Centreon Reviews

We have our own private data centers that are set around the world. They post our solutions to our customers. We have a NOC that monitors the applications and services of each server. The primary use is of the solution is to trigger incidents and to resolve issues before the customer notices.

We use Centreon as a base for almost all of our monitoring, and we use it to trigger instances. We work with ServiceNow. We shifted from the open-source, old, unsupported version of Centreon to the new version. We use the built-in plug-in which Centreon has, the monitoring plug-in, the specific component plug-in. We didn't even have to write the check and maintain the check, we were able to use what Centreon had. That's one thing that it improved in our organization.

We have used it from the beginning, so I can't really compare it to anything before. But when we first installed the UI, it allowed us to see the big picture, to understand what's critical and what's not critical, and to build more and more checks, more and more output, and more hosts for it. It's scalable. Centreon allowed us to do it without having to look for another solution.

We have about 10,000 alerts a month coming from Centreon. For us, especially compared to other systems, it gets us the information for a specific alert: What is alerting on the server, what's working or not working. The number of clicks which we need to do to get that information is significantly lower. If you have an alert on server A, in another solution, you have to search for server A, and then search for what's not good and what's good. In Centreon, it takes one or two clicks, one or two transactions, done by the NOC user, to get that information. When you're talking about doing that 10,000 times a month, that's a significant reduction in the amount of work.

It's flexible for infrastructure monitoring. We can write our own checks. It's based on Nagios, and it's fully open-source. We do prefer to use the plug-ins, because then we don't have to maintain them. But we can write anything regarding server level and application help, ourselves. We have the flexibility.

When we started using it, our work was based on Nagios completely. What we like about it is that, whereas with Nagios, by design, if you have five or six data centers, you have to open five or six web pages to see what's going on, in Centreon, this is all included in one page, a single site, one dashboard. You don't have to jump from one specific dashboard to the other.

I also really like the filtering capabilities of it. You can easily tell what's critical next to what's okay, the state of the services. It's very easy to get the whole picture quickly.

In terms of the data visualization features, since we're not looking for anything too particular or too complex, it works for us. It's very easy to find exactly what alerts you have. It's very easy to filter by a specific alert. It's very easy to search. It's very easy to configure a specific relation between alerts, to see what's good and what's bad at a given place.

I would compare it to something like Excel, perhaps. Visually, it's very easy to work with. Maybe you can't do things that are too complicated or have some sort of BI, but it has what we're looking for. What we need to understand is: Where is the alert, is there anything else affected, is it clear? And then resolve it as fast as we can. It's a very straightforward, non-complex GUI.

There are improvements that they need to make to their API. When we're using different systems and we want to disable monitoring for a specific server, we still can't do that through the API. That's something that's lacking. We have to be creative and think of other ways. 

And now that we're looking into switching to the world of containers, which is a different type of monitoring altogether, I hope that they have some sort of scalable solution for it. In a container world, the container is irrelevant. It could just be destroyed and another one can come up in its place. It's about the history, the log, and the service itself; that's what is valuable. That's something that they have to think about, although we're not there yet ourselves.

The stability is good. The old Centreon, for us, wasn't stable but, again, we're talking about an old system that wasn't supported, that wasn't built on best practices. The current solution is stable for us.

I don't think we have had any availability issues since we installed the new Centreon. The only time we did was when someone was doing work on Centreon on our side. But other than for maintenance, we haven't had any downtime. We have had some slowness, but not a time when the system wasn't available.

It is a very critical system for us, so if there is a problem with Centreon, we do have to deal with it right away, because it's our eyes. I would know if there was some big issue with Centreon.

In terms of the scalability, so far it looks like it's been doing well. We use the best practices that they send us.

We have a problem because we're growing a lot, server-wise, and we have to accommodate the capacity and rearrange it every time. Sometimes the engines are loaded. But it's something that we have to keep watching because it's installed in our servers, not in a cloud. So we have to make sure that the sizing is what it should be.

Maybe another thing that would be helpful would be a way for Centreon to monitor itself, to tell us when we need to add more engines, or when need to add more CPUs - scale up, scale down - based on the Centreon infrastructure. I'm sure they have this in their best practices, but it would be much better if this was part of an actual alert, so we would know, beforehand, and not have to proactively check it every once in a while.

