to be installed: netprobes on every monitored server, gateway servers, dashboard webserver, webmontage webserver. Directly after installation, however, basic real-time infrastructure monitoring worked out of the box, more advanced monitoring after appropriate configuration.

We had partial support for specific monitoring requirements by ITRS professional services staff on-site. They all were very knowlegedable and customer-oriented. It was obvious that in addition to solving the task given to them they really tried to transfer their knowledge to our staff.

Difficult to quantify. We have reduced stress level of all involved personnel and increased user satisfaction due to the real-time dashboards we gave them. Targeted notifications reduce effort due to false or misdirected alarms. Processes have been improved due to the insights gained by the Geneos monitoring.

ITRS is quite flexible depending on the size and requirements of the customer. Given the benefits we have from Geneos and also compared to pricing of other solutions (e.g. job scheduling) costs have not been an issue so far.

Icinga (Nagios-Clone), AppDynamics, BlueStripe, Leutek. Icinga was too slow for our requirements and would have required - according to the company mainly supporting this open-source solution - major development efforts to accelerate it enough. The other solutions did definitely make a good impression but we went finally for Geneos due to its specific focus on the financial area (we are a bank) and also due to positive experiences with Geneos we had in the past in another time-critical business area (ETF Market making).

For the beginner there is a steep learning curve. To master the Geneos technology reasonably well, four to six months are realistically needed (within those you can already build up an initial monitoring though). For larger organizations it may make sense to centralize this know-how and re-use it for different monitored applications or processes instead of having many individuals learn about Geneos just to realize one specific monitoring each. Once set-up, Geneos proved to be a very powerful and versatile tool to real-time monitor our IT infrastructure and - most important for us - our critical applications and business processes.

Event Management: Manages alerts from infrastructure, applications, and batch jobs. Performs 24/7 monitoring across our Global Markets platform.

This solution has helped provide relief to existing Level 2 teams, allowing them to focus efforts on in-depth problem analysis.

• Dashboards
• Processes
• FKM
• Disk

These alerts proactively help manage the enterprise operational risk.

A lightweight version which could host more than 100 gateways, as we can see slowness while loading all our gateways. We do support a horizontal platform and having this feature will have an impact in the MTTR.

We're able to highly customize the integration of custom developed monitoring samplers.

After developing of a lot of custom samplers integrated with our software, it gave us the opportunity to act proactively to identify malfunctioning applications and services. This allowed us to minimize the business impact when we had network issues.

There is a lot of functionality within the product that can be implemented in many different ways. It would be useful to restrict the way to apply some conditions and for it to have more out of the box rules. It would also be nice if it offered more flexibility and the possibility to aggregate data.

I've used 2011.2.1 (Gateway version) and ga-3.0.22 (NetProbe version) for about three years.

There were no issues with the deployment.

We had no issues with the performance.

It's been able to scale for our needs.

They're very good and are always available to help us with the implementation of new solutions.

Not at the customer where I’m working at the moment.

I didn’t configure it myself during the initial setup. However, I did try it on my own in a virtual environment and I can say it was very simple to install.

It was implemented in-house.

It’s very easy to install and setup, offers high scalability, and has a low resource use.

For supporting market data organizations, Active Console & Gateway helps to diagnose problems quicker allowing timely incident notifications. Market data delivery systems are allergic to missed data which can be hugely detrimental to the business. The ITRS Geneos system assists engineers by allowing them to focus on troubleshooting the root cause instead of spending an unnecessary amount of time determining the impact of the problem.

Real-time monitoring of market data components on an enterprise environment is the most valuable feature of Active Console and Gateway. The built-in plug-ins allow administrators to easily configure monitoring components for market data systems such as Thomson Reuters Enterprise Platform and SRLabs Wombat (formerly NYSE). The interface is easy to use when interrogating monitored systems, viewing and graphing historical values, and performing Gateway configuration updates. Script generated output can be modularly added to allow greater insight if built-in plug-ins are not available.

Better exportable reporting of historical data would greatly improve the product's usefulness. Much of the reporting outside of the user interface is very basic and requires much customization to be useful. Additionally, the product documentation could provide more detail on plug-in features by showing implementation examples.

Take advantage of the "Hot Standby" feature on the Gateway product to increase resilience. It provides administrators the ability to configure a pair of Gateway instances with mirrored configurations for fail-back capabilities when hardware or network failures occur.

It's been able to scale for our needs.

Excellent 10/10 Any issues are addressed by ITRS support expertly and in a timely fashion.

The deployment is easy and the configuration is fairly straight forward. The documentation for plug-in configuration is a little sparse, but the latest version of the user interface is very intuitive. It is important to note that Gateway configuration accepts XML files allowing easily transferable setups.

In-house. Be sure to read the available documentation and, if possible, attend the vendor provided training and certification.

The product is priced quite high. There are pricing options for customers based on the size of the environment and plug-ins used by the monitoring system.

The product is renowned for its versatility for monitoring market data environments. The built-in plug-ins for TREP and Wombat is the main reason for using this product. The licensing cost is the biggest detraction, but cheaper solutions are not as robust.

• Toolkits
• Compute engine

It provides us with the ability to monitor much deeper into both our infrastructure and applications functional metrics. Deploying simple metrics was simple and we quickly covered the functionality provided by the product we were replacing. The result was a similar metrics monitored at a much better frequency, with a more stable product and a much better user interface. Also, we were able to deploy self-service role-based access by architecting the include files and authentication modules in an appropriate way. That enabled the application support teams to start getting involved in extending the baseline monitoring we had deployed and go much deeper into the monitoring of certain applications than was previously possible. Interfacing the product with our enterprise event management platform was relatively easy.

A few minor incremental improvements we have asked the vendor for would be nice. The main weakness of the product is poor historical logging and reporting. The main difficulty with the product is how to identify performance issues with complex rules or samplers. This is about to change with the new Insights module.

I've used it for three years.

Nothing major. Webserver module did not deploy successfully though

No issues encountered.

Performance can be a problem with complex or greedy rules and samplers.

9/10. Good service

10/10. Very committed, very helpful, very knowledgeable.

Our previous product had poor functionally and of poor quality.

The setup can be complex if the solution you are deploying is complex.

We used a mix of both in-house staff and vendor consultants, and they worked as a team.

Know your functional requirement. Gradually build complex monitoring. Start simple.