Share your experience using Cygna Diamond IP Platform

My main use case for Device42 is that we use it as a CMDB and affinity map to check out network topology or determine when we need to decom something in a life cycle. We use it for many different purposes.

A quick specific example of how we use Device42 for one of those purposes is that being able to deploy it at a customer site and do a mapping of the environment gives us an overview of how we would go about structuring the rest of the products that we would put in place. We use the topology map to build out, say, network segments or understand server affinity mapping architecture and build our disaster recovery plans around that.

In addition to my main use case, we use Device42 as a lifecycle manager as well, and I know many people do not use that, but it does have functionality to be able to pull data CMDB-wise.

The best features Device42 offers, in my opinion, are the network mapping and topology; I think that is the best functionality of the software.

What stands out for me about the network mapping and topology is the visualization, which is the biggest part of it. Being able to see the topology and affinity mapping out in front of you on the screen in the way that they create it is very handy.

Device42 has positively impacted my organization by definitely speeding up our discovery process when we are working with clients or new clients up front with the onboarding. To build out a proper DR recovery for people, it is a necessity to understand their environment, and Device42 helps us understand those environments much quicker compared to manual intervention or running other tools in a segment and several other applications to gather roughly the same type of mapping data.

Device42 saves a significant amount of time, with onboarding and discovery being reduced significantly, specifically around understanding how to build out a client's circuits and network topology. Typically, we have to match that on our side to do a proper disaster recovery environment for individuals, and we build out clean rooms and do the full setup at a hot site. Being able to match that identically with a mapping that we know to be the source of truth and to be accurate saves weeks and weeks of time within the discovery process.

I think Device42 can be improved by adding more features around the CMDB aspect and lifecycle management. I do not think many people use it for that functionality, but if they were to expand the subset of tools available with that and maybe dig a bit deeper with what you could do with the data mining from that, it would be beneficial. Making it expansible into other types of reporting that does not exist right now, or perhaps a complete reporting engine, and being able to visualize that data from the lifecycle pieces of it in a more consumeristic way would be valuable. We want to be able to go to that and just look at the reporting for CMDB to understand, at a fast pace, when lifecycles are coming up and help us identify and manage those into, say, the capacity planning process and all that. I think that data could be useful in many different functions if the mining aspect and reporting aspect were improved and extensive.

I have been using Device42 for five years.

Device42 is stable.

I feel Device42's scalability is easy; I do not have a problem with adding devices to it or any other aspect within that, or installing it in multiple places and using it. Everything works scale-wise. I feel it scales fine.

I have only used customer support a handful of times, but they have always been responsive, pleasant, and solved my problems. I have no complaints there.

I previously used Cloudscape for affinity mapping before switching to Device42. IBM bought them, and then it turned into another product, and so it just seemed to be a hassle continuing with that product, and that is when we started using Device42.

I have not seen a return on investment in terms of cutting employees and have not really tracked the monetary savings that we have. The time investment is the biggest piece that we have noticed as a whole, and it is significant. We are saving weeks and weeks of time during discovery processes, and that is repeatable. Onboarding a new customer, we save time. Every customer we onboard and we use Device42 as a mapping agent, we save time with. Eventually it extends into major time savings over the course of a year.

I evaluated Cloudscape before choosing Device42.

My advice to others looking into using Device42 is to definitely take into account the flexibility of being able to use it as a CMDB source or data source with lifecycle management. I feel many people miss that aspect of it or do not use it for that, but it can be quite flexible in that direction. I would rate this product an eight out of ten.

We are using Device42 for various customers who are starting from scratch and implementing this tool in their environment. We are doing ADDM, ITOM, and migrations as well with help from Device42 data. This makes it very useful for different use cases.

The client's main requirement for Device42 depends on how large the customer's environment is and what kind of implementation they need. If they have their infrastructure on-premises, they can go with the on-premises installation. However, if they have their environment running in the cloud as well, there is a separate installation and separate prerequisites we need to follow for deploying the tool in the cloud. Apart from deployment, we need port enablement on the network side and some service accounts which will be configured into the main appliance. We need to enable some ports at the network side to reach out to the remote collector and target devices. There is a plenty of prerequisites which the customer team also needs to fulfill during or after deployment and during execution of discovery as well.

Automated discovery means that most customers do not know about their environment. They do not know what servers, network devices, or storage they have. We have customers provide us some subnet ranges, and we run those subnet ranges in Device42 and can schedule those. This performs automated discovery for those subnet ranges and tells everything that is behind those subnet ranges, including which servers are there, which are Linux, which are Windows, which network devices are there, and which storage devices are there. Automated discovery means it does everything automatically without any manual intervention for collecting data about how many Windows or Linux servers exist. Device42 does everything automatically. You only need to have the prerequisites fulfilled and have the subnet ranges from the network team, and then you are in good shape after running the discovery.

