What needs improvement with Centreon?

The issue my company has with the tool stems from the fact that it didn't give an on-time response to us. The product collects the information, but it fails to send them via SMS, WhatsApp or Telegram. The solution can be used if you want to get email notifications, which is not good for our company because if someone is not in front of their desktop, you can't receive information about an equipment or LAN that is down.

Prometheus provides the ability to automate the backup of my infrastructure. This automatic backup capability allows me to integrate it into GitLab for versioning, among other functionalities. Thus, it serves as an additional application that simplifies the work of network engineers. The solution could have backup automation. It can automatically detect all the applications and infrastructure components, including dynamic protocols, which can be highly beneficial. Automatic detection enables proactive measures, such as triggering remediation processes via API as soon as alerts occur.

I think Centreon's security could be improved by leveraging AI. That's where things are heading in the industry.

The reporting has room for improvement. The reports could be improved by providing more data and more detailed charts. I would like Centreon to offer support in Portuguese. Centreon should have better integration with WhatsApp.

Centreon introduced network discovery in the most recent update. However, it doesn't work well. Our previous monitoring tool could discover networking equipment on the network and identify the relationships between the devices.

Centreon is very bad with auto-scanning. It's very monolithic software. It doesn't have microservices and it only has basic clustering. You cannot, for example, have six or seven nodes for Centreon's cloud processes. Another area for improvement is auto-remediation.

The problem with the reporting is that you have to configure the report, and after that, you will have the same report every month, every week, and every day. You have to sync it in order to have a great report. For me, the reporting tool is not a strong aspect of the product.

The solution’s customizable reports and dashboards for allowing management to see performance metrics is very well done. However, it is very time-consuming. I am pretty sure we can create a very beautiful report, but I don't really have time to focus on it now. I wasn't using this feature at the start. Now that we got it, I haven't had time to work on it since it is a paid solution that is quite expensive. We also need to dedicate human resources to work on it, because it is not so simple or quick to configure. I would like them to improve their documentation. When I faced some issues, I was looking for more documentation on the Internet. There is official documentation on Centreon's website, which sometimes is useful. Sometimes it is not very useful, as you cannot find the information or enough examples of configuration. The answer for me was to contact the support, who helped me, but I was not able to find all the information by myself on Centreon's website. A Centreon community or blog would be helpful.

There is room for improvement in the basic reporting. They provide reporting in PDF files but you cannot modify these PDFs much at the beginning. It would help if they would simplify the modification of reporting, when starting. A lot of solutions in the market have this issue.

In the next year or two, I need to implement a load balancing system because I am using Veeam Backup, which I don't like.

Improvements are needed in the area of cloud monitoring, as that's a newer feature.

One of my pet peeves with Centreon is that it's not easy to determine what the end results are of all of the inheritance from the different hosts and service templates, for example. If there was a way to easily determine, for example, for a specific host, which notification settings or service settings, would be ideal to set. Currently, we have to go through all of the different templates and take a look at how the template is configured, and how specific parameters may change across different templates with different precedents, megatons, etc. It's a lot of work and involves trial and error. I wish they could simplify the process. The solution needs more features on the mobile app. Currently, the mobile app cannot be used to receive notifications. It would be great if the mobile app acquired the capability to receive notifications from devices. Our customers are asking for that kind of feature.

Centreon is missing an easy way to create a trendline for the metrics. Actually it is possible to create it, but you need a good knowledge of math, Centreon, and RRD.

I would like to see more plugins. That is something it needs. There is also room for improvement through dynamic thresholds, or self-discover thresholds. I would also like to see a discovery feature that could map the whole network environment and automatically suggest things. Finally, NetFlow would be helpful. We have a lot of clients that ask for NetFlow.

There is room for improvement in the area of artificial intelligence. The product gives us a lot of information, but it's only information. We want the product to do more auto-remediation.

Because the API is available, which is good, Centreon could be more productive if there was better API functionality. Since you can automate some tasks with the API, such as how to add an host or automatically rollout a new host, this is a good area to continuously improve. E.g., the automatic adding of hosts, like LDAP objects or network scans. I think the network scan is a good point, because if you install Centreon as a fresh install, it's pretty easy to make the basic installation. It's very easy because you can download a ready-to-run image from a virtual machine. Or, you can also download a custom operating system on it and can get the system quickly running. However, after you have it running, you need to fill it with objects, which make sense. This is the point where Centreon could improve. They could add different tools to make it easier to add some hosts to your network from your Active Directory, etc. Another big improvement would be a more powerful API to add host services, etc. At the moment, these things are possible, but not directly. These are things Centreon may need to think outside-the-box about and be creative. Also, Centreon supports officially 10,000 services per poller. That is not much for larger customers, because this limit is reached very quickly. We use it with three times the limit without any problems, but Centreon says, "Okay, we are only supporting it with 10,000 services." We are aware that increasing the limit has different impacts because they need to support it. However, for most customers, it would be be very good if they could increase the limit of services. I would also like to see an improvement of the communication with big data systems, because Centreon is a monitoring system. In our point of view, Centreon should be a part of a source for a big data system, not a big data system itself. So, it should be easier to add data from the Centreon system (monitoring results) to a big data system. For example, it should be able to feed another machine learning system. At the moment the interfaces are limited.

Centreon needs to improve the granularity of the data as well as the graphical data. It would also be better to if there was improvement to the filtering/grouping system as well as the creation of views.

There are improvements that they need to make to their API. When we're using different systems and we want to disable monitoring for a specific server, we still can't do that through the API. That's something that's lacking. We have to be creative and think of other ways. And now that we're looking into switching to the world of containers, which is a different type of monitoring altogether, I hope that they have some sort of scalable solution for it. In a container world, the container is irrelevant. It could just be destroyed and another one can come up in its place. It's about the history, the log, and the service itself; that's what is valuable. That's something that they have to think about, although we're not there yet ourselves.

We have provided feedback to Centreon directly. The most important issue is the capability to interconnect with other systems. It already exists for some of them. For example, the Stream Connector is something we use to populate data in another system. This kind of facility for connecting should exist for all products that it makes sense to have connected to a monitoring solution.

I would like to see a better UI, one which is more responsive. This would be an improvement. Other than that, at the moment, every one of our customers is satisfied with this product.

* Lacks service monitoring in the cloud. * Necessary to improve service monitoring of database services in the free version.

Sometimes, when the GUI and some of the search fields are being reset, and I return to the page, then I have to set them again. Therefore, some improvement on the UI and the filtering is needed. There are a few bugs or annoying things on the GUI. However, the features are all here for what we need.

I went through a few things with them to do with Centreon MAP, to do with active polygons, being able to draw an area and make that active. The functionality was in the older version of Centreon MAP and in the new version, which was a complete rewrite, they dropped it.

Release management and quality of testing need improvement, because with each major upgrade we have many issues coming in. Then, it takes several minor upgrades to get rid of them.

The map allows you to see the whole infrastructure. While it is a good solution, it could possible to be better, because the put on shield is incredible. In the future, we must be able to see the map in 3D, like on Google Earth, because infrastructure is on the site this way. Sites have many flaws. The map must be in 3D to show localisation. We supervise and monitor a lot of ELP in my company. Centreon should develop a trading pack with ELP and ECP.

Improvements I would like to see include * a discovery solution * better reports * end-to-end monitoring. The latter is the number one feature that we are looking for. Right now, a lot of other monitoring providers already have a good end-to-end monitoring solution, but unfortunately, Centreon doesn't have it yet. So that is one thing we are very much missing.

The Home view could be improved by adding customization functions that allow users to change the size of the widgets for a more uniform layout.