Centreon Reviews

We use it for monitoring infrastructure and custom applications. We customize the monitoring and dashboards. We have a NOC here, where we monitor our clients' environments 24/7. It is integrated with our ticketing system and SMS and email for communication. We also have a Knowledge Base system integrated with Centreon.

We use it on-premises for ourselves and we provide SaaS with it for our customers. We have more than 20 installations of Centreon.

Centreon makes it easier and quicker to get the information needed to analyze. It uses different colors when there is a problem that passes a threshold. It gives you information and you just have to analyze the machines on the report. It's easier to find the ones we need to comment on to our clients, so they can look more deeply into them.

The solution also increases the accuracy of our monitoring because the plugins enable us to monitor things that we wouldn't normally monitor. There are built-in plugins that pick points that we wouldn't usually monitor if we had to create that monitoring by ourselves. When monitoring something, we might not consider one of those points, because it's not a main point. But it is being monitored. And when we troubleshoot, sometimes we use one of those monitoring options that gives us more information. That makes us more accurate. Our accuracy could always increase, of course, but there is no limit on that.

With the automated configuration for monitoring items using plugins, we optimize our time. And with integration, if we have something happening, we can automatically open a ticket and send communication through SMS or email. Both are very good options. During the day it probably saves us 50 percent of our time, and during the night it's even more. 

We usually do a mapping of our client's business and present that on a dashboard. We don't generally use the reports for that because the dashboards are more real-time. That way, the client knows in real-time what's happening. That helps align IT operations with business objectives a lot. Monitoring and presenting in that way is the whole point.

In terms of mean time to resolution, when we introduced Centreon into operations that didn't have it, it reduced the time to resolution because we located the source of problems quicker. The amount of time really depends on the stuff involved. There are a lot of links that take many hours. The time that is really reduced is the time for detection of the problem. The total resolution time, which contains the detection time, is reduced because of the detection phase. But the resolution phase is basically the same. The overall time varies a lot. It's hard to say how much it reduces the MTTR. But it can be very significant in cases where detection is difficult.

We use almost everything in the product. What is most important are the monitoring, alerting, and the dashboards. If we don't have basic monitoring, we don't have a NOC. It's the basis of the functionality of the system. 

The dashboards are valuable because they ease troubleshooting and viewing. It becomes easier to locate the source of a problem. We can use BAM for that as well, but we only have it in one of the installations, one that has the Centreon Business edition; the others are using the free version. The dashboards make it easier to communicate with our clients. They don't want to see the alert console, they want to see a beautiful dashboard representing their network and their business and to watch it in case something is wrong in their environment.

We use the reports, but not that much, although the reporting is very good. We use it for creating books, monthly reports for our clients. We use the reports for analysis and to say, "These ones require growing," or "This is too big. You can lower the memory and save some money on your cloud." That is a monthly service we provide to our clients. 

Centreon is also very versatile. There are a lot of built-in plugins that ease the work. But if we need to connect to some device that doesn't have a plugin ready, we can customize a plugin and create monitoring for the device ourselves. It's quite easy. When there is a plugin, it speeds the implementation of new devices. If there isn't one, it takes a little longer, but we are not unable to monitor the device. We are always able to monitor.

I would like to see more plugins. That is something it needs. 

There is also room for improvement through dynamic thresholds, or self-discover thresholds. 

I would also like to see a discovery feature that could map the whole network environment and automatically suggest things. 

Finally, NetFlow would be helpful. We have a lot of clients that ask for NetFlow.

I've been using Centreon for more than 10 years.

It's very stable. We have had Centreon here for more than 10 years, and we have had about three problems in that time.

It's very scalable. We have installations with more than 10,000 pieces of equipment. We use the free version and it works well. You just add more pollers and segregate the database.

Their technical support is very good. They answer quickly without any problems. It's a good service.

We used to use Nagios. I also used the IBM Tivoli solution, OpenView from HPE, and WhatsUp Gold. I have used many solutions.

We switched to Centreon for a number of reasons. The IBM and HPE solutions were too expensive. We then went to a free solution, Nagios. But the Nagios interface is not as complete or as good as Centreon's interface. So we switched to Centreon's free version first and moved to using the EMS solution about a year ago, to get the benefits of plugins and dashboards.

