Centreon and Cisco UCS Manager compete in the IT infrastructure management category. Centreon appears to have the upper hand in flexibility and customization, while Cisco UCS Manager is more recognized for its robust server management and automation capabilities.
Features: Centreon offers extensive monitoring capabilities, scalable active monitoring, and detailed reporting, which support large infrastructures. Its flexibility and ability to integrate diverse modules, plugins, and scripts are notable. Furthermore, it provides crucial dashboarding and business intelligence for strategic data visualization. Cisco UCS Manager is efficient in managing server configurations and is flexible with hardware profiles, fostering seamless deployments. It excels in operational automation, simplifying scalable infrastructure management.
Room for Improvement: Centreon could enhance its customization features, extend service monitoring, and improve integration for broader systems. There is also a need for better anomaly detection and advanced GUI functionality. Cisco UCS Manager might benefit from a simplified user interface and enhanced automation processes. Improvements are needed for its performance monitoring dashboards and integration scalability. Users also point out its complex deployment and high pricing.
Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Centreon's deployment is versatile, supporting on-premises and hybrid cloud setups. However, there is a noted gap in support availability, primarily offered during Central European business hours. Cisco UCS Manager ensures consistent on-premises deployment but requires more technical expertise, challenging for smaller organizations. Its customer support is considered efficient, though access to local support could be improved.
Pricing and ROI: Centreon provides an open-source solution for cost-effective monitoring. Although the Enterprise version may seem expensive, it offers good value with its features and support, offering quick ROI through improved troubleshooting and reduced downtimes. Cisco UCS Manager is seen as a more expensive option, justified by reliability and comprehensive features for good ROI. However, its deployment and maintenance costs can be a deciding factor when considering alternatives.
Centreon provides timesaving and costsaving benefits as it lets us manage multiple devices on a single platform.
It significantly saves time by automating monitoring tasks and reduces costs as it requires fewer resources.
I can manage all LAN uplinks and fiber channel storage uplinks directly from UCS Manager.
Cisco UCS Manager provides cost savings by reducing the time support staff spend on long deployments.
We do not have direct access to Centreon's technical support.
If issues arise, like services appearing as down in Centreon, technical support helps check the polar-server communication.
Technical support from Centreon responds within 24 hours and resolves issues quickly.
With Intersight, service requests are automatically generated, enhancing the user experience and providing timely resolutions.
For a severity one case, a call ensures immediate assistance and resolution of the matter.
Regarding Cisco tech, they are pretty good.
Occasionally, for several hours, we do not receive any alerts, causing a business impact.
We use other tools for adding and deploying configured devices, but direct access from Centreon would be beneficial.
I can install the hypervisor, such as VMware, and add the servers into the cluster seamlessly.
I would rate the scalability at nine out of ten, probably.
Centreon is a much more straightforward and stable tool compared to Icinga.
Sometimes we do not receive alerts, causing business impact, and users ask why no alerts were received.
If there's a really complex problem, I would probably give it a ten since it gets escalated quickly.
Enhancements are needed in identifying configuration issues, providing real-time alerts in case of issues, and improving the HTTP configuration tasks.
While Centreon excels at server-level monitoring, it lacks the ability to track web app availability and latency, unlike Dynatrace, which is efficient in this area.
Reliability is sometimes an issue. Centreon has a developer mode and production mode, but sometimes alerts don't come through in production mode.
We would benefit from advancements in AI that offer firmware recommendations automatically, reducing the need for human intervention and vendor communication.
It doesn't work straight out of the UCS, so someone who knows what they're doing is needed immediately, and it can be quite confusing.
While it has been improved from using Java to HTML, simplifying the tabs would enhance user experience.
Centreon's pricing is not very expensive.
Recently, we acquired an excellent bundle with significant discounts, with offers like buying three servers and getting one free, along with UCSC and fabric included for free.
As long as they can afford it, there is a setup cost involved.
Monitoring is a fundamental pillar of technical support, and Centreon streamlines this process, reducing the need for extensive manual checks.
Centreon's real-time monitoring, despite having some manual aspects, supports us in managing our operations effectively.
Centreon allows us to monitor all of our devices on one platform.
It supports ease of deployment, allowing for quick mass deployments in the data center, saving time and resources by doing so from a remote location.
Whenever there's a failure of any component, it's very easy to swap because you just disassociate that profile, remove the faulty blade, connect the new blade, and associate that profile, maintaining the same MAC address and worldwide port name.
One of the valuable features is the user interface base, specifically the C user interface.
Centreon is an all-in-one IT monitoring solution that is a network, system, applicative supervision, and monitoring tool. It is free and open source, and one of the most flexible and powerful monitoring softwares on the market.
Centreon Features
Centreon has many valuable key features. Some of the most useful ones include:
Centreon Benefits
There are several benefits to implementing Centreon. Some of the biggest advantages the solution offers include:
Reviews from Real Users
Below are some reviews and helpful feedback written by Centreon users.
PeerSpot user Thor M., CEO at a tech services company, says, "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. 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.”
Thomas C., Managing Director, Canada at Eva, comments, “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.”
Marcilio L., President at ITS Solucoes, expresses, "The dashboards are valuable because they ease troubleshooting and viewing. It becomes easier to locate the source of a problem... 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."
Florent Q., Network Engineer at a computer software company, mentions, "The most valuable feature is that we can manually configure everything we need. After it comes inside the interface of Centreon, you can display it. Because the interface is quite user-friendly, you can manually configure the configuration very deeply, which is very pleasant and useful because you can monitor and see everything on your service list, dashboard, or MAP. The most useful feature for me is that you can create your own plugin and monitoring query."
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