Centreon and Kentik compete in the network monitoring tool category. Centreon seems to have the upper hand with its comprehensive monitoring capabilities and open-source model providing cost-effectiveness, whereas Kentik stands out with its advanced visualization and real-time insights, although its pricing is a significant consideration.
Features: Centreon offers scalability and flexibility with tools like Enterprise Plugin Pack and Centreon MAP, automatic alert creation, and centralized dashboards. It allows integration with third-party modules. Kentik provides advanced NetFlow visualization, traffic engineering insights, and real-time network visibility, with Data Explorer and alerting for easy monitoring.
Room for Improvement: Centreon could benefit from more robust API functionalities and enhanced cloud service monitoring. Better automation and mobile support are also areas for improvement. Kentik could improve actionable insights and API usability. Integration of network flow data with application performance could be enhanced, and addressing pricing challenges would be beneficial.
Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Centreon supports on-premises and public cloud deployments but lacks 24/7 support. Users appreciate the assistance but note that it can be costly. Kentik supports on-premises and private cloud setups, and its customer service is responsive, although educational institutes may face pricing challenges.
Pricing and ROI: Centreon's open-source model offers cost-effectiveness and its enterprise version provides value due to scalability despite a complex pricing model. Users note a quick return on investment. Kentik's pricing relies on device count and flow metrics, requiring a larger budget, though it offers significant value with its features.
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.
In production environments, especially for service providers on IP networks and data centers, Kentik helps in reducing the time to identify and resolve issues.
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.
I have mostly used forums for any support needed because the setup is straightforward and the documentation is quite good.
They have monthly calls and discuss the product roadmap with us to determine what is needed.
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.
Kentik's integration with Kubernetes makes scaling easier.
You can scale as many devices and tests as you want, but you should have a good number of credits in your accounts.
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.
Based on stability, I would give Kentik a nine.
In production, however, dimensioning of the underlying platforms is something to be mindful of.
Enhancements are needed in identifying configuration issues, providing real-time alerts in case of issues, and improving the HTTP configuration tasks.
Reliability is sometimes an issue. Centreon has a developer mode and production mode, but sometimes alerts don't come through in production mode.
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.
More work is required to integrate AI for troubleshooting, simplifying root cause analysis, and providing suggested solutions for network issues.
Centreon's pricing is not very expensive.
Kentik’s pricing is competitive in the marketplace.
The pricing is good and aligns with the market target.
Centreon's real-time monitoring, despite having some manual aspects, supports us in managing our operations effectively.
Monitoring is a fundamental pillar of technical support, and Centreon streamlines this process, reducing the need for extensive manual checks.
Centreon allows us to monitor all of our devices on one platform.
One of the most valuable features of Kentik, especially for service providers, is its ability to visualize all the BGP peering and the status of the BGP peering platform.
Overall, the ease of use and the fact that it meets client expectations are major positives.
Kentik is easy to use and set up.
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."
Kentik's AIOps Network Traffic Intelligence platform unifies network operations, performance, security, and business intelligence.
With a purpose-built big data engine delivered as public or private SaaS, Kentik captures a high-resolution view of actual network traffic data and enriches it with critical application and business data, so every network event or analysis can be tied to revenue & costs, customer & user experience, performance & risk.
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