The setup is very easy. Centreon itself is an ISO that you boot. You answer some questions and it's up and running. In terms of configuration, you can put in the IP address of the host and attach the plugins and they are ready for monitoring. It's very easy. If it had a more complete discovery feature, it would be even better, but it's already very easy.

The time it takes for the initial deployment depends on how many hosts, and how deeply, you want to monitor. But in less than a week, you can have good monitoring set up for a small to medium sized company. The longer part for us is the interview with the business, the analysts and the system analysts, to understand their particular applications and services and the impact of those on their business, to create business dashboards and business monitoring.

We have had a quick return on investment because we have a lot of hosts to monitor. For new implementations it speeds up the process of deploying. That is labor-intensive work, and it reduces the amount of that work. That helps create a return on the investment quickly, by not spending on as many man-hours as we would have.

In terms of replacing other tools, it hasn't really reduced our cost, but we have reduced costs with Centreon in another way. We need fewer people to monitor more stuff. Prior to Centreon we used free tools so the cost of the tool was not the issue; it was the performance of the people working with the tools.

If you need basic monitoring without dashboards, just monitoring, the plugins are very useful and really cheap. If you want a more complete solution with dashboards and reporting, the EMS solution is great and it is not that much more expensive. It's a good value. Really good.

We use multiple views on Centreon. We don't use a single view because it's too big. We could have a single view. But in terms of alerts, when we create dashboards that provide the best point of view for the whole infrastructure, we usually segment them to see things in more detail. If we put the whole infrastructure in a single dashboard, it would be too macro, it would not be detailed enough. 

We have a lot of screens for monitoring so we create a lot of dashboards and put them on the screens. Those dashboards are not super-detailed, but they are also not a single, macro view, so that we can know where a problem is. We usually create enough dashboards to avoid having to drill down. We have drill-downs, of course, but as a NOC, we prefer to have the most information we can have on-screen. For that we have a lot of dashboards open simultaneously. All together, the way we have set things up, it provides a single view, but with a lot of dashboards, not a single one. That's how we prefer it.

In our company, for monitoring, we have 12 people using Centreon. For support, there are about 20. As for the number of users who only use our Centreon dashboards, I really don't know because our clients have a lot of people. We have three guys who implement Centreon, customize the monitoring, create the dashboards; all of them do all these functions. They maintain the solution to make sure it's working well.

I would rate Centreon a nine out of 10. It needs those features I mentioned earlier. But, for the price, it's really a 10.

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.

The primary use case is for a central monitoring system for all our IT equipment. We can predict problems and react before we have an issue on our infrastructure. We managed to merge all our technical monitoring into a single console, therefore building good availability reporting all around.

We have early alerting of problems within our IT infrastructure.

The most valuable feature is the monitoring of servers and networks, because we have a lot of them and need to maintain control.

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

There have been stability issues. After each major release, it takes several minor releases to get rid of bugs.

No scalability issues.

Technical support is working fine. They react quickly and are able to solve issues over a remote connection. For more complex tasks, we use prepaid support days and ask Centreon to come onsite.

We did not previously have another solution.

Each major upgrade is complex due to bugs.

Centreon is an open source product. Thus, there is no need for licensing.

Buy some support days from Centreon and work together with them.

We evaluate other possibilities from time to time. Mostly, they are overpriced for what they do.

We use it for monitoring. We have more than 20 clients and we use Centreon to monitor our clients' infrastructures. We are a service center for infrastructure monitoring.

I can't point to one valuable feature. All of Centreon is good.

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

We've been using the solution for ten years.

It's built for the duration. It's very stable.

The scalability is intermediate. It's in some ways it's very scalable and in other ways it is not. But it is only a monitor. It's only used to get the information on the infrastructure. We don't ask for scalability. It's a very good product for the price. It does the job.

We have a close relationship with the designer of the solution. Our companies work closely. So when we have a technical difficulty with the product, we call them. They make changes and they patch and fix the product. The support we receive is good. It's very interactive. We have good communication with them. They understand the issue and they solve it very quickly.

In theory, it could take a lot of time to find a solution to an issue, but they find the solution. They have changed the product code because of issues. The solution is quite developed and Centreon as a company is very agile.

The implementation was very easy.

The competitive products have value, but we have used this one for more than ten years and we are not planning to change it.

My advice would be don't do it by yourself. While it's very easy to implement it, and it's free, contact the company and take advantage of their experience to have a perfectly designed solution. In this area of IT, the more precise you are, the better the solution. In monitoring, if you have too many options it's useless. You have to be very precise when you implement the solution. So, go with Centreon. It's more efficient than doing it by yourself.

