IBM SevOne Network Performance Management (NPM) Reviews

Generally speaking, we use SevOne as a central data collector for network components, routers, switches, load balancers, WiFi, and SDN. We also use it for server databases, cloud integration, and all the scenarios where we collect information.

SevOne produces a number of solutions for carriers and enterprises. The ones we use right now are software-defined networks, which are similar to Cisco ACI. We also use the WiFi solution to support Cisco WiFi and some other vendors. There's also a SevOne product for SD-WAN that we'll probably deploy in the next year. SevOne provides resources to come in and set those up. The solutions are basically visualizations and sometimes custom collections that combine the data insights product with SevOne NPM.

The two solutions provide a series of dashboards that give you insight into how your environment's working. We have full visibility into the health of Cisco ACI, including what's running on it, errors, performance, etc. It's the same with WiFi. We can track every access point, look at each connected station, and see the various metrics relevant to each connection. SevOne ensures everything is configured and operating properly.

SevOne monitors multiple technologies from different vendors. We're primarily a Cisco network, but Cisco has adopted some technologies from other vendors, and we've had no problem incorporating them. We also do F5 and other standard vendors that everybody uses. We manage everything on the network and infrastructure with SevOne. We have integrations with numerous products, third-party applications, and data from external sources. SevOne is fairly flexible as long as we can bring the information back into the system.

We get the most benefit from SevOne's ability to forecast capacity planning trends. We can look at growth in particular values and combine them to see how they interact with each other to improve our accuracy. We don't just base things on a single metric. 

If I'm looking at CPU, I'm also looking at queue length. The new company we work with is incredibly lean, so we've done a massive amount of work between SevOne and our other products to reduce the number of alerts that go out. It's not a matter of just filtering—it's also about making the network work smarter.  With SevOne, we're able to combine things and provide information out of the same platform. For example, if I have high utilization taking place, I see the packet drops in my critical applications by looking at QLS.

I can also look at net flow to tell if their backups run during business hours when they shouldn't. If I combine all that into an incident, my network team knows exactly what's happening when they get it. They can resolve the issue rather than being flooded with tickets that are caused by the utilization exceeding a specific percentage. We get those day in and day out. 

The network is sized to run near capacity, so we get the maximum use of the bandwidth. That also means it'll fluctuate over the threshold periodically and generate alarms, but we're able to combine it with additional data to tell us whether it's a problem or not. We don't need to raise incidents because the utilization went over the capacity anymore. The reason for the high utilization can be identified, so we can make better decisions on what to alert on. SevOne makes our support teams more productive. 

We use SevOne with virtualized next-gen network services because we run Cisco ACI, and we're on AWS and Azure. We can monitor network components on all these platforms. The company is in the middle of a transition because we spun off another company. We started on the cloud, so we never migrated from legacy into the cloud. It's a little different, but we are using it to manage the cloud environment. From a practical perspective, SevOne would give you the ability though to do both, so you don't need to change tools if you move from one to the other. 

SevOne has the ability to transform raw network performance data into actionable insights. Like most products in the network management space, SevOne doesn't have this capability out of the box because networks vary. However, it has the tools to customize it and adjust it as you go along. You get a solid platform that collects information and displays everything you would generally need to see. You can make it more effective by utilizing the data, API, and customization capabilities within the product. 

SevOne looks at indicators. In SevOne's terminology, a "device" is like a router or a switch. An "object" might be a CPU or an interface. It monitors the utilization or dropped packets on an interface. With each of those indicators, the smallest measurement is the baseline, and they do a baseline on everything. The baseline is based on a polling interval over a period of time. That information lets you review and see what's normal.  

They don't aggregate. They keep a year's worth of raw data, so I can do comparisons and see what occurred last month in this particular time period, like the end of the month or fiscal year. I can look at those networks and switches involved in those systems and see how they were performing at any given time each month back to a year ago. I can also set up alerts based on anomalies. I can look for standard deviations or numerical values above or below a threshold.

For example, let's say I'm expecting a certain amount of utilization. If it drops below that baseline, we get alerts that something isn't normal. We combine this in our upper management systems where we apply AI. The manager of managers gives us background information, so the AI can predetermine what might happen next.

We combine anomaly checks with static thresholds. We'll raise an incident for a static threshold breach, but we'll also have the anomaly data so the AI learns what happened before the breach took place. That way it can predict when it will happen again. It's good as a data collector and for feeding the other systems where we apply a bit more intelligence to the data.

We are a large enterprise and provider. We use the solution to monitor and capacity plan our network.

We also use it for our cable modem estate. We have about 6 to 7 million customers who aggregate onto devices. We monitor those devices with SevOne NPM on a separate cluster. We also have a customer-facing cluster that we are about to install.

It is our strategic performance monitoring tool. So, it is the only thing that we use to monitor our internal network, which is huge. We plan to extend it and replace our network performance monitoring tool, which is another IBM tool and currently a big customer-facing system. We planned for another fairly large cluster of about 20 virtual machines.

We have both physical and virtual appliances onsite. We don't currently use the cloud.

