What advice do you have for others considering SevOne Network Data Platform?

I rate IBM SevOne Network Performance Management seven out of 10.

I would rate the solution a nine out of ten.

I would recommend the product, but not the use of physical appliances. The SevOne data that we extract isn't used by default. It is more just historical data rather than reactive operational data. So, it is like, "Look what happened yesterday-type thing," rather than how we must react to a situation. We don't currently use Data Insight, but it looks great. I would rate the solution as eight out of 10.

I would definitely recommend the product. Monitoring is the key to being successful. Without a monitoring platform, you don't know what happened yesterday and what things look like right now. With a monitoring platform and the graphs, you can go back four weeks or two months and look at the patterns. Without a monitoring platform you are blind.

Definitely go for it. The interface is user-friendly, and it provides so many reports and alerts. It gives you a good, total package. And the support team is also very cooperative. I can't think of very much that the solution lacks. Everything looks okay to me.

I am impressed with their LAN side, WAN side on the Wi-Fi domains, but the SD WAN has room to improve. If not for SD WAN, you can blindly use SevOne as a solution. I would rate SevOne Network Data Platform an 8 out of 10.

We combine our analytics reports but we don't use SevOne in that case. We have data that comes from a non-SevOne system, we take the data feed and we have a reporting layer on top of it. Sometimes, this process takes data from SevOne and helps to provide a high-level service dashboard view. However, we do not use a SevOne dashboard to display it. Rather, we rely on the reports. At this time, we don't directly integrate with ITSM but we have aspirations to involve SevOne in the whole ITSM process. Ideally, any information that has been collected for ITSM can be accessed by SevOne. Also, it's a bi-directional take on the idea, where ITSM can share in the data collected by SevOne. My advice for anybody who is considering this product is to test it, hands-on, before jumping to a conclusion about whether to implement it. It is important to compare products from other vendors to see how they perform. Unfortunately, you have to try SevOne using different components that include the basic NMS plus Data Insight, to get a really good feel of how it collects the data and presents it. I'm confident that at the end of the evaluation, SevOne will stand out in that space. I would rate this solution a nine out of ten.

My advice would be to plan exactly what you're trying to get before you do the deployment and do as much research as you can before you go through the week-long training session that they give you with the initial purchase. There was a week-long training that we got as part of the initial purchase, but the training came before we even had the tool onsite. So I was not able to ask questions intelligently. With flexibility comes complexity, and the other is going to be management. See everything that SevOne can do, they are going to ask for a lot. So you need to get management understanding what the tool can do with what you have deployed right now. Don't promise them the world. Filter down what management's expectations are. I would rate SevOne a seven out of ten.

We haven't done too much with software-defined, but we have certainly looked at the telemetry capabilities, and it does support those. While it doesn't support all of our technology in that space, it does support two-thirds of what we need to do and the other options to support telemetry. Another kit we have is something that we can work with SevOne to do, which is an offer they've made to us. It's quite good. Support is very key, and with all of our vendors, we want to have good technologies, good function, and capability, but we want to have a good relationship with the supplier, and SevOne has made a lot of changes organizationally and consolidated back to the US. Despite all of those changes and acquisitions, they've still maintained an excellent relationship with us. I only had an update from the COO earlier in the week, telling us where things were going. You don't get too many suppliers that make an effort to reach out in that capacity, which is really good. We have not done too much in the way of customization. We haven't really needed to. The product is fully featured enough to meet all of our needs in any performance area but it does have options to do that if we needed it, we just haven't had a demand for it. My advice would be to take the time to plan out what you need and just validate that it'll work with the technologies in your environment. I would also probably go with the Data Insight module from day one. I wouldn't use the native interface within the product. So plan for that as part of any deployment, and then you'll get a lot more value upfront. SevOne is one of the biggest strategic investments we've made. It just works. It just does what we want with no fuss about it. SevOne is built on open-source technologies. If I had a bigger team, I could have written my own, but we didn't. So it was convenient to buy an off-the-shelf solution like SevOne because we knew it would just work and tick all those boxes and we'd get the value straight away, and for very little license outlay compared to what we were paying. It was a bit of a no-brainer. I would rate SevOne a nine out of ten. To make it a perfect ten, it should be free. They're almost at a perfect ten. The only thing that worries me with SevOne is that they were acquired by Turbonomic and now by IBM. The only reason I bumped them down a point is because IBM now owns them and in an ironic twist, we exited IBM four years ago and now we're back with them owning the product we moved to. My concerns are not the technology, I think they have a good technology future, but it's more around the vendor who they're owned by now that that causes me concern.

You have to try it. The first step may be a bit harsh because of the layout. It's an older type of layout, but it works. Once you find your way with it, it is quite easy and straightforward. But, at first, it's not always easy to handle. But, it is a good tool that works nicely. So far, we don't regret it. We need to master the system to be able to fully grasp what can be done. It is not for every end user who wants to go into the system and start monitoring whatever they want. They need to be able to grasp some content before that. Without training or previous knowledge, it is not always easy to grasp every concept behind the solution. It is a monitoring system so it's not a system where you click, then drag and drop. I know they support telemetry. But the device on the end user side needs to be able to send telemetry information, which is not something we can do yet. We don't have enough devices doing telemetry to really use that feature to its greatest potential. So, this is something we have on our roadmap, and probably we will dig into it in a couple of months or years when our infrastructure is evolving in that direction. Telemetry is something that we would like to invest some more time with, because it is different from having just simple SNMP polling, which is heavy on the system. It puts on a lot of overload based on the frequency of polling. By default, it takes five minutes. We want to have something with a frequency smaller than five minutes and maybe pause every 10 seconds, and SNMP can do it, but it puts a lot of overhead on the system. With telemetry, the big advantage of telemetry is a constant stream of information. There is no overhead. We just have a constant flatline of internal usage. We don't have huge peaks. We have fast information, close to real-time. We should have closer to real time monitoring in the future, instead of just being passive and waiting. There is still a ways to go for telemetry, but most infrastructure is capable of doing it. Nothing is perfect. I would rate it a solid seven (out of 10) because a lot of points could be improved. I have a long list of small tweaks and customization that can be brought to the system. We give some of them to the customer support, but we are not their only clients. So, they go through prioritizing all their processes. Sometimes, our propositions are refused. It is a good system, but there is still some room for big improvements.

