Centreon Reviews

Centreon is a client application. We use the solution to monitor network infrastructure. In case of an incident, We can fix the issue.

Centreon makes me reactive. It allows the use of signal application over monitoring infrastructure to use signal.

The solution allows us to study more analysis to reduce.

Centreon offers infrastructure monitoring.

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 have been using Centreon for one year.

We are trying to study proactive management monitoring because of the working cloud infrastructure. Our team is trying to get a volume of remaining work, and these new proactive tools can benefit us.

The solution is 80% stable.

Infrastructure scalability is smooth because it doesn't break down or have downtime.

The solution is 80% scalable.

The product is quite expensive.

If something renders infrastructure, it enables reacting and accessing meetings as necessary. It provides quick response, typically within a minute or less. The alerts provided are apparent, facilitating the identification of root causes for any issues. Moreover, Centreon offers a lot of plugins. Locating these plugins is straightforward, which eliminates the need for additional tools.

I recommend Centreon because it is user-friendly.

Overall, I rate the solution a seven out of ten.

We're a telecom group and we use Centreon to monitor all our services.

Centreon's dashboard is good. Centreon's dashboard provides a single view of all our customers. When there is a problem, Centreon notifies us and works with us to resolve it quickly.

Centreo's dashboards help to improve our visibility and ability to proactively ensure the right data is available at the right time which is important.

We use Centreon's plugin packs to communicate with our telecom locations in Brazil when the host does not have Centreon integrated.

Centreon's ready-to-use connectors and integrations are essential because they provide a comprehensive overview of our organization, which allows us to quickly resolve client issues.

Centreon helps me organize our hosts by stage and monitor our clients.

Centreon is the best for helping monitor our IT infrastructure from cloud to edge and providing holistic visibility.

Centreon helps us align our IT operations with business objectives by identifying problems and resolving them quickly and permanently.

Centreon helps us measure service performance by modeling IT service maps for business-critical IT workflows and metrics. This allows us to see the hierarchy and discover problems. Centreon is a valuable and important tool for addressing these issues.

Centreon helps to consolidate all alerts, KPIs, and business maps as well as manage metrics across domains. We can seamlessly integrate with the client's network.

Centreon's most valuable feature is Opsgenie.

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.

I have been using Centreon for four years.

We use Centreon for every stage in Brazil and the solution is stable.

The scalability is acceptable, but there is room for improvement.

We do not have local support in Brazil, which is challenging due to the language barrier.

Neutral

Our organization previously used Zabbix before switching to Centreon.

The initial setup is complicated because consolidating and configuring the database is a complex process.

We have seen a return on investment and that is why our organization has been using Centreon for over four years.

I give Centreon an eight out of ten.

I recommend Centreon because it is a good solution that configures well.

We use it for standard monitoring of 300 to 400 devices, the usual Windows and Linux servers and network equipment. We are monitoring the disk usage and the network ports.

The teams within our NOC get proactive reports which are quite detailed. That saves them a lot of time on having to research or troubleshoot to find an issue. Thanks to Centreon, they are guided to what needs to be fixed.

And it's an invaluable tool for helping to drive business performance excellence and aligning IT operations with business objectives. It's been helping us to engage in smarter reviews of what's happening within our network. We get alerts popping up from time to time, and we can use them to implement permanent fixes or workarounds.

Another benefit is that Centreon has helped measure service performance by modeling IT service maps for business-critical IT workflows. We actually give detailed reports to our customers and they're all based on Centreon's reporting. That ability is very important, a top priority.

The best features that we've come across enable us to create our own monitored instances. For example, we have a SQL script that is being run by Centreon, and it gives us a specific metric on the dashboard that we utilize for monitoring the performance of a third party. We integrate with third-party companies or, in this case, government institutions, and they do not give us any guarantee of the service, and they also don't give us the ability to monitor the service. However, from our side, we can monitor the throughputs with the SQL script that we have running with Centreon.

In addition, the flexibility, customizability, and analytics of Centreon's dashboards are all very good. The dashboards help us see the whole network map, and that is quite valuable for us. In addition, the dashboards have helped to improve our visibility and ability to proactively ensure the right data is available at the right time. Our service desk staff spends most of their time on the dashboards, and they use the proactive monitoring to log service requests to the L2 and L3 support. They've been invaluable in that sense.

The flexibility has given us the ability to add in our own monitoring metrics and that has been quite interesting and very useful for us as well.

We've been using Centreon for close to two years.

We haven't had any stability issues with the solution since we started using it.

The scalability is also good, not that we've needed to do much so far.