It's not fancy, it's not glamorous, but it's a good workhorse. It's very pragmatic and it's very easy to use. It provides global information about the network and the servers. It's not the fanciest product, but it's good.

We are directly in contact with the company. We communicate with them so that we can deploy a solution with them. We share a lot of experiences between our two companies. They meet all our needs and all the features we want them to implement. We have a lot of meetings between us to change the product and to go for innovation inside Centreon. We have everything we need with the product.

I would rate the solution at nine out of ten. Ten is never possible. Products always need improvement because there are new features on the IT market. The evolution of the product can happen with AI. The key to this product is the people inside Centreon. A product is a product. It can be changed. It can evolve. But the relationship with Centreon is the most important factor.

We deploy Centreon for our customers' infrastructures. They use Centreon to create alarms to be able to anticipate problems. It works for big companies and institutes. As a Centreon partner, we have different types of customers.

When we started to work with Centreon, there were about 30 people in our company and now there are 90 people, so our company has been growing and growing with Centreon. One thing that I love is that today, as a Centreon partner, we have a dedicated person who is in charge of our relationship with Centreon.

When looking at the product, for me, the best improvement is Centreon MBI. When I started with Centreon, this feature didn't exist and it's very good.

The most important feature is that it permits us to receive alarms if there is an incident within the infrastructure. 

The feature I love the most is the reporting feature, the MBI (Monitoring Business Intelligence) which permits us to send advanced reports to our customers in PDF format or in Doc format.

We also deploy Centreon Map which gives our customers intuitive views of their respective information systems.

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

The stability is better now. A few years ago, the product was not very stable, but it's much better now, in 2018. It has really improved. We no longer have any performance problems.

We haven't had any issues with scalability.

We have support with Centreon, so if we run into an issue, we open a ticket on the platform and they are good. We don't have any problem with them. I am satisfied. They always respond to our emails and our tickets. They are really good.

We used Nagios before Centreon. I prefer Centreon because Centreon vs Nagios provides a web interface without having to spend more on a license for it. That is why we migrated from Nagios to Centreon.

When I started with Centreon, the initial setup was very difficult because they didn't package the product. But now, setup is very easy and we are able to deploy Centreon very quickly.

As a Centreon partner, the pricing is good. We get a discount. It's a really good product so I would say the pricing is correct.

I rate Centreon at nine out of 10 because I think the user interface can be improved. That's why I don't rate it a 10. But, from my point of view, this is one of the better monitoring products.

We monitor all our technical infrastructure and tickets in the ITSM tool. We have all our tickets inside Centreon in real-time and can monitor a lot of ELP and CLN in real-time for application purposes.

My director receives a report on the infrastructure every month.

The monitoring of our infrastructure, but it is very important to have a BI report because we must monetize everything. The monitoring is good, but we must also have a bigger view of the infrastructure. So, the BI report is very important.

The map allows you to see the whole infrastructure. While it is a good solution, it could possible to be better, because the put on shield is incredible.

In the future, we must be able to see the map in 3D, like on Google Earth, because infrastructure is on the site this way. Sites have many flaws. The map must be in 3D to show localisation.

We supervise and monitor a lot of ELP in my company. Centreon should develop a trading pack with ELP and ECP.

It is very stable. I have experienced one issue in six months. I do not have an issue with the product.

We have not had any issues with scalability.

We have an autonomous platform. Therefore, when we have an issue, we receive an expert because the issue is very important.

We are a big company and did not have a worldwide monitoring solution before Centreon. All we had were several countries using monitoring tools which were inefficient, e.g., Zabbix in China and Thailand. 

To use Centreon is easy. 

To get it started is a lot of work, since it comes empty. We had to push information into it to make it work.

We had a trained administrator in Centreon (with certification).

The pricing is acceptable.

We did not evaluate another solution.

When you buy Centreon, you must understand that it is empty. Do not ask it to do your job. Centreon is a solution, and it is very good and efficient if you put all your infrastructure inside. A lot of enterprises buy Centreon and are surprised that it is empty, or it does not work. 

It does not work, because they have not put anything inside to monitor. Therefore, it is very important to explain the buying and usage of Centreon to future customers. 

You must work to use Centreon. This is very important.

Monitoring our telecommunications network.