I would advise evaluating it thoroughly to make sure it is right for your network, and it meets your administrative needs. This should be a major or key element of your decision process. SevOne supports software-defined and streaming telemetry-based networks, but we are not using any of that. I've also not customized out-of-the-box reports. I've only created custom reports for various customer groups that are consuming the data. I would rate SevOne Network Data Platform a nine out of 10.

We are not using all of the features of SevOne. For example, we are not using Net Flow at this time. We are still deciding on what we should do with the data that is being produced by SevOne. For example, we are working on how to manage the users' access because it depends on the visibility that is needed. We don't want everybody to see everything. To accomplish this, we have to use both NMS and DI creatively to control what users can see and what they cannot. User management is a bit complicated, although I think that most devices are like that. Essentially, we're trying to combine NMS and DI to meet our requirements. We want to configure it so that some people are very restricted to certain areas that they can view, which is something that we now control using the reporting. They do not have access to NMS, but on DI, they have access only to only a specific report. The problem with doing this is that we have more work to do when we define the role to the user. With their restrictions, they are unable to create a report, so it needs to be provided by us and then we need to give them permission to build it. I understand that some organizations will not need to have this level of detail for user access control, and for them, the user management page is pretty easy to understand. This is an advantage. However, we need to have a greater level of granularity, so simplicity is a disadvantage. It's both. My advice for anybody who is implementing SevOne is that before deciding whether the licensing is object-based or device-based, you really need to know what you want to monitor and estimate the number of licenses that you need. This is something that is really important in the beginning and I think that it's something that we made a mistake on. Of course, it is possible to purchase additional licenses later but depending on which model you choose, you really need to think and count how many devices or how many objects you want to monitor. It is also important to understand how SevOne counts objects, before purchasing the license. In summary, for our requirement, SevOne does pretty much what we ask and does it very well. It is easy to use, the guide is very clear, detailed, and easy to understand, and the support is great. We are not using all of the functions but overall, the out-of-the-box service and customer support are very good. I am not familiar with the other tools in the same space so I am comparing functionality against different solutions. However, I can say that their customer service is outstanding compared to other vendors. I would rate this solution a nine out of ten.

I prefer physicals, but virtual systems work if they have the capacity that SevOne recommends. You can't undersize the systems. We don't do flow data here, although one group tested it in the past but they never purchased it. But it's nice to be able, within 10 days or less, to recertify a new device. That's one of the reasons we picked SevOne years ago. And we can modify those certifications at any time, ourselves, and that is something we do. Overall, for what we're using it for it's very solid.

My advice is to have a good architecture review with SevOne to understand what your business needs are. Make sure that you are deploying the SevOne collectors as close to the network gear as possible, so you have the metrics with no latency over the network. The ease of use of the dashboard has improved, now that they've introduced Data Insight, which is their new visualization reporting engine. That is a little bit more user-friendly. They've made good progress with Data Insight to make things even easier. SevOne is an eight out of 10. They do a lot of things very well, but there are some areas that need some improvements and they're aware of them. They're working on them for future releases. Every tool has a niche environment, but there's no Holy Grail or perfect tool out there. Overall, we feel SevOne is well-positioned. It's a very strong tool. What I like about them is the support structure. Being able to collaborate with them, when we need some additional services or recommendations on the tool, is helpful. It's a tool that positions us very well to provide immediate service and meet the needs of the business.

It is a very simple, flexible tool with an easy graphical user interface. This is a great tool for having all the SNMP and ICMP reporting in one place. There are a lot of integrations for this tool. They offer good monitoring and reporting. I would rate SevOne as a nine out of 10.

If you're asking for technical comments, then I can describe it in detail, but this is more general. For example, the IT operation can continue working the way it is, but they have to integrate SevOne into their environment. How do they want to do it? We don't know. It all depends on the different clients. I use a lot of tools, actually. Here are the things I can recommend about Turbonomics: Scale-up, scale-down. But again, for reporting purposes, sorry, no recommendation there. The customizations are very hard. The person doing it has to be very good at analytics and has to be very good in all languages, like C-Sharp, unless you want to use the Python tool. I don't know if the Python evokes the scripts in it. I think it does, but it's very, very hard. You need a developer to write the customized reports for whatever you're looking for. If a regular person were using Turbonomics, like admin folks, they wouldn't be able to do that, unless they are a programmer. They have to make it better for reporting. That's the first thing. Also the discount, like I mentioned about the Azure discount. It would be good if they could just get the number right. On a scale of one to ten, I am neutral because it is not too good and not too bad. I would give SevOne a five. In order to make it a 10, they would have to get their staff members highly active and focused on the customer's issues, and just focused on the product, on saving money. On-prem, they need to focus more on the Azure side of the house and cloud. The need to improve their internal technical knowledge and expertise. They need to hire really top-notch folks in Turbonomics.