We don't yet use the anomaly detection to help alert on unusual or dysfunctional behavior, but that is a feature we want to implement.

We haven't needed to use their tech support so far.

A different team within our organization was involved in the setup, but as I understand it, the guy from Centreon was quite familiar with it, so it was quite easy.

The deployment of Centreon took about two months, but that was mostly due to user adoption by the service desk and NOC teams.

Initially, when we did the setup, we just threw all of our devices into Centreon, and at one stage it became quite bogged down in the sense that there was too much reporting or alerting. But it was quite easy to filter things and to streamline the reporting, enabling us to get exactly what we needed, including the proactive monitoring that we needed. The flexibility that Centreon has given us to do that kind of analysis and streamlining has been invaluable.

I would like to see improvement in the licensing model. You can purchase X number of licenses, up to 1,000 devices or 1,000 instances. Your next batch is 2,000. But what if you only need, say, 1,200? The model could be changed a little bit.

In a different company, I was dealing with SolarWinds, which was okay for what it did, but the licensing for SolarWinds was quite expensive in comparison. In terms of navigating the licensing models, Centreon and SolarWinds are basically the same.

The other option being looked at was SolarWinds. With Centreon, there's the licensed package, but it's also an open-source platform, and that was the driving force behind the decision to go with it.

My advice would be to go ahead with Centreon. Don't waste time, go ahead.

There are still a lot of features that we don't yet use that we are looking into. But overall, so far, it's been very good.

We have multiple instances with Centreon: a central, remote, MBI, report server, and two pollers. We also have Centreon MAP. All the pollers are pulling all the endpoints, sending information to the central and remote instances. If we need to produce some reports to connect, then we connect directly to the report server. If we need to produce MAPs, then we connect to the MAP server.

We monitor bandwidths of all the links inside the data center as well as outside Internet links and MPLS links to have the connectivity, status, and bandwidth consumption. We have defined the threshold on these links to understand if they are being overused or not. This is the main feature.

We use the same for network devices to see basic information, like a device's uptime to know if it is up or down. It is also the same for all the ports and environment probes on the hardware.

For the server, we configure specific probes to check some specific services. For example, the server provides a service through a Docker container, then we can configure a specific query to check the Docker container stages. Or, if we need to have the temperature of the air conditioning system, then we configure a specific query to ask for it. So, there is basic information coming from the network devices related to hardware. There is also some specific monitoring about services that we are using in terms of the business or infrastructure on specific devices.

We have 500 hosts and 4,000 services.

The most valuable feature is that we can manually configure everything we need. After it comes inside the interface of Centreon, you can display it. Because the interface is quite user-friendly, you can manually configure the configuration very deeply, which is very pleasant and useful because you can monitor and see everything on your service list, dashboard, or MAP. The most useful feature for me is that you can create your own plugin and monitoring query.

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.

I have been using this solution for eight years: four years at my first company, three years at my second company, and a year at this company.

It is very stable. In fact, I thought it has improved a lot over eight years. When I started working on the network, we had to restart Centreon Engine quite often. There were some bugs, mistakes, or errors in the configuration. Therefore, we needed to restart Centreon Engine and some other services inside the server. Since I have been at my current company, we have not done that. We have 4,000 services that we monitor, and it is very stable now.

It is quite a good tool. It is scalable in the sense that we can use it for more hosts and services that we want to monitor. If we monitor different kinds of devices, we can still find plugins and plugin packs directly from Centreon's support and website. They are still developing new plugins and updating them. So, it adapts to your infrastructure. They have also developed some patches. So, it has good scalability.

The support was great. They answered me very quickly for our two first concerns. For the last one, it was quite long. However, after one escalation, we did solve the problem after a day. I am pretty satisfied with them.

They could talk in English with my colleague as well as French for me, as I am French. The people, with whom I talked, were very skillful. So, I was impressed. They could easily help me.

Positive

I was using Splunk at my previous company. Splunk is much more expensive, but it has some capabilities in terms of getting logs. On Centreon, you only get SNMP metrics. However, if you want to get syslogs with a monitoring solution, you can use Splunk, a regexp query, and a specific SQL query to construct a proper output. For this, Centreon is not helpful, but Splunk is.

I was not involved with the initial setup at my current company.

Centreon has helped reduce our mean time to resolution. Because we have well-configured monitoring, we can decrease the time to answer any problem. We are informed quite quickly about an issue, so we can say, "Yes." Compared to no monitoring and waiting for a user complaint, it can save us 30 minutes a month between the first user's complaint and the monitoring alert.

We buy the Centreon solution and licenses for many projects and monitoring hosts. 

It is perfect and very cheap if you are a little company or startup. After that, it is quite expensive for a big company. 