Their support is very good, they're very knowledgeable. We do use them quite often and they're very quick to answer and very quick to take over the desktop and to investigate it themselves. They seem to be very technical.

We wish they had 24/7 support just in case, but we have our own design failover, so the chances that the checks aren't going to work in one way or another are very slim.

We used the regular Nagios, two or three of them for each of our data centers. I wasn't there at the time the switch was made to Centreon, but I can guess that it was because Centreon is a unified solution. You can now configure checks and do it on one page. With Nagios, at least the old one, you had to have a different site for each data center, so you had to manage three or four things.

The initial setup was pretty easy. It's very similar to Nagios. The initial setup of Centreon is not difficult at all.

We cleaned all our infrastructure and built Centreon from scratch, but we already knew what we were doing. For the deployment of an empty environment, it was very quick. It took a few days. The difficulties were on our side, making our specific checks and fitting them into the plug-ins, but that didn't have to do with Centreon. We had to go back and do some re-engineering. For us, it was easy.

In terms of our strategy for restructuring, we had a lot of checks that were irrelevant, servers that were irrelevant, and checks that weren't written correctly. Our strategy was, first of all, to have the minimum number of checks needed; second, to have a naming convention; and third, wherever possible, to use a Centreon plug-in and not write our own. It took us a while because we had a lot to review. We have a lot of different applications with a lot of different checks. It was more of an in-house project of processes and procedures. We took advantage of the new Centreon to clean up everything and do it right.

We have the skills. We had a consultant from Centreon come in - that was part of the contract - for three days, and he showed us some tricks, some best practices, and answered some questions.

Specifically for us, because we knew what we were doing, I don't really think we got a lot of value from the consultant. But I can tell you, if someone has no clue what's going on with Centreon, the consultant would be very helpful.

If we're looking at Centreon and how we managed to integrate it with ServiceNow, if we needed to buy another monitoring tool, that would probably be a cost of $20,000 or $30,000 a year. We didn't have to do that. Our escalation rate from our NOC is very low, it's about two percent, so I have to give Centreon some credit.

I think Centreon's pricing is fair, especially given the criticality of our system. They were cheaper than the other solutions.  

I understand Centreon is going to North America now. They were smaller when we got it, and the pricing was fair. It took us a while to get in contact with sales, which was a little weird, but once we did and they knew we were serious, the pricing was fair.

The licensing terms were pretty straightforward. I believe it was based on the number of hosts.

The other solutions we tested give you a unified GUI and a platform, like "Nagios as a Service." They all do basically the same thing.

We also had Opsview, after acquiring a company that used it. We took all their checks and migrated them to Centreon, and then we closed Opsview. It was pretty easy to migrate from it - as long as it's Nagios, it's pretty easy. We had to do fixes here and there, but it was something that took a few dev-man days of work. It was not something that was a complicated project. Doing so, this saved us a lot of money. They were paying more for Opsview vs Centreon for about 10 percent of the service. We had a chance to consolidate to Opsview or Centreon, and it was clear that we should consolidate to Centreon.

Take what you have and challenge it. If you're using another system and you decide to move to Centreon, even if your system is similar, don't put your junk on Centreon or any other tool. Go through your processes, go through the system, see what the system is good at, see what it's not so good at, and try to use plug-ins and best practices. Make sure you do an in-house cleaning first. Don't just dump everything on another system and expect it to work.

We've trained a lot of people on Centreon. It was very easy for everyone. It wasn't something that someone specific had to get used to. When we were looking for different solutions - because we ran out of the support for Centreon - we tested Centreon against a few other solutions, and then we understood the advantage of Centreon, especially the GUI.

We already have a system, ServiceNow that does a lot of the reports and consolidates a lot of the incidents for us. We have to do it in one system and we chose that specific system because a lot of other components are relying on it. But, from our perspective, it gives us exactly what we need. I wouldn't need to over-complicate it.

We have around 70 users who use Centreon in one way or another. Ten to 12 are using it daily, one of their main tasks is to go through it. The rest are on-call, escalation. They would go on Centreon, if they get a specific call, to get more information. In terms of their roles, we have the NOC team that uses it, and then we have the Cloud Operations team, which is the second tier of our infrastructure cloud. They use it when they receive escalated incidents. Part of the DevOps team, two or three, uses it to administrate the system. And some of the managers look at it every once in a while to see if there are things that are alerting in a major incident.