It has improved our awareness of how well our network is running and of network faults within our infrastructure.

All of it is valuable: 

• ability to schedule downtime
• intensity or depth of monitoring which it does
• different plugin packs
• Centreon MAP
• Centreon BI.

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

It's very stable. I have never had any issues with the product.

It's absolutely scalable. We're monitoring 1200 hosts from a single server, and you can have multiple pollers. We've just implemented five pollers across our different states in Australia. We're just pushing out the configuration to those pollers.

We have only required technical support for Centreon MAP. Generally, because I've used Centreon for a long time, it's fairly intuitive in my opinion. For the infrequent help we have requested, they're good at providing assistance.

Since I've been at Opticomm, we've always used Centreon. Prior to that, I've used a number of different management platforms. I'm a Netcool certified engineer so I've used Netcool, I've used HPE OpenView, Network Node Manager. I've used a couple of other platforms. I've obviously used Nagios. The main reason why I switched to Centreon was the graphical interface.

The setup was very simple. It's pretty much all automated.

Excellent value.

We looked at:

• Centreon vs Nagios
• Centreon vs Micro Focus Network Node Manager
• Centreon vs SolarWinds
• Centreon vs ObserveOn.

Clearly understand what you want to be able to monitor. Clearly understand what alarms, what things you actually wish to monitor, before you start implementing. There are so many options for configuration and optimization that you really need to be able to map it out beforehand. Design and put down what you want to achieve. Don't just jump in and start adding things.

It's a great product, it's very flexible. There is a lot of customization you can do with the product. It has numerous add-ons that can enhance the functionality of the product.

We have a lot of customers, we manage their LANs, firewalls, and other devices - mainly network devices - and we also monitor them. If we get an alarm we can see right away what is going on and log in to those devices to check what is going on.

We can proactively see what is going on in the network, so most of the time we notice problems before our customers do. This is the main reason we are using this kind of solution and monitoring, to be sure that we see the problems before the customers.

It supports active monitoring so we don't have to use traps. From time to time traps are not very useful because we never know if they are actually working or not. The reporting part is also valuable as are the event logs. Using them we can check right away if something has had a hiccup.

Also, the downtimes feature where, for example, if the ISP is doing some maintenance on its network, we have the option to put downtime on the devices or the services, so we won't get any false alarms.

Improvements I would like to see include 

• a discovery solution
• better reports
• end-to-end monitoring.

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

More than five years.

It's stable. Every product has its pluses and minuses, but it's usually working pretty well. If you configure everything exactly as they tell you in the documentation then it works very well.

We haven't had any issues with scalability.

As we are using their Enterprise version, we submit as many tickets as we want. Lately, we have submitted quite a lot of them because we want to make this product even better. We have had some questions and some ideas that we wanted to share with them and test with them. So I have used their support a lot and they are always very helpful.

I haven't had any experience with other solutions and I don't even know how our company dealt with these kinds of issues prior to this solution. When I came to this company eight years ago, we took this solution with the first managed customers, so we grew with the solution and with the monitoring.

It quite easy to set up. In the past, usually our admins would do it, but lately I have tried to do it myself, and I would say it's quite easy to put up.

It's quite expensive when you use the Enterprise version, but if you compare it to other providers, it's more like a middle-of-the-line product. It's always good to have a price that is lower, but I would say the price is okay because we get very good support and if we have any other issues we can always contact them. There has never been a time when I didn't get help from them, so I would say the price is quite okay.

In terms of licensing, you have to think through if the components that need licensing are really needed. For example, the Map module: If you don't need a map to be shown, I don't see a point in paying for those licenses, if you just use it a couple of times a month or a couple of times a week. Think through what your needs are and whether those needs really require that kind of advanced solution where you need to pay for licenses. You can use the Centreon free version and get the main features. The licensing part is, I would say, only for bigger customers who have the option to pay more and who really need those kinds of modules, fancy reports, etc.

If I remember it correctly, there weren't any better solutions, at least not eight years ago.

During the last couple of years we have tried other solutions but none of them have had the features that we like.

If you put it up, be sure to use Centreon's documentation because if you don't use it you will run into problems. 

Otherwise, I would recommend it because it's quite easy to set up, it's easy to use, their documentation is quite okay. At first, the documentation was very bad, but in recent years it has gotten better, much better. Set it up, test it and try it and you will see that it is the product that you want to work with.