It is a business choice from Centreon to fix the price, so a big company can afford this license or policy. What I am facing right now is that we are short licenses, and they only sell packages of 500 hosts, which is quite a lot. We have a 500 limit for now, and we want to have a quotation for 100 or 200 more. They told us, "No, the next step is only 1,000." So, they could maybe try to sell a smaller package of licenses.

I tried a few other solutions in terms of monitoring, e.g., PRTG, LibreNMS, Nagios and Cacti. All these solutions, except LibreNMS, are very poor in terms of design. The user experience in Centreon is much better. However, in the end, you just configure some SNMP work on the solution to get your answer. The difference with Centreon is that you can easily define, in the configuration, to have the templates for each host, services, notification, etc. So, Centreon is much better than all these other solutions.

All the SNMP data is available on the devices. If you know what you want to monitor, you can do it with or without Centreon. So, it does not increase the accuracy. It provides a very user-friendly way to display it, but it's not more accurate. To be more accurate, we did use another tool, Splunk, which provides some artificial intelligence or behavioral monitoring.

In terms of pure SNMP metrics monitoring, Centreon is very good. However, if you want to diversify your monitoring with other inputs than SNMP, e.g., syslogs. Other tools can be very useful, like Splunk or ELK, for diversification.

Take time to configure it well, as it is very useful. Don't leave it until later. It should be implemented at the start, not after all the infrastructure is in place and in production. It should be done from the beginning, before the application server.

Get the vendor training to understand as much as possible about the solution. While it is quite user-friendly, it is not so easy to understand how the plugins and plugin packs work.

Invest time at the beginning, as it will save you time later. This will help you a lot. So, my advice is to start as soon as possible to work with a monitoring solution when you have an infrastructure, especially on Centreon.

I would rate Centreon as eight out of 10 because I really like it.

We are a provider of the Centreon solution and a reseller as well. We also use it internally to monitor our offices around the world.

We also have a NOC for our customers hosted in Azure and AWS.  We provide Centreon EMS as a SaaS solution to monitor the infrastructure (or applications) of our customers. 

As a reseller/integrator of Centreon, we deploy it on premise for our customers as well.

We try to provide a 360-degree view of the infrastructures. In that context, the feature we most benefit from is the dashboards. We build specific dashboards using the integrated tool called Centreon MAP. It allows you to draw your network for a site or to draw an application and how it works with all the components, as if you were drawing in Microsoft Visio. The diagram is dynamic and, underneath the it, you can put metrics and data that is directly pulled from every infrastructure or application components.

In terms of Centreon's versatility for connecting to any system, as long as the device has an IP, it's fairly easy to interconnect with anything. You can perform basic monitoring, or you can look for more specific KPIs on any kind of equipment by using a combination of SNMP, API and scripts. For our NOC operations, we easily deploy a poller in our customer's environment that securely connects to our central servers. Making it really easy to add new customers to our NOC.

In addition, it increases the accuracy of our monitoring. When looking at the availability of an asset, what matters from a business perspective is what is the real value. For example, if we're monitoring a retail store and there is an outage during the night, since the store is closed it doesn't matter if the systems there aren't working during the night. With Centreon, you have the ability to track the availability for specific time slots. That's one of the features that we use a lot. We are able to say that during business hours everything went fine.

Once you're familiar with how Centreon works, it is way easier than any other solutions. You are able to cut out all the unnecessary notifications that you can get and only stick with the essential ones. In this way, you don't miss any important alerts. And because we are able to track a lot of data, and not only availability, we're able to find the root cause of an issue much faster than with another solution. Once everything is set up correctly, it reduces our MTTR by 50 percent.

There are a lot of free tools on the market, and they work. But once you have some specific requirements, especially for reporting and dashboarding, you need a complete enterprise grade solution. It's the category that Centreon is in, and it can save you 20 percent on operation costs. Once you know how to use the solution, you can reuse the scripts and everything you've been deploying, so when you want to add new equipment, new hosts, it's really easy and faster compared to other solutions.

The most valuable feature of the solution is the flexibility, the ability to integrate all kinds of equipment. As long as something has an IP you can monitor it. What we try to achieve all the time is not only saying a company's system is available, but to give additional data on the performance of the equipment. So the flexibility is what matters the most to us, where we can script everything. Centreon has a lot of Plugin Packs, meaning they support, by design, a lot of devices. And on top of that, we have the ability to add our own scripts and do whatever we want and display the data as we want in the central dashboards.