There is no use if you cannot integrate the discovery solution with your IT infrastructure. Device42 has the capability to integrate with Remedy ITSM and ServiceNow ITSM. There are other integrations as well, as plenty of third-party ITSM tools are available where we can integrate Device42. This information is available on their website for all ITSM platforms that you can integrate with Device42.

Discovery tools such as Device42 are very useful for enterprise level organizations. For end users, if any end user is working on the management side of managing all the environment and infrastructure, it is very useful for them because it actually makes their job easy. They can manage all the infrastructure and all the required details they need from the infrastructure in a very efficient way.

Through automated discovery, they have everything with all inventory in their hand. Device42 provides a very holistic view of the infrastructure showing which things are running in the environment. If the infrastructure is segregated with some parts running in one region and other parts running in different regions, you can have all those infrastructure on a single screen. You can get everything from your infrastructure including what things you have, what licenses you have, which things are expired, and which things are unknown.

Most of the time what happens is that application teams provision servers or provision any new device without informing the inventory team or the CMDB team. These discovery tools are useful for getting those hidden things and providing you those unknown things so that by looking at all those unknown things, you can verify and have all those hidden things in your environment in front of you. This is why it helps end users who are managing the infrastructure and is very useful at the enterprise level.

Various discovery tools in the market do almost the same thing such as collecting inventory and hardware details, running application instances, and end of life details of operating systems. However, in Device42 specifically, we can do resource utilization analysis. There is an ADM feature which you can enable for resource utilization that provides details of RAM utilization, CPU utilization, input and output, and IOPS details. Those kinds of details can be provided from the deeper server level.

Visualization capabilities are also available with ADDM things and visualizations. You can create application layouts, though the caveat is that these are not dynamic. However, you can set some alerts where it can update as well.

Device42 is working on a SaaS-based product with a SaaS-based version where the implementation is going to be easy. As of now, we are doing heavy implementation where we are downloading the main appliance OVF file, downloading the remote collector, and downloading Windows Discovery Service separately. The installation is a bit hectic because the customer needs to provision these VMs and appliances in their environment and then needs to enable the discovery in their environment. After this SaaS version is released, most of the things will be in the hands of Device42 where maintenance can easily be handled by Device42.

Currently, maintenance is handled by the customer team or the Device42 admin who manages those maintenance tasks. If space utilization is getting increased in Device42, we need to add some disk, do database compression activities, or release some data from Device42 that is older than a certain age. All those maintenance activities will be done by Device42 automatically once the SaaS version is released.

Another capability that could be improved is the reporting part. As of now, reporting is good and we can create standard reports and custom reports through DQL queries. However, those DQL queries are a bit tricky because you need to have good SQL knowledge for generating and fetching data from Device42. Device42 has already introduced an AI feature called Inside AI that helps in creating those queries, but they can improve that feature further. If you want an exact result or exact list of servers depending upon your conditions or trigger conditions, the AI feature should provide that. Device42 can improve that AI feature for helping end users in creating those DQL queries to fetch the data from Device42.

Another area is support. Support is good as of now since Device42 has been acquired by Freshworks. Previously, Device42 was a separate company, but now it has been acquired by Freshworks and the management has changed. Device42 is working on enhancing the tool in a better way so that it can be used at a bigger enterprise level, can integrate with most ITSM platforms, and can do more things such as migration and help in other use cases. However, that progress is a bit slow.

Starting from the beginning of my career, I have been working on Device42 for 12 years now.

Scalability-wise, they are adding some features into the tool and scaling it. Since Device42 has been acquired by Freshworks, they are working on releasing their SaaS model as well. They are also working on enhancing their AI features. From a scalability perspective, they are working on it and scalability is going good, definitely.

Support is good as of now since Device42 has been acquired by Freshworks. The management has changed, and Device42 is working on enhancing the tool in a better way so that it can be used at a bigger enterprise level and can integrate with most ITSM platforms. However, that progress is a bit slow.

The main competitors as of now are BMC Discovery, which is the main competitor of Device42, and ServiceNow Discovery. Most customers are using ServiceNow Discovery because they are using the ServiceNow ITSM and want to integrate the ServiceNow Discovery data with the ServiceNow CMDB.

Other discovery tools are also in the market such as StratoZone for Google, cloud scape or CloudImage for AWS, and Azure Migrate for Azure discovery. However, those are cloud-native discovery tools that provide all the details related to the cloud and are used for preparing assessments. Those are not core discovery tools and are high-level discovery tools. The ones doing deep discovery are Helix and ServiceNow Discovery.

Price-wise, from what I understand from my leadership, Device42 has some cost and it is a bit high compared to other discovery tools such as BMC Discovery or BMC Helix. Their rates are a bit high because they treat every server as one unit of one license. One server means one license, and for storage, if you are doing it for 0.10 unit for one storage, their costs are a bit high from what I understood from my previous engagements and in my current team. I would rate this product an 8 overall.