SevOne’s data collection functionality is very good. From a collection point of view, we pull SNMP data, which is simple. It is easy to manipulate the pull in the estate. It is really simple compared to some of the other products that we have used. However, for deferred data, i.e., things that we import or don't pull directly, we tend to have a preplanned integration. So, its Universal Collector is really useful.

I don't know that we use it, in earnest, but SevOne does give us real-time insights into our network performance. We set thresholds on certain connections that are important to us. Should they trend towards an issue, then our capacity planning team is made aware of it.

SevOne is excellent for transforming raw network performance data into actionable insights. Our capacity planning team has been very pleased with the transition to SevOne because we previously hadn't used Data Insights, which is really good.

It uses a baseline. So, it uses the last six weeks of data. It has days of the week and weeks of the month understanding of network volumetric data. This is good because it can show us things that are out of the baseline. However, it isn't better than anything else I have used from a baseline point of view.

It is really easy to integrate our network performance data with our ITSM. The API is straightforward.

We use SevOne to collect and report on network flows.

SevOne improves infrastructure planning by helping us analyze network traffic. We can look at bandwidth for specific endpoints on the customer's network and analyze traffic to identify issues. For example, maybe some connectors are unavailable. We can resolve those issues much faster.

We use it for network firewalls, routing, and switch monitoring, including performance monitoring and triggering of alerts.

We have it in our internal cloud. It's an on-premises solution.

SevOne is like a Swiss Army Knife. Because of the architecture and its redundancy, when we acquire a new customer and we are figuring out the optimal monitoring solution for them, we can quickly—within a couple of hours—bring in and start monitoring their devices and showing them data with SevOne. We can monitor CPU, memory, bandwidth utilization, errors, and high octet counts. That is very important for our infrastructure and our business.

And SevOne has helped with the planning of transitioning of our network services. It helped us to know how many objects were involved and what was needed, and let us understand how it was going to impact the installation we had, with respect to installing and using the Universal Collector. We were also able to identify the growth needed for our current infrastructure and to secure and install the licenses. It helped us expand the clusters that we have to support the planned growth.

In addition, the solution enables us to take any network metric and convert it to an insight into what's going on, without having to use a bunch of tools or manually determine things. SevOne's ability to convert that information into insights saves us time and gives us a one-stop-shop.

The integration of SevOne data with our ITSM has saved a lot of time with SevOne being the source of truth for most network device states in the organization. We're able to aggregate alerts, as the ITSM tools aggregate notifications from other vendors in our infrastructure. And SevOne's ability to clear itself when a condition is retired, and to notify the ITSM tools, is very helpful. It helps with automation as well. For example, when a router interface goes down and SevOne notifies the ITSM tool, it equally notifies the tool to retire the alarm and clear it when the interface goes back up. That is great. The ITSM integration has also helped to automate the creation of tickets for customers and internal groups.

SevOne is used mainly for network monitoring. In my company, there are different services that include mobile data, voice, and broadband. SevOne is being used across all of these three services, and it also covers our corporate network.

SevOne is also being used for business reporting and capacity planning.

SevOne provides a comprehensive view of network performance data. It supports multi-vendors out of the box, which is very good. In 90% of the cases, new devices are plug-and-play, so when a new version comes out then SevOne has support for it out of the box. This is the case with either network monitoring or NetFlow data. In the worst-case scenario, they have an open framework that we can use as the next step. It helps us to get it up and monitored fairly quickly.

The ability to support multiple vendors' equipment is very important. In fact, it is one of our top priorities because this compatibility saves us time and money, as we are able to get new equipment set up quickly and without much effort. That's a key thing for us.

I'm not able to quantify our savings in terms of monetary value but in an ideal scenario, we save two weeks of time. When we add a device, we get data out of the monitoring points. Nine times out of ten, SevOne works immediately. In the exceptions, we reach out to the vendor to clarify what they need from an SNMP point of view. After that, we take it up with the SevOne certification team. With any new vendor that comes up, SevOne provides a 10-day SLA for the free certification. That's a pretty good saving.

It is very important to us that SevOne supports streaming telemetry-based networks. As with any other company, our network is evolving and we are moving towards telemetry. We are in a pre-discussion phase with SevOne to use the telemetric components so hopefully, in the near future, we will have it in our product suite.

We do have SDN but as of today, not with SevOne. That is something that we have aspirations for and will look to in the future.

The out-of-the-box reports and workflows help us to understand what is normal and what is abnormal in our network, and this helps to speed up time-to-value. This is one of SevOne's strong points as I compare them with other vendors that I have seen over the years.

SevOne gives us the ability to edit and customize the out-of-the-box reports and we do that quite a lot. We take what SevOne has provided and we change it to fit our needs. For example, when vendors change their versions and release, we fine-tune them to accommodate these things.

It is fairly easy to customize the out-of-the-box reports, although one needs to have a bit of knowledge to do that. I see it as any other product, but there are some limitations to it. There are complex structures from certain vendors such as Cisco that are not easily supported. For instance, Alcatel-Lucent provides multiple SNMP profiles but that cannot be supported in SevOne. This had to be accomplished using other means. It is cases such as this that highlight why you need to have the knowledge but once you have that, it's fairly straightforward.