The customizable reports and dashboards are really flexible. We started this partnership with Centreon, when we were looking for a solution, because of the flexibility of the reporting. That's what we found to be most attractive in the solution. You can display the data as you want. It's a bit tricky at first to understand how it works, how the data is organized, but once you go through the learning curve, the tool is really powerful.

Also, because we are able to segregate the data within Centreon, by customer, using the dashboards, we are able to see all our customers in one place, and bring all the relevant information to us directly.

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.

We used to use it when it was an open source solution and, more recently, about a year and a half ago, we started using the EMS solution, the enterprise version.

It's really stable. It's been working for a year and a half and we haven't had any issue with it. No downtime on the platform. We were able to upgrade, again with no downtime.

It's really scalable because you can spread the roles of Centreon across different servers and you can add servers when you grow your infrastructure.

Right now we have 1,000 hosts, and the other deployments we do are around 500 to 2,500 hosts, usually.

Centreon's support is good. When we have an urgent matter, we speak directly to the Centreon team and bypass support. We speak to the engineer who validated our infrastructure. He answers all of our questions.

Positive

During the initial setup we faced some issues. Part of it was because we had to become more knowledgeable in the solution. There are some gray areas and if you don't know the product well you may have issues. Another part of it was some bugs that we came across, although that's part of every software solution in IT nowadays. But the initial setup could be easier.

Our deployment took 10 days, but because our customers want specific dashboards and specific KPIs, we worked on that also.

The goal was to properly size the infrastructure to make sure we have room to grow. We wanted to make sure we have best practices in place for future deployments. If today we have 1,000 hosts and tomorrow we have 5,000, can we grow easily or do we need to redo everything? We also worked on how to structure the data. What kind of data do we want to pull from the hosts? And once everything was set up, how would we display this data? We also wanted to make sure we reduced the false positive alarms as much as we could.

We have five or six people who work with the solution. We have some developers who are working on scripting. We have non-technical people who are more focused on building reporting, and when they have a question or something doesn't work, they ask a monitoring expert to interpret the data. And we also have our customers who have the read-only view of Centreon and the dashboards where they can see the real-time data.

There is no maintenance of the solution on our side, other than adding new hosts or updating, when required.

We had one day with a Centreon consultant who helped us on the design part, to make sure we were starting off on the right foot, and at the end to help verify that our deployment was correct. He did a really good job and was really knowledgeable.

We've seen ROI because we're able to monitor new customers more easily and with less work. We're able to reuse the work we did to deploy new hosts. That is a gain for us. And our customers are happy with the reports and the data we provide to auditing.

Their licensing model is really easy. You have one license and you have access to all the features, compared to other tools where you have to purchase add-ons. And since you can track anything in this tool, it's easy to integrate new hosts. It's fairly easy to replace older versions of other monitoring tools and you can save a lot.

Because we are a consulting company, we usually work for large organizations, such as banks, industry and retail companies. We have a deep knowledge of monitoring tools such as SolarWinds or HPE. We have extensive knowledge of what's on the market and, knowing that, that's why we chose Centreon.

The advantages of Centreon are its flexibility and that the licensing is pretty easy compared to other solutions.

Where Centreon is weaker is that the initial deployment could be easier. It's based on the open source solution, so if you are not from the open source world, and you're not good at Linux, that could be a barrier. But for people who are familiar with Linux this would be a pro. I'm not from the Linux world so for me it is a con.

Because Centreon is from the open source world, you need to have some skills at first to be able to master the solution and to deploy it properly. What we frequently see with our customers is that they purchase an expensive solution but they don't take the time to configure it properly. They might be using the solution at 20 percent of its capacity. The same thing can happen with Centreon. That's why you need skills, at first, to deploy it. But after that, it's pretty easy to maintain on a daily basis.

We use it primarily for monitoring our devices. We also use it for discovery. For example, if a server is down, the first step to take is just go to Centreon and have a look.

I installed this solution on my company's local server. It is on the LAN network. There is a plugin for Centreon for connecting and providing visibility to the host.

It provides visibility into the network. Without visibility, it is difficult to know what the first step to take is when there is a problem. With Centreon, I can just go to their website if the server is down and it gives me visibility.

We have seen increased usage. That has expanded.

Centreon helps align IT operations with business objectives. It helps our guys in support monitor all our services. It gives you visibility for all services on the host via a link.

You have one single view, which is good. As the administrator, the permissions are the same for every account in the Active Directory. 

We use the solution’s Anomaly Detection feature. It helps our teams to predict potential issues. I like this option for its graph. The graph is very good for when you want to look at evaluating your system over time. It also automates the alerting process. 

It is very easy to manage because the visibility is good.

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. 

We have been using Centreon for the last couple of months.

