What needs improvement with SevOne Network Data Platform?

SevOne could improve its flexibility because it isn't fully customizable and its out-of-the-box configuration doesn't cover all use cases.

The tool needs improvement in non-Cisco SD-WAN.

We have a real heterogeneous network with a lot of vendors and different types of equipment. Out-of-the-box, it doesn't tend to give us the things that we would like to see. Therefore, we have to raise certification requests. I would like them to improve the self-certification, e.g., tools that allow us to certify products ourselves. The event configuration piece could be overhauled. It is a little clunky and old compared to some things that I have used. You need to plan integrations. That has been the biggest bug with SevOne so far. For the things that SevOne pulls directly, those are easy to understand, modify, and put into the database. For things that need to use the Universal Collector or xStats, you need to plan that stuff well in advance.

One thing that comes to my mind is that while I was playing with the SevOne, when I started using it, I tried adding one of the BroadWorks application servers into SevOne. SevOne has all the templates for BroadWorks, but what happened was that it created thousands and thousands of objects from that one application server and we immediately ran out of license. That shut down SevOne. It was a huge pain for me to go into each object and disable and delete it from SevOne. It would help, when new objects are discovered, if there were a way to categorize those objects and to pick the part of the object you need, rather than just discovering thousands of objects and adding them into the database.

I'm not really sure if this was the software's fault or a server issue, but a couple of years back the disks were failing on our SevOne physical server every month and the server would go down. The secondary server took over from the primary until the disk issue was resolved. That was annoying.

SevOne Network Data Platform could improve its SD-WAN side. The system is still maturing. Cisco is always changing their product and new products are coming to market, they have an opportunity to focus and forge a good relationship with the SD-WAN product. They could build a strong product to provide services to SD-WAN. I would like to see live maps as an added feature. Also, build modules on AI and EML to provide better data insights that would proactively tell us what we should be looking after.

The reporting is pretty straightforward but this is an area for improvement. The reports are easy to configure but they are a bit outdated in terms of appearance and visualization. SevOne has some alternatives where you can use Data Insight and it's easy to configure, yet outdated compared to other reporting mechanisms out there. As we are moving to virtualization, it would be helpful if there was support for Kubernetes or microservices. If this added in the future then this might help us to better manage SevOne in a virtual environment.

NMS has several areas for improvement. It should be more user-friendly inside of NMS for some of the functionality in there. It's been getting better the last version or two, but there have been bugs in there whenever I've gone to new versions. There have been some features that were advertised that I would have that weren't actually there yet. They were kind of there, but even their tech support team didn't know how to use them because they were so new, and the documentation wasn't very thorough around those bleeding-edge features.

We need to be thinking about streaming telemetry protocols. They already have the port for enhanced visualization, which they already have through Data Insight. I can't really think of anything else that needs improvement. It's meeting all the needs in those areas for now and the things they're claiming for the future are where we're hitting as well. There are some areas around multi-cloud or hybrid cloud solutions that we need to look at because we do have more of our workloads in the cloud so we need to consider how we can monitor the foreign stats in that regard. It's not something we've specifically looked at for SevOne at this point in time, but that would be something for us to consider.

We made assessments internally about the system, i.e., about what could be done better. There are a lot of points. With the administrative management of the appliance, if some object appears from SevOne because something changed in the network or whatever, then as an administrator you will not be aware. If you are using this object in a report, this object will disappear from the report and you will not be aware of it. So, if you have 1,000 reports, you cannot always check these reports everyday to see if objects are missing or information has disappeared. We don't have any information on alerts, saying that something is happening there and maybe we need to take action. If an object was replaced by another one, or if a link was replaced by another one, then the graph needs to be changed because it doesn't exist in the graph anymore. However, we don't have this information. This is also the same in terms of the internal architecture that we put in place inside the system. We can tag our network device based on the firmware, some rules, or a manufacturer/vendor. But, it is not always clear when we add a bunch of devices that they will mark these categories. For example, we need to make sure that one device is from a specific vendor. We have to dig deep in each device to make sure they are really attached to the correct vendor. If they're not attached to the correct vendor, then information will not be pulled in the same way, and we might be losing information. So, small tweaks need to be made to the internal management, making it easier for me. SDN networking is going from legacy towards object-oriented, so we don't have a choice. It is something that we are using and need. Unfortunately, our IT lead is not really into the SDN solution of ACI, as apparently it is missing some features in terms of deep analytics and monitoring of ACI hardware infrastructure as-is. In the future, we may use SDN infrastructure because I know they are releasing features every month.

In terms of having a complete view of our network performance, I would rate it a nine out of 10. The reason for not giving it a 10 is that there is no packet capture associated with SevOne, but we do have other tools in place to do that. In terms of stability, because of our move to VMs from physical appliances, some things have become a little unstable. It doesn't seem to be a SevOne issue, but we had to have a lot of calls with their technical support to figure out what's going on with it, but overall, it is pretty solid.

The user management features need to be improved. It would be nice if we had more granular control, or layers of control, out of the box. The way it is now, it is simple to configure, but if we want to add greater restrictions with more detail, it becomes quite difficult to do. Depending on the task, there are too many things to control. For example, there is no problem if I simply need to create a user role. However, if we have to create with LDAP then we need to manage many groups and different cases. This is something that I wish we could do differently.

There are some tweaks and enhancements that I've already requested. One is to be able to make changes per device rather than as a global setting. That has to do with naming. It's minor.

One area that requires a little bit of improvement is the topology of visualization and being able to map out connections, end-to-end. It's able to do that, but it's not as impressive as we would like it to be. We would like to understand the different interface types and the connection points better, through the visualization. Heatmaps also need further development. In addition, you can take a device and look at all the metrics that are being collected or enabled. But having a quick map view of the KPIs versus the alerting policies that we've built around a device, and being able to map that quicker and have a one-to-one correlation, would be useful.

We previously have had discussions on some reporting enhancements. So, we raised a feature request, which was delivered from SevOne.

In terms what could be improved, they need to integrate and get a better price. They can do cost analysis with Azure. They need to have a live cost analysis for the discounts, because if you have multiple thousands of VMs that you're doing, of course you're going to get a discount. Correct? If you're only doing a few of them, you won't get a discount. That's the reason why they have to value the discount and coupons. The other con is that they need to be better with the accountability. In other words, the accounts or reports are not better than the others, compared with vRealize. The other thing is that you cannot write any kind of script in it to customize it to get other reports. So I'm shifting the gear into reports now. There can be a problem of Microsoft versus Turbonomics. Because Microsoft won't allow the bigger clients to know what they're giving as a discount and they don't want Turbonomics to know what kind of discount I'm giving them. So there are pros and cons. Because these companies have a monopoly, they don't want the information of their biggest client to get out and say, "Okay, these are the coupons and these are the discounts I'm getting and let's see what Turbonomics can do."

As I mentioned before, there are cheaper solutions available. Earlier, our management team only managed ICMP, like IP SLA. That's why, at that point in time, we decide to use Cisco IP SLA. Well, I don't know if it's in development at SevOne, but some similar solutions offer end-to-end visibility, both regarding the server and also the network elements. Other solutions also include the server and some additional layers, like an operating system or database, and in some cases, the application, too; their network elements are designed for management-level. I don't know if SevOne plans on incorporating these features into their next release, but they should. On a scale from one to ten, I would give SevOne a rating of nine.