Centreon Reviews

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.

We basically use the solution to host monitoring for our customers. We are trying to upsell them to use some of the more advanced features of Centreon, however, unfortunately, we haven't succeeded in doing so yet.

I've only really worked with the basic features of Centreon, including the monitoring and simple reporting for dashboards. 

I have seen on the demonstration that there are a lot of other features which could be interesting, however, I have not had the chance to really see them or deploy them for our customers. 

We have the business activity monitoring, the map, and the MBI modules and they are all very good.

One of my pet peeves with Centreon is that it's not easy to determine what the end results are of all of the inheritance from the different hosts and service templates, for example. If there was a way to easily determine, for example, for a specific host, which notification settings or service settings, would be ideal to set. 

Currently, we have to go through all of the different templates and take a look at how the template is configured, and how specific parameters may change across different templates with different precedents, megatons, etc. It's a lot of work and involves trial and error. I wish they could simplify the process.

The solution needs more features on the mobile app. Currently, the mobile app cannot be used to receive notifications. It would be great if the mobile app acquired the capability to receive notifications from devices. Our customers are asking for that kind of feature.

The organization has been using Centreon for five years now. However, I only have slightly more than one year of experience with Centreon, the same as my tenure with this organization.

We do encounter bugs every so often, however, the management offers the support and can easily jump in and help us fix those issues. Overall, it's stable. We do encounter some issues simply due to the fact that no software product is perfect. That said, they are very good at quickly addressing and resolving them.

I don't have any experience with scaling. It's supposed to be scalable on paper, however, I haven't really tried it in practice nor do I know other people who have tried to scale it up. Therefore, I have no firm opinion of the potential to do so.

In general, we have about 30 users on the platform at the moment. Most of them are customers who have read-only access.

Technical support has been great at being responsive when we've dealt with bugs on the system. We're satisfied with the level of support they provide.

I can't really give an answer due to the fact that, when I came on board, we had already been using Centreon for quite some time and I have not really explored what was used before they started using Centreon in the organization.

When I came on board, Centreon was already up and running, and I did not have the experience of going through the initial setup. As it was already complete, I can't really speak to the process. I don't know if it was straightforward or complex or how long the deployment took in general.

My management has had some issues with the pricing, primarily due to the fact that we actually are currently still a Centreon partner in Asia. Unfortunately, we were not able to really capitalize on the partnership, so we are ending the partnership. 

We are moving from the expensive Centreon Enterprise edition and downgrading to the IT edition. You could infer from that there are issues with pricing, however, had we been able to successfully sell Centreon or Centreon-based services to more customers, we might have stayed on Centron Enterprise. Since it's just for a few customers, the Enterprise edition does not make sense due to the rather high pricing.

We still have a partnership agreement in Asia, however, we are mostly just a customer. Our business relationship with the company is coming to an end and we are downgrading from an Enterprise solution to an IT one.

The way the architecture of the solution is set up, the central server is on the public cloud, and for each customer, we have on-premises servers.

Overall, I would rate the solution eight out of ten.

We are an IT company. We are using Centreon to deliver services to some of our customers. The main use is for IT monitoring of their infrastructures, especially right now in the media and telecom sectors. In the last month, we have also been approaching the public media sector in Italy.

We are using Centreon for our customers. During the COVID-19 emergency, we were able to do all the tasks required from our customers because you have unlimited access to information remotely. It is very powerful from this point of view because you can see real-time information about how the customers' businesses are going. If you need to make some emergency actions, you can put in place all of them effectively and in the right position on time.

You can combine step-by-step the URL services or review services that you are invested in. You can operate at a higher/different level of critical alarms or at a different level. You can review whether a service has been met.

You can concentrate and orchestrate several other solutions from other vendors. You can consolidate those solutions all in one place, then maintain and monitor from that single point. This creates ease of use. It is a very powerful solution from this point of view.

Centreon has some additional modules. Through these modules you can have all kinds of reporting and dashboarding, which are fully customizable, not only from the content point of view, but also from the graphical point of view. You can design, implement, and deploy real maps representing your services from a geographical and service point of view. So, executives can view their services, e.g., if there is an impact and which are the services impacted. In this way, you can strictly separate the dashboard for the technical stuff and create a separate dashboard for executives to see business information. These are the specific capabilities of Centreon. 

You can do some predictive metrics using the tools of Centreon. Therefore, you can have an alarm of sorts before some events can occur.

Connecting to any system, such as traditional on-prem, cloud, virtualized, or edge devices, is very simple. There are hundreds of plugins ready to be deployed with several key monitoring indicators that take place. This is very powerful because you can simply pick up the connectors made available by the plugin's package. 