The stability is good because the operating system is Linux, and we are using the latest version.

We use it with vBackup, and the server backs up to vBackup every two to three days.

The solution is monitoring 6,000 services.

35 percent of the technical support use the solution.

The support is good when I contact them directly. Opening a ticket on the website of Centreon can be difficult for my colleague, but not for me because my English is good. However, my colleague doesn't speak English well, as our company is in Quebec and our first language is French. We do have someone there, who helps us with French when needed.

The support checks the command line of our Linux system, which is good. 

You can go to their website to investigate problems. This provides us flexibility.

At my last company, I used Nagios XI.

We brought on Centreon because we didn't have a monitoring solution.

The initial setup is very easy. On the website, if you want to create an account, you go to the website for the cloud. There, you have the possibility to run a test of the system, before you want to implement it.

The implementation process was the same as the last system that I used. This made it easier to use.

My company implemented the system. Then, we implemented a hub with the services, and this took five to six months. It takes time to implement all the services of a company because of all the firewalls. 

Only six to 12 people can currently configure Centreon.

Centreon helps me detect where the problem is quickly. When we resolve a problem quickly, this lowers our overall costs.

I recommend looking at the trial version.

Centreon is better than Nagios XI in regards to cost and support response times, when you have a problem. If you have a problem, it costs money to contact the Nagios XI support.

The solution is very good. I would rate it as a nine (out of 10). 

We use Centreon primarily for network monitoring. We monitor our customers' networks, including the internet connection and the switches, for temperature and general hardware status. For some of our larger customers, we use it to monitor servers as well, using the simple network management protocol (SNMP).

We see benefit from using this product all the time. For example, if there is a hard drive that's failed in a system then we get notified via Centreon. If there is some kind of environmental deviation, such as an air conditioning unit or something else that doesn't work, then we get environmental information like the temperature has changed.

We also get notifications if the internet goes down. Prior to COVID, there were lots of people in various offices and we need to know if they're all working and productive. 

This monitoring and notification system is something that happens constantly.

Centreon increases the accuracy of our monitoring, although accuracy is something that we consider to be a core feature. If the product generated alerts that you couldn't trust then it would be a cry-wolf scenario, effectively making it unusable. We would not use a product that was not accurate or didn't perform as expected, because that makes the whole product useless. Basically, if the monitor isn't accurate then there's zero value in the software.

The reports are definitely good, although, to us, the most important thing is that action is taken. When events and things happen, it's important that they're acted upon and dealt with, and that we're notified. Reporting is one of those things that can be used to show a customer that you're doing your job, but the most important thing for us is using it to do our job.

The single-pane view provides us a view of all of our network infrastructure, and it is one of the most important tools that we use to see the status of our customers' networks. Being the monitoring environment, it doesn't really do remediation, so it is not our only tool. We have three core applications that we use, and Centreon is one of those very important applications. If you're a carpenter you need a hammer, or if you're a doctor, you need a stethoscope. It's one of those core tools that, if you don't have it, it's hard to do your job.

The most important thing in any kind of monitoring system is that it's set up correctly. If this is the case, where all of the correct relationships and workflow are mapped out such that you will see only the most important details, then the single-pane view is very useful and it can save a massive amount of time.

It provides a nice benefit when it comes to helping align IT operations with business objectives. The top-down views, dashboards, and business context reporting are things that are nice to have because you want to be able to show the customer that everything is working, that problems have been addressed, and that you're providing value. The customer is the most happy when there are issues that you uncover and they're quickly addressed.

It has certainly reduced our mean time to resolution. This is because it is set up properly so that we can figure out what the issue is as quickly as possible. Reducing noise is very important and it also helps increase the accuracy of the alerts that we're receiving.

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

We have been using Centreon for approximately 10 years.

At the core, the systems are very stable. The only issues that we have run into are around updates. This is true with anything, including Microsoft updates. As this is an enterprise-grade solution, you probably don't want to be the first ones to apply the updates.

My advice is that you should have a conservative approach to when to apply updates. That said, we have active support, so we are always upgraded to the latest version.

This solution is almost infinitely scalable. Almost everyone in the company works with it at some level. We have approximately 20 people in technical roles who use it, and the environment contains between 3,000 and 5,000 devices. This could be monitoring a single internet connection, up to monitoring thousands of systems.

In terms of versatility, Centreon came from a traditional monitoring system, so it is better with traditional infrastructure. However, they're building more cloud monitoring and it's something that they're working on. But its current strength is on the core network infrastructure components, as I see it.

