Device42 Reviews

The tool helps with network scanning and the discovery of asset management. 

We faced outages in the data center before implementing Device42. The tool has improved it and helped us with asset management. 

I like the tool's agentless discovery feature. The tool configures the devices based on the documentation provided. I am also impressed with its auto-discovery feature. The tool also keeps on tracking and finds whatever is in the environment. 

I would like to see API management as an additional feature in the tool's future versions. It will give more API security. 

I have been working with the tool for five months. 

The tool's technical support is very knowledgeable. They helped me with my queries. 

Positive

I would rate the tool an eight out of ten. You need to use the product for one month and see if it offers the best value for your company. 

I used Device42 for security purposes during my internship over the summer. I was tasked with trying to figure out a way to manage and secure the assets that the company I was working for had. We noticed that most of them were actually not secure, and also found out that Device42 was not up-to-date either.

Because I was using the solution to track our assets and see which ones were secure and which were not, so that we could better secure the latter, just having them all in one place definitely made it easier in some ways.

If I hadn't had Device42, I would have had to manually go through each asset, and that would not have been fun.

The most valuable feature was the ability to look up the different assets and see the different attributes that each one has, as well as being able to compare them to other assets.

It's also very important that the software provides agentless discovery.

In addition, I really enjoyed the dashboards and visuals. It was easy to navigate.

A lot of our assets didn't have information, which either meant someone wasn't keeping things up-to-date or just we didn't have enough information to go on. But for what we did have, the analytics were decent.

It was hard to know which assets I'd already looked at because if I looked up another asset with a similar name, they would still pop up. I would have to make sure I was looking at the right asset. The search function should be improved.

I used Device42 for about four weeks.

Device42 did crash on me a couple of times. I'm going into the security field and I'm an information systems major, but you can't really be working on a website designed for security and have it randomly crash on you.

This may be very cliche, but do your research on it first. Not every solution is perfect, we all know that. But if it doesn't match your needs, then it's probably useless. Having to go back and redo all the work you already did would be a disaster.

We are not using Device42 for its monitoring capabilities. We are using it just as a CMDB. We are storing the server data and using this tool for data storage. We don't do many day-to-day activities apart from updating the device information as and when it comes.

Customers are constantly expanding the environment. So, it's easier for us to keep track of how many devices have been added. We are using another tool for monitoring, and we are using Device42 as data storage. Whatever devices have been decommissioned and commissioned are in it. So, it's a central database for us. We are not relying on just one tool for device information.

The import/export for bulk operations is a valuable and good feature. 

The resources table needs a few tweaks. We've raised a feature request for this. