ITRS Geneos Reviews

This is the most amazing monitoring tool I've ever worked with, because it allows you to monitor a lot of things and also to address the issue and assign it to someone so everyone will know it's being investigated.

I've used it for six months now.

No issues encountered.

No issues encountered.

No issues encountered.

9/10.

9/10.

We switched because this covers everything we need to monitor in one place.

It wasn't that complex to setup.

We implemented it in-house.

Do it and you won't regret.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

Geneos enables customized aggregate views and alerts for both related and disparate components. This flexibility and insight facilitates proactive and prompt causation analysis. Simply put, you can easily see everything at once. If there’s an issue, you’ll know why within seconds, rather than spend precious time trying to find out.

Global support personnel, even without expertise in market data, can now easily and quickly run respective market checks and escalate with pinpoint data.

The Geneos configuration has greatly improved since the nascent version 1.0 days, but still requires specialist knowledge and convoluted config debugging when something’s not monitoring as expected. A hierarchical variable/component reference tree and more readily accessible examples would be welcome.

I've used it since the early 2000s, in the halcyon days when it was branded as ITRS NetAgent. I had led its feasibility test and global rollout for my previous company’s Triarch and TIBCO platforms. ITRS was new to TIBCO at the time, so we had worked closely to add the necessary platform-specific features; ITRS has always been easy to work with.

We had no issues with the deployment.

One original glaring issue had been the lack of fault-tolerant Gateway Servers, but that had been remedied in a release a few years ago. We also had issues with slow Gateway startup and high CPU usage, but subsequent releases and reducing the number of config include files resolved the issues.

There have been no issues scaling it for our needs.

ITRS support personnel are generally top-notch, with a technical account manager who personally sees through each query or ticket.

Various iterations of TIB Hawk, Traverse, and in-house written apps had sufficed, but never truly provided centralized, customizable, easy to use, and market data specific monitoring available via ITRS Geneos.

Initial setup itself is straightforward. There’s a single server (two in fault-tolerance) running the master “Gateway” process, and each monitored server runs a “Netprobe” process. Each tarball is extracted to a single folder, rather than strewn all over the file system. Upgrades are likewise easy.

To not run Netprobes as root, some network monitoring features necessitated writing in-house scripts to feed alongside into Geneos, but that’s also its flexibility in action.
Rather than a cookie cutter setup, you will likely find yourself continually tweaking features and adding new alerts to suit your needs.

Since ITRS was introducing a totally revamped Gateway version 2, ITRS provided a consultant to advise on the initial configuration template, which we then customized and expanded upon.

The insight into finding the weakest links in the infrastructure has enabled us to proactively upgrade servers and networks in measured phases, rather than in a big bang approach.

ITRS has recently streamlined its pricing model to be a bit less granular (computation engine is now standard, for instance), which may or may not benefit your needs. The accounts team is amenable, so try to strike a deal, whether in cost, free training, and/or onsite consultancy.

There’s a reason even Thomson Reuters retired their own monitoring product, in favor of licensing ITRS Geneos.