Versatility is not something that is critical to our monitoring operation. For some of the cloud services, we can spin up instances and we can monitor that way. But, some of the cloud instances, depending on what it is, need to be dealt with in a different way. Often, the provider has solutions for that.

We work with a dedicated technical support person who is fantastic, so our overall experience with them has been very good.

We had a solution in place previously that didn't have a single-pane view. It's hard to quantify, but having Centreon certainly makes it much more efficient, as you're able to go in and see the status of all your customers in one place immediately, in real-time, rather than having to log into a separate portal.

One of the things that we did previously was to develop plugins and tools in-house. This was something that was time-consuming and is no longer necessary. We switched because we didn't have to spend time on training, and it allowed us to focus more on our core mission.

With any enterprise-grade monitoring system, the key thing is that you take the implementation seriously. You need to look at and understand what kind of architecture you want to set up and how you want it to be laid out for your customers. The initial process, like the initial setup process for any tool of this magnitude, will take some time if you want it to work really well. That initial time investment, however, is well worth it later on when you have the correct relationships set up and you have a reduction in false alerts, ultimately leading to a higher accuracy level for alerts.

If you're going to have success, it's very important that you take the time to set up parent-child relationships. You need to take the time to set up how the processes work for each customer because otherwise, you'll have a scenario like in Three Mile Island that had that nuclear disaster, where you get hundreds of alerts in a matter of one minute.

If it's set up correctly then it's super-useful. If a certain condition happens, you want to get an alert for the correct condition and not underlying alerts that are not useful. That's the most important thing. If it's set up correctly and you have the correct relationships and workflow all mapped out, then it's very valuable and it can save a massive amount of time. With Centreon, it's very important that you take that time to set up the parent-child relationships.

For us, it took several months to get it set up to be the way we wanted it. But, once it is in place, it is a solution that you can possibly use for decades to come.

We used a collaborative approach between our in-house team and the vendor. We had certain requirements that were important to us and we discussed those with the Centreon team. At that point, we worked together on implementation and deployment.

Using Centreon has helped us to reduce costs, although it's hard for me to quantify. For example, we have saved time in that our in-house developers no longer have to create plugins and other tools that we used before implementing Centreon. Also, because of the faster resolution times and reduced noise for the alerts, it drives up productivity because we don't have engineers looking at alerts that aren't real.

Finally, Centreon is one of our core tools and if we didn't have it, we couldn't do our job effectively.

Looking at this product from a pricing perspective, you need to consider the differences between developing your own solution in-house and buying one. There is always going to be a certain amount of time that you have to spend to customize and get to know a tool, but the fact that you have access to the support is a really big plus because it makes it so that things are done in a more uniform way.

The pricing works out well for us, given our environment and where we are.

We evaluated other options, but one of the reasons that we chose Centreon is because it came out of an open-source environment, and that is something that we really liked. We do have open-source capabilities in our organization, which helped with the transition, making it easier and smoother for us.

On the network side, it's one of the most important tools that we use to see the status of our customers' network infrastructure. With that in mind, if you don't set it up correctly then you don't get any of the benefits. My advice for anybody who is implementing this product is that they need to be ready to think through the architecture properly, then be willing to devote the proper internal resources to the implementation. This is true especially for the dependencies of hosts and services and setting them up correctly because that is absolutely critical in reducing false positives.

We look at Centreon as a partner and we work in partnership with their support because to create the most successful implementation, it's important that it's a two-way street. It takes input from you as the customer, and input and help from Centreon. To have it work in the most efficient and best way, parties need to be able to devote time and resources to set it up correctly. But then once you've done that, you are able to get the rewards, with faster resolution times, reduced noise for the alerts, and that drives up productivity because then you don't have engineers looking at alerts that aren't real.

I would rate this solution a nine out of ten.

Our primary use case is for our customers and us (S&L). S&L is service provider for our customers. We use Centreon for our own monitoring, but mainly, it is used for our customers. We support our customers to build up monitoring with Centreon, monitor their infrastructure, obtain a view of their environment, and know about problems before they really matter. Because if you have some architecture, then you can react. If you don't react, you will have real problems in the future. To prevent this, you can use Centreon, as one of many examples. 

If you have different functionalities, like a mail flow or production hall, that you need to take care of, then you can visualize those into a map, and you will be able to see on the map where your real problem is. E.g., you have a big hall with different access points where need to locate the signal of disconnected access points. Then, you can currently see it on the map. It's not that complex, because you can easily take a look at the map and see it where the location is of the faulty device.

It is decentralized, which is better, because you can reduce the load from a single system. Also, you get a better view because it's more independent. Then, for the management, it's nice because they have one central system. With that, they can manage all the other systems, as well. This means they don't have to configure each system by system. They can configure it from one single interface.

One good feature is you can see a big picture of your entire infrastructure. If one component is not reachable, this doesn't mean that you have other hosts which are not reachable, and you can see the cause of it. You can see the reason why your servers or program aren't available to the public. Therefore, you can solve the problem and save a lot of time in detecting the problem, so you don't have to search for it. You can see the problem right in the traffic interface. 

Another thing that is very powerful in Centreon is the possibility to use third-party modules. You can integrate different modules into it, so you can use the collective data in different ways for different needs. You can also create some events with it for support tickets, which is great stuff. You can automatically create some support tickets to support your IT department for an efficient way to work.

The data visualization features are great because you can get a view of the past. You can see some concurrent data correlations, because you can see your data usage over the past couple of weeks or months, so you can do capacity planning for the future. E.g., for capacity management, if you have to expand your storage, then you have more possibilities to use third-party modules or you could also buy a commercial one, like Centreon MBI, which is an enterprise feature of Centreon. Using the module, you can create reports automatically. Another benefit could be to use Centreon BAM because there you can design business cases and define KPI to get notified in a special way of escalation (first-, second-, third-level support.)

The great thing about Centreon is that it is also based upon Nagios. However, Centroen also provides the EPP, Enterprise Plugin Pack. The plugins are capable of monitoring nearly all data you want. The only necessary thing to get to your goal is it needs the destination that you want to monitor. This means you will have to have an API or some other way to make a call to the destination, so the destination can respond to it. If this is possible, you can nearly monitor all things with Centreon. This is very nice because you can monitor technical stuff and also normal things, like availability of some services, which are being used by your customers, your colleagues, or yourself, so you may get a view of the functionality behind it.

Centreon is not just a monitoring system, because if you take care of it, you will get great documentation and an overview of your topology without spending additional time to create or achieve that goal.

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.

We have been using Centreon since either 2007 or 2008.

The stability of the architecture is very helpful because Centreon provides its own protocol. It is called BBDO, which is a binary protocol from Centreon. It's very stable. Because if you have an outage or disconnect from a remote server to your central system, it doesn't matter. The system will continue to collect all the necessary information. Once the connection is up again or reachable, the collected data from past will be automatically transferred to the central system and be calculated there. So, you don't have a gap or missing information in there. The BBDO also has the benefit that the monitoring system will keep running, even if the central machine isn't running. So, if you have different satellites or remote servers (pollers), this is a nice thing. Because once the central machine becomes available, then it synchronizes itself without any additional administration tasks to do.

Mainly, we using Centreon 2.8.28. However, we are also developing own features for the newest version 19.04. With the newer version, we want to release it for our customers and use it for them in the upcoming weeks.

Monitoring is the main topic for our team. For us, it is full-time maintenance, but this is because we are the customer's contact person. We take care of many customers, so we have to know what we are dealing with and take care of many questions all day long. 

Out-of-the-box, Centreon scales without any limits, from a default point of view. You can add different pollers to reduce the loads on another poller. From the outside, you have a web server on the internet, where you can monitor it. 

For the future, it would be great if Centeron redesigned the way of holding the performance data, especially for Monitoring Business Intelligence (MBI). This is an enterprise product of Centreon, and the amount of data stored there is not a small thing. Maybe, they could phase in with another amount each year or use Elasticsearch to reduce the data amount and query time, because the MBI module from Centreon is very nice, but the data storage is huge. This is something that they can take care of to make it a bit better. 

In general, Centreon scales great without any limits. If you have a limitation on a single poller, you just have to set up a new second, third, or fourth poller. Then, you can distribute your monitoring.

In our organization, we have around 100 people using it (out of three companies). We have 50 different customers of a wide range, like automotive and medical, who are all independent, self-standing companies.

It is very easy for one single customer to get support with Centreon.

Normally, we don't need technical support from Centreon directly. As a partner, we deal with any sort of problems ourselves daily. It doesn't matter if it is a Level 1 or 2 problem. Level 3 problems can be also solved by our own team, in most cases. Though, in one out of ten cases, we need to contact Centreon directly, and when we do, they are very helpful. 

In a worst case scenario, we need to schedule an appointment with a Webex session (remote session), but that is something that has worked really well in the past. We make an appointment with the customer together, then we can solve the problem very quickly.

Centreon does very well supporting their partners and customers. It doesn't matter if it's technical or another point of support. Their support is very good.

Previously, we used Nagios, which is the general base of Centreon. Nagios is a monitoring solution that is open source. It was one of the first monitoring tools available to the public. In the past, Centreon was just a critical interface for creating the configuration of Nagios. This changed in the last couple of years, so Centreon is now a completely self-standing product.