Cisco is a vendor that we have had to customize reports for. With respect to temperature monitoring or CPU reporting, some of the out-of-the-box reports don't fit that specific vendor version, so we had to modify them to use the latest MIB and SNMP OID.

We use SevOne for high-frequency polling, where we can quickly flip it on and the network operations team is able to easily troubleshoot issues.

SevOne has enabled us to integrate our network performance management data across our ITSM and business decision-making tools. All of the data that we collect is also shared with other consumers, instead of just retaining it and reporting it. This is done via the Data Bus, which is running over the open-source product, Kafka.

This was fairly easy to deploy and then open using the various device groups and object groups. Once it is open, data can be sent to other consumers. There is no need to do a lot of work. You just quickly enable the component and open it.

These integrations are key to our organization, where there are a lot of users and a high need for the data. For instance, capacity planning. A bit of analytics outside of SevOne has also been implemented, taking the data from different areas including ITSM, network inventory, configuration management, et cetera.

This performance data is key, and having such integration means that we get value out of SevOne fairly quickly. We don't need to invest time and money developing in-house products or looking for other solutions. Of course, the SevOne database component comes with a cost, but it's directly related to what the business needs.

SevOne helps us to detect network performance issues in advance of them impacting end-users through proactive alerting. The monitoring system contains threshold policies that have been configured using the dynamic thresholding approach. Specifically, it looks at a few cases to develop a baseline and calculate the standard deviation. If there is any breach or any high utilization in the specific service of a network, SevOne will provide alerts according to the severity level. It will go to our ITSM and then out to the operational users who will keep an eye on it.

We are a VoIP company and we use Cisco BroadWorks as our voice platform. SevOne monitors all the servers, the uptime, the bandwidth being used,  and everything else. It also monitors the trap that it gets from these servers.

It's running on VMware.

If we did not have this tool, we would be virtually blind. We wouldn't know what's going on with all the servers. We would end up having to rely on someone calling us and saying, "Hey, this thing is not working." Then we would have to deep dive into the problem to find out what was broken. Having SevOne monitoring all these different aspects of our platform really helps. Based on the graphs, we are already aware that something might break and what might happen. We are not blind anymore. It is one of the most important systems we have in our environment for monitoring devices.

We usually look at a 24-hour graph. If the graph was around 2K yesterday, and it's about 1K today, then we obviously and immediately know there is something wrong.

We are able to monitor our multi-vendor network switches, including Juniper, and Cisco, as well as our BroadWorks systems.

We also use SevOne to integrate network performance data with business decision-making tools. One of the tasks we were recently assigned was to figure out our user growth and to make sure we have enough resources for that growth. It was so easy for us to look at the SevOne graph and figure out what our users' patterns are and how they will shape up in the future. We came up with an estimate for every month over the next few years. It helped us figure out what kind of resources we are looking at. If the graph tells us a server is reaching its peak, we know we need to build new servers and add them to our platform.

And while we don't really heavily use the network, it helps us figure out which gateway is using most of the traffic.

We are a system integrator, so we help the customers implement SevOne NPM and provide first-line support. When the customers have issues, they call us first, and we open a ticket for them if they need SevOne support.

Most of my customers are in banking and finance, so they are more conservative. Some of them are in a period of transitioning their infrastructure to the cloud, but they still have an on-prem solution. In the next few years, some customers may transition to virtualized or nextgen network services, but not at this moment. Some telco customers still have the on-prem appliance to monitor the circuit server-level connectivity or for NPRs.

There are three typical use cases. First, most of our customers use the SevOne platform for network performance monitoring, including network devices and connectivity. Customers like the high availability, unlimited scalability, and fast-forwarding. 

The second use case is to provide a central platform for infrastructure monitoring, including the network server and some application monitoring. About 60 percent of our customers use it for this. The third is for server monitoring only.

The use cases are a bit different. In the old days, IBM, HP, BMC, and Microsoft required customers to deploy agents in the server to monitor them. However, the servers used SNMP. And although there are advantages to using SNMP to monitor the server, customers prefer to use a server platform for monitoring. Most of the use cases fall in the first category. The second accounts for maybe 12 percent, and 10 percent of customers only use SevOne for server monitoring.

SevOne NPM helps our customers detect performance issues faster. The solution has a polling engine to check the normal behavior of a given device in an area. It helps the operations team, but you need to configure it properly. It all depends on the implementation engineer, and the operations team must fine-tune the monitoring policy. Once it's properly configured, SevOne will help you address some issues right away. 

Without the solution, the operations team would need to manually check each device when something goes wrong. With SevOne installed, we get the alert right away, so you can say that it cuts the troubleshooting time by one to three hours, depending on the situation. If you properly configure the policy, you can proactively address potential performance issues before a failure occurs.

SevOne has multiple out-of-the-box options for reporting. They have the old reporting portal and the new one. The new reporting portal has more out-of-the-box functionality, and it looks great. It helps the customer gain visibility into the network.