ITRS Geneos Reviews

ITRS Active Console has helped us monitor servers and set thresholds for different metrics. It is easy to setup and works with different kinds of servers. It also helps you execute shell scripts as response to alerts.

Active Console allows us to execute shell scripts as a response to an alert.

I believe the product has to improve on reporting. Currently it allows writing events to a database and we have to manually create reports from it. The reporting tool needs to be improved.

I've been using it for an hour and a half.

I have not encountered any issues in deployment of the application.

It's been stable and does not crash.

We've been able to scale it for our needs.

The customer service and technical support are prompt. The best way to reach them is to send an email to their support. They are helpful and prompt in their response.

Make use of their helpdesk. They are helpful and prompt.

• Breach predictor
• Compute Engine
• Reporting
• Dashboards

In many cases we are now able to correlate multiple events and take actions while considering a large number of criteria when we do. We can more reliably instruct the product to take action when a certain number of events happened in a certain sequence. This can be done even without setting hard thresholds, but looking at the data we collected in the past and the behaviour the system has on a daily basis.

• Active Console
• Breach Predictor
• Documentation
• Data Storage

I've used Geneos 2 for three years.

Deployment is simple and straight forward. The packages also include examples on how to start them.

In some past versions yes, but the issues were immediately fixed.

No. Planning the implementation of the product on the infrastructure keeps scalability issues away. The product is easily scalable.

Customer Service:

Customer service delivered by ITRS is to the highest standards from all points of view. Highly responsive and quick acting.

Technical Support:

Technical support delivered by ITRS is to the highest standards from all points of view. Highly responsive and quick acting.

Yes we did. Geneos is a highly configurable monitoring system with many built-in plug-ins and offers great functionality. All of this aside, the breach predictor was one of the selling points. The old product was missing many of the expected out of the box functionalities.

The initial setup was a bit complex. We use the product to monitor the Core trading infrastructures (OTC, CFD, Low Latency, etc.), which means many servers, many processes, many metrics. It was complex as in the beginning we were not completely aware of all the capabilities of the product and our infrastructure is close to 200 Servers and 150-200 unique process which are running multiple times. It was complex due to the very high complexity of our systems and the scale.

Initial setup and delivery was done by ITRS and they were a highly professional and experienced team. Redesign and reimplementation was done in-house.

I can't say for sure as I don't know the contractual figures, but I suspect the ROI to be at least 100%.

Original setup was included in the purchase order. I can't say what the day-to-day costs are as I don't know the figures, but if we exclude the licenses, I would say about 10-25 Eur/day and still, this is a wild guess.

We did evaluate other options. One was Integrien Alive (bought by VMWare and non-existent anymore), Leutek ZIS, Quest Software Big Brother and IBM Tivoli (TEP).

Plan the implementation top to bottom before starting so you don't have to redesign it afterwards.

1. Get to know the product and the capabilities
2. Decide what you need to monitor
3. Implement it in steps, e.g. first core (hardware) and then application specific

Customizable Dashboard to display real time business flow monitoring. This is extremely useful to operations as well as business user. Not only monitor health but capacity and performance at a glance.

Cater well to Capitals market trading environment. From on exchange order latency to client RFQ type of multi-stages tracking. Geneos is able to provide the tools to capture data in (near) real-time.

Highly customizable. It’s ability to ingest metrics on a given format allow users to create highly customized scripts/tools tailored to their monitoring needs.

Operation team used to perform 20 highly manual steps for the Start of Day (SOD) checks on a particular system which involve checking dozen of log files, running 30+ SQLs, collating information from exchange website and compare to system static data, etc. Porting all actions into Geneos with an appropriately designed dashboard has shorten the SOD checks to just a glance to the dashboard and greatly reduce manual errors.

Its web monitoring capability is very hard to use especially if there is authentication involved.

I've used it for six years.

We had no issues deploying it.

I've had no issues with its stability.

There were no issues scaling it for our needs.

Very responsible customer support. All case logged are followed up promptly.

Straight forward, startup with basic metrics and progress toward bespoke use cases that's where the real value is. Be expected of a lot of a lot of customization and intuitive work around to extract metrics from your plant if it's not readily available.

In-house team with some vendor support or help along the way. People with a little bit of dev skill can make a lot of things possible.

It’s expensive but the number of Sev One incidents prevented is priceless especially where there are regulatory pressures in the capital market.

Many other application monitoring tools are either too infrastructure centric or client experience centric. Not many cater well towards the capital market.