Regarding staff for maintaining the solution, it depends. When you have, say, a new product, and you have new service checks and need to connect it to new host templates, that might take some time, but that's a business requirement. When it comes to just maintaining Centreon itself, it's not too much work. It's one of many tools that our DevOps maintain. I don't think they have too much of a headache with it. There are things here and there but it's not something that is very time-consuming.

In terms of how much of the solution we're using, you can always improve it. It's a matter of the time that you have to put into it. Right now, it's giving us enough. We have tried to learn a few things about it. It's a lot work, and we have had to do other things instead. We are happy with the solution, with where we are at the moment. If we had more time we'd seek to improve it, use new features they have. But we haven't had time to work on it. You have to configure it, you have to maintain it, and write processes. That wasn't at the top of our list. We're using Centreon for what we're using it for, and we're using other tools to complete it.

Overall, I would rate Centreon at nine out of ten. They have excellent support, fair pricing for what you get. It's not some sort of machine that does analytics and discovers the servers and these kinds of things. If you want something, arrange a call, talk about it. When they have a new feature they're very excited about it. It's open-source, they're contributing to that and releasing things.

If you're good at something, just stick with it. Don't make any critical changes. If it's working well, don't try to break it, or be something you're not, and reinvent everything. They haven't changed the UI so much, and that's what's good about it. They didn't try to reinvent it or change something. They took what's good about Nagios and added the things that needed to be added.

There's always room for improvement, they're not perfect, that's why I'm not giving them a ten, but they are good. It wasn't just me who decided that we should go on with Centreon. It was myself and three DevOps, and we all came to the same decision, that we should continue with them. Looking back at it, we'd probably do the same. It's just what we need. I just hope that in the future they'll be able to adapt in the world of containers, more complicated monitoring.

Within our technological infrastructure and Communications Management service, it is vital to use this tool to determine the status of each managed element in a simple way.

It has allowed us to review the status of IT elements and has generated alerts to ensure continuity of service.

• Predetermined templates, which allow for simple and fast service monitoring configuration.
• E-mail alert notifications
  

• Lacks service monitoring in the cloud.
• Necessary to improve service monitoring of database services in the free version.
  

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.

Our primary purpose for Centreon is monitoring. We use it to view the status of all our pollers, manage them, and configure them. We manage around 30 Centreon pollers. 

Our team is operating multiple security services (digital signatures, 2FA, secure storage, etc.). We are taking care of everything (hardware, network, hypervisors, VMs, OS, applications, security patches, backup, etc.). Centreon is used to monitor the health of each component and alert us in case of failure. It gives us an overview of our infrastructure health and provides real-time feedback when doing changes.

It allows us to keep the same standard monitoring configuration on all the systems that we manage (checks, polling interval, thresholds, etc.). It also allow us to see the status of our different platforms on a single page.

We have a single GUI where we can view the status of all our infrastructure.

Sometimes, when the GUI and some of the search fields are being reset, and I return to the page, then I have to set them again. Therefore, some improvement on the UI and the filtering is needed.

There are a few bugs or annoying things on the GUI. However, the features are all here for what we need.

It has been stable, so far.

There are no issues that I know of at the moment.

We did have scalability issues with an older version, but now on the newer version, there are no problems. We even have more pollers than before and everything looks good.

They only sell four hour slots for support, so if you have just one question, then you need to pay for four hours. Or, you need to wait until you have enough questions to fill those four hours. They are not flexible in this. 

On the quality of the responses, the last error reported went something like, "We will open any issue on GitHub." However, then my colleague looked at the backlog, and there were hundreds of issues pending. Here there is room for improvement.

We did not have a previous solution. Centreon solved one of the biggest issues that we had. We have a lot of pollers for the metering. In the past, we had to log into each of them to see the status, which was really a pain because did not have a central metering before.

We just installed the standard packages, then the rest was done via the GUI. So, it was good.

I have no idea how much it costs.

I don't know the other solutions which were evaluated, but I know that there was an evaluation. As the evaluation was done before our team chose to use Centreon, I was not involved. Therefore, I can't speak much about the decision other than we knew that Centreon would be able to do what we needed it to do.

If they have the same issues that we had, which means a lot of pollers spread across the whole infrastructure and no central view to look at the entire status with the need to manage everything together, then it is a good solution. For this use case, I would highly recommend it. 

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.

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 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.