The initial setup is pretty straightforward, because it's very easy to get it running. However, you have to spend some time with it to get it to life, because if you just set it up, it is empty. Therefore, you have to take care that there are some holes in it, and you need to monitor some things. This is back to my point about a better API for the future as an improvement.

To get a basic view of your environment, it normally takes two to three days. However, if you want to go into detail, it depends how large your environment is: It could be hours or weeks.

We are Centreon partners, so we use our implementation strategy almost daily for our customers and ourselves. If we set it up, we ask the customer, "What are their needs?" We have a best practice, so we install the basic systems made in a network scan, which are pretty easy. If you have a scan, you can use the API to import a host. Then, you can use the monitoring really quickly.

If you have an outage in your environment, every minute counts. Every single minute that you can save with Centreon is a good reason to use it. 

We and our customers have saved so much time that we are acting instead of reacting to a situation in a positive way. You can get the investment back within a few weeks. 

If you can imagine having an outage of your infrastructure and 100 people cannot work for any reason against a small outage, which was indicated by your monitoring system and could be avoided, then this is an estimated ROI calculation.

The pricing starts at around 5000 euro. However, this depends on: 

• Your environment
• The size of your host
• How many hosts that you have.
• How many remote pollers that you have.
• If you want to use the Monitoring Business Intelligence or Centreon MAP functionalities.

You purchase a package. You have a support contract (there is also a platinum support contract) and it is per module. That means you have to pay, e.g., for the MBI module or the BAM module. Or, if you want to save a lot of money, you can pay for IMP, which is the complete package.

The pricing setup costs and licensing weren't very good in the past. The customers generally said the pricing of Centreon was fair and cheap if you compared it with other solutions. However, in the last few years, Centreon changed the license model multiple times, telling us the current model will not be stable. Many of our customers were confused about the many changes with the increasing license costs. Our customers wanted to get the support and contact person of their countries. The business investments of our customers are well planned for the next few years, not just the next two years, but this was the way Centreon thought in the past. Our customers want a stable, attractive base for investing that they can call upon. We were able to figure out a solution with Centreon for every single customer to solve this problem in the past. 

For the future, it would be nice if they have a more stable pricing model. Centreon has told us that they know about the issue, and they will try to adjust it to make it better in the future.

We have taken a look at other solutions, like Zabbix, Nagios, Check MK, and PRTG. For us, Centreon is the best solution, because we have all the benefits from the other solutions. Not all, but most of them. It's a great product to monitor our environment, so we can prevent any outage or misconfiguration on some hosts.

A main feature that sets apart Centreon versus its competitors is the possibility to expand the monitoring. You can set up different satellites to expand your monitoring or get an inside view of a special environment, such as a DMZ zone. Or, if you want to monitor a branch office from another country, so you can monitor it with an inside view of it, not just an outside view. 

We use the remote server functionality on some customer sites, because you can see an independent view and are not dependent on a single connection. If you have branch offices or bigger office outside your headquarters, you can use remote servers because if the connection is broken or disrupted, then the remote server will obtain a view of your environment and server availability. This is a good point against using other solutions. Because with other solutions, you don't have this feature. Then, you will be blind if you have this type of a situation.

Centreon is definitely not a perfect or bug-free solution on the market. On the other hand, which solution is that. They have a great support that you can count on, along with continuous improvement, which is very important for any customer when getting help in a support case.

The most part, Centreon is open source, free, and available to everyone. So, if you phone back you can submit an issue to the GitHub repository or source it directly for help to other users. If you want to set it up, you can do it easily. If you have some problems, you can also take a look at the publicly available documentation from Centreon. No matter which solution you use, you should be aware that every solution needs time to invest for a good, pure result. For Centreon, and also in other monitoring systems, you have to spend time with it because monitoring is a permanent process, which should be improved daily, but you should focus on the important things. 

We use Centreon a lot, but we could use it a bit more in the future, because Centreon is nice in a way that it is not just monitoring. You can also make the documentation of your network topology without any additional work. If you take care of your monitoring, you have automatically created a topology of your network, so now you have documentation of it. This is also a time saver.

I am splitting my rating into two parts. Centreon is an open source, available product. I would rate it with a nine (out of ten). For the license costs, I would give it a seven (out of ten) because that is something they need to improve, so the customer could better plan their investment in the future. This is information that we have received from our customers as feedback. They are really satisfied with the solution, but not 100 percent satisfied with the licensing model, even though this has been improved a little in the past. So, my overall rating is an eight (out of ten).