Get an expert in to evaluate what your real APM needs are.

• 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.

Customer Service:

9/10. Good service

Technical Support:

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.

We can see in real time what is happening with our app logs, processes, and databases, and we can respond very quick to alerts minimizing the downtime.

In my experience, being able to monitor our databases is a valuable feature as we can create our own queries and aren't reliant on the in-built ones.

It needs to have better middleware integration for things such as application and Microsft SQL servers. We would like to have better dashboards with more in-depth detail, access to historical data and customisable views.

We had no issues with the performance.

It's been able to scale for our needs.

We previously used IBM Tivoli for our monitoring needs.

The server was already configured by the ITRS support team, but we configured our own gateway.

It was implemented by a third-party, although we created the rules and samplers ourselves.

You need to perform careful research on what is already included in the application and what needs to be customized.

In my experience, the integration interfaces/plug-ins are most valuable as these help us maintain seamless integration with our systems.

Geneos' compatibility with most of the available products has helped us improve the monitoring of our systems.

We need more hassle free plug-ins that offer "Load and Start" with minimal manual efforts.

I've used this solution for one year.

There were no issues with the deployment.

We had no issues with the performance.

It's been able to scale for our needs.

It's good, but they have a lot of scope to improve it and make it even better.

There were custom in house solutions that we are replacing with vendor products.

Performing the integration was slightly complex for us.

We did the implementation in-hosue.

It is the most adaptable product so you should go-ahead and use it.

We use Geneos to monitor our own development and production environments. Due to its automation capabilities we are able to automatically restart failed processes and alert our developers to issues in our applications and infrastructure without traditional eyes on glass monitoring.

The ability to build integrations to tools that are not monitored out of the box is the most valuable feature.

At the moment Geneos is excellent and handling real time monitoring, however not great at doing historical reporting. This is required for post incident analysis and capacity planning. Various solutions have been developed by ITRS over the last few years, including major changes to the database logging features and the Open Access API. They have a new Product called Insights, based on their technology Valo, I’m keen to see this product used to bridge this gap.

We've experienced no issues with performance.

It can be difficult to gather data on large Geneos estates.

Excellent, certainly with their larger customers they are very involved with deployments giving advice and coming up with workable solutions. However, changes to the product (i.e. bug fixes and enhancement requests) do take a long time to materialise.

Out the box the product is not intuitive to set up, however there are a lot of resources online to mitigate this fact. However the users of the product have to be quite technical to get the best out of the product as they will have to understand the applications they are monitoring.

My company provides consultancy on implementing Geneos, so we used an in-house team. The best thing to do with implementation is to divide common reusable functionality into include files so these include files can be shared amongst teams.

At various places I have worked with have several licence deals in place with ITRS, you will get the best price if you get a single global deal.

If you have never implemented Geneos before I would greatly recommend their online training courses which are available free to users of the product. You can also get classroom based training courses if required.

Three different colors indicating different level of severity makes monitoring easy. With different level of access we can assign controls to different user and most of the things are taken care by our support teams.

The clean and colorful UI and easy to use options like snooze and active times. Previously, we had monitoring tools which had complicated UI's and the screen looked very dull. Also as an end user, we hardly had control over alerts triggering from the tool that had to reach to our Dev, or so called CATE teams to snooze an alert. But now with different level of user controls we can do it from the tool itself.

• The dashboard feature is full of bugs. Grouping items results in a distorted dashboard.
• The file monitoring fails when we need to monitor the same file twice a day but we do have a workaround which is tedious.
• The email alerting mechanism which is based on Pearl is limited. We cannot export a dataview in the email, and moreover the email format is a fixed one, and no user defined email can be sent.
• There are too many features clubbed in for the ease of setting up an alert which makes it more complicated. For setting up a single alert you will need to navigate through at least four places.

We had no issues with the performance.

It's been able to scale for our needs.

10/10 - excellent service and tech support provided.

It was pretty straightforward. We just need to acquire a gateway which once done, is followed by probe deployment on hosts and you are done with it.

We used a vendor team. I really cannot comment much here as we were not really involved in the implementation.

We did evaluate other solutions, and as mentioned earlier this product has many good features which are really easy to use. The UI is clean and since you have color defined with each level of severity its more easy to take up an action. The reason i'm focusing on this is because, Monitoring teams have to monitor for long hours and when the UI is dark and clumsy it really effects the monitoring.

This tool should be given a try where you have lot to depend on monitoring.