You can use the API to develop any type of integration. The plugins for users are capable of covering the major vendors and other kinds of software, e.g., the major types of ticketing software that are widely available. 

Centreon is missing an easy way to create a trendline for the metrics. Actually it is possible to create it, but you need a good knowledge of math, Centreon, and RRD.

More than 12 years.

It is very stable. It is rare to receive complaints from customers, though sometimes it happens.

It is scalable. We have tens of thousands of homegrown devices.

We have five users, including our CTO and systems engineers. They can design, implement, and train people on the solution.

Our people get a quick response in the proper time.

We primarily switched to Centreon because of compatibility, cost, difficulty in finding expertise, and support with our previous solution. 

Centreon has been more flexible with customers' requests. We also saw at the same that Centreon would be able to grow with customer needs, not investor needs. They have developed their technology to solve customers' problems in the last two years, doing an excellent job with reporting and predictive analysis.

The initial setup is not complex for skilled Centreon users, even in cases of customers with very heterogeneous infrastructure. In fact Centreon has the ability to grow horizontally when needed, using the ready to use plugins. Usually, for customers from 500 up to 1000 hosts to be monitored, the implementation process may require from two up to four weeks for a basic-standard deployment.

We can do the implementation by ourselves.

We take a step-by-step implementation process for customers. We adjust the solution based on each customer's needs.

We have seen ROI with Centreon.

The solution has reduced our mean time to resolution.

One of the main characteristics that help customers to reduce costs is the solution's capacity to consolidate. This causes the solution to be more efficient. It immediately gives you the big picture about what is happening. Staff can immediately identify a problem and how to solve it. Centreon provides one single point for information so you don't have to use other solutions.

The solution is affordable. The price isn't so high compared to other solutions. The price is negotiable, e.g., you can get a very good price at 20,000 devices if you can commit for several years.

Centreon is always available to develop new plugins when needed. The most important thing is that their maintenance account yearly subscription fee includes the fact that they will maintain the new plugins that you requested them to deliver.

We do a competitor evaluation every year of the market to determine if there is a better competitor. While there are other solutions, I don't think there is a better solution than Centreon.

The solution increases the accuracy of our monitoring. The reaction that I have had from some customers, or even prospects, when we do a live demonstration involving how Centreon is working is that their experience with other solutions is bad. Centreon is a really capable tool that increases efficiency and gives you more information.

We have been a partner of other brands in the past, and comparatively, Centreon is much more stable.

If you are large customer who spends more on the solution, you receive more services versus other market competitors. Centreon offers value for its cost.

It is a complete solution. Our customers are happy. If you want to improve your active monitoring activity, you should use Centreon. I would rate the solution as a 10 out of 10.

Centreon is readily available to integrate tools from other vendors.

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 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.

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).

We use Centreon to centrally monitor our entire global IT infrastructure and to alert us about impending issues.

Centreon enables us to proactively take action on issues before they even become incidents, which significantly reduces business disruptions resulting from controllable factors.

I find the product's scalability to be one of the most valuable features since it allows us to add unlimited devices for monitoring and to set up additional polling servers without additional license cost or downtime in our monitoring.

The Home view could be improved by adding customization functions that allow users to change the size of the widgets for a more uniform layout.

No issues with stability.

No issues with scalability.

Centreon technical support is only available during Central European business hours. When it comes to critical business solutions, there should be a 24/7 hotline that customers can rely on.

We switched to Centreon from our previous solution because of the flexibility it offered as an open source solution and because it allowed us to have more control over the design of our monitoring environment.

The initial setup was straightforward, as the product is available in ISO image format, ready for deployment. Centreon also has a comprehensive guide and documentation that are simple and easy to follow.

Open source solutions can be very cost effective for an organization looking for a product that can be quickly implemented, as there is no initial cost and there are no license renewal fees. However, it is important to take into consideration some of the related costs that may come along as needed, such as training, support, and product enhancements.

We have used SolarWinds Network Performance Monitor and SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor.

Centreon is like a sandbox for monitoring your systems. It allows you to customize and automate different tasks, such as the configuration of hosts for monitoring, and actions taken during an alert.

I recommend some training and deploying a lab environment instance, where administrators can fully understand how each feature integrates with the rest of the system to help avoid early configuration mistakes and achieve an efficient production environment design.

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 use it for infrastructure monitoring.

The improvement has been the ability to deploy a log monitoring system on already existing infrastructure. When I took ownership of teams where I replaced the previous monitoring solution with Centreon, the capability to stabilize and quickly fix the infrastructure monitoring - since the previous solution was not very good - helped us.

It also gives us a good overview of our system.

The collection part, due to the flexibility and scalability.

We have provided feedback to Centreon directly. The most important issue is the capability to interconnect with other systems. It already exists for some of them. For example, the Stream Connector is something we use to populate data in another system. This kind of facility for connecting should exist for all products that it makes sense to have connected to a monitoring solution.

We have never had a big issue. Sometimes there is a mistake, the wrong configuration for example. But there has been no outage caused by a bug in the software.

We haven't had any scalability issues with the monitoring solution part. But in terms of data, analysis, we have a very large amount of data, a big database. The MBI, the Monitoring Business Intelligence part is very important for that because we have limited data analysis, graphing, and reporting. With the new solution, we will have success with that. This improvement will enable a lot of functionality and features in terms of Big Data treatment.

We have direct contact with a pre-sales engineer. We work directly with him by email or by phone, it's very fast. I don't use the support gateway from Centreon.

We had a different monitoring system. Why Centreon? It's very good at agents, in collecting data. Because of some specific integrations we must do, we chose Centreon. Based on demand and our expectations, and the collectors, we made our decision.

We picked Centreon because, after an open-source comparison, and given what we want to do, and our skills and experience as well, it was the best solution for us, the most reliable for our services. We manage the unified collaboration clusters for an organization in Europe. The difficulty is that we have to maintain a complex solution so I don't want to increase the complexity of managing it. The opposite would be the best way, to effectively simplify the management of this kind of cluster. Centreon is made for monitoring but also has extra connectors to enable automation. Globally, that was a very important point for us, to open the door to tomorrow. If we stay with Centreon, we should be able to play with the data, with Centreon and with other systems.

The first setup was eight years ago and it was not very complex. We had an expert in Linux so it was not really a big issue, with ten years' experience in monitoring systems. There were no specific difficulties with it.

We have a good monitoring system and a good aggregation layer. That means we are alerted on service impacts and not when something is down. We have saved a lot of time on non-business-hours intervention.

I deal with technical parts, not with the costs.

In terms of licensing, the big question will be the ability to be flexible with the scale of design.

We had different solutions. We had Splunk for Big Data monitoring as well as Elasticsearch and Zabbix. These are at the top of the market, along with Centreon.

My advice is to make it simple. When I say that, it's in terms of templating. With Centreon we can create a lot of templates. It is very good to have something very flexible and configurable. But be careful, don't create a lot of templates that will clash with other templates because, in the end, it will be very complex to maintain. Start simple and maintain up-to-date documentation.

We use other reporting solutions to complement it, to create beautiful reports that are specifically requested by our customers. In the future, I expect we will use a diverse range of products to give us the value we need to present to our customers.

I'm a solution architect, so my main job is to provide good solutions to meet demands. When we build a design, we study which solution will make sense for the customer. As an integrator, of course, I need to be sure that any solution, for the price, will make sense for my enterprise as well.

If we compare Centreon to another open-source monitoring system, and we're talking about it as a pure monitoring system, I would rate Centreon between eight and nine out of ten. If we compare it to a Big Data system, it would be closer to seven out of ten, due to the Big Data capacity that we don't have with Centreon. Strictly on monitoring, it gets a good score but with the new technologies, what we see with Big Data and the capabilities for machine-learning and AI, etc., the latter will have a better score because they have the capability to generate a lot of metrics.

We use Centreon for monitoring resources to prevent priority-one and priority-two tickets. It is our primary monitoring tool. All our devices are being monitored using Centreon.

We have reduced the number of priority-one and priority-two tickets by about ten percent.

What I like most about Centreon is that it is very flexible and customizable, based on the user and/or business needs. Centreon is very flexible when it comes to monitoring parameters. We can use scripts found on the internet or scripts created by our infra/apps team.

Also, the data visualization features are very simple and straightforward, yet very informative.

Finally, it is very simple and user-friendly. It is easy to understand and to make your way around it.

Centreon needs to improve the granularity of the data as well as the graphical data. It would also be better to if there was improvement to the filtering/grouping system as well as the creation of views.

It would be a lot better if they improved the scalability and granularity of the data.

Technical support is great, very helpful and accommodating.

We had a previous solution. We switched because we are trying to save some money and, at the same time, looking for a solution that will support our business needs. This solution was suggested by upper management.

The initial setup was very simple and straightforward, including installation, adding of nodes, creating services, etc.

The solution is very effective, despite the low price.

Follow the best practices and the installation process in the documentation. It is very easy to understand.

In terms of the Remote Server functionality, I'm not highly familiar with it yet, but based on what I have read I think it is a great feature and I'm open to any possibility of using it in the future.

We have 300 to 400 users. Some are infrastructure engineers, VPs, application analysts, and people on the upper management team. For deployment and maintenance, we have three to five personnel: our Senior Vice President, Linux/VM engineers, and global operations engineers.

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.