Microsoft System Center and Centreon compete in the IT infrastructure management category. The choice between them depends on integration needs and the balance between customizability and structured Microsoft support, with Centreon excelling in flexibility and customization for diverse environments.
Features: Microsoft System Center offers integration with Microsoft products, intuitive configuration, and robust monitoring and automation features for Windows. Centreon excels in server and network monitoring with powerful data visualization, third-party module integration, and impactful dashboards.
Room for Improvement: Microsoft System Center can improve its non-Microsoft integration, installation process, and cloud-monitoring abilities. Centreon needs enhanced network discovery, API functionality, and better auto-remediation features.
Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Microsoft System Center is primarily for on-premises use with limited hybrid cloud capabilities and challenging technical support. Centreon is flexible for both on-premises and cloud deployments, with generally responsive but mixed support reviews.
Pricing and ROI: Microsoft System Center is expensive, with enterprise licensing fees but provides ROI through automation and management cost reductions. Centreon offers a cost-effective open-source solution with charges for advanced features and flexible licensing valued by larger clients.
It significantly saves time by automating monitoring tasks and reduces costs as it requires fewer resources.
Centreon provides timesaving and costsaving benefits as it lets us manage multiple devices on a single platform.
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.
As a partner, I cannot create a ticket directly; I have to involve the end user's email to create one, so using the Software Assurance ID to create a ticket directly is not possible, making it very challenging for me.
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.
Microsoft System Center is scalable, allowing integration even if I have different sites.
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.
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.
The disadvantage of Microsoft System Center is related to the many integrated services; if one service is failing, then all features will be affected.
Centreon's pricing is not very expensive.
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.
Regarding endpoint management, Microsoft System Center is very helpful; it has integrated endpoint protection deployment, allowing me to handle endpoint configuration, system deployment, and patch deployment, making it an all-in-one stop shop for managing and configuring end clients.
| Product | Market Share (%) |
|---|---|
| Centreon | 3.2% |
| Microsoft System Center | 0.4% |
| Other | 96.4% |
| Company Size | Count |
|---|---|
| Small Business | 11 |
| Midsize Enterprise | 5 |
| Large Enterprise | 14 |
| Company Size | Count |
|---|---|
| Small Business | 7 |
| Midsize Enterprise | 4 |
| Large Enterprise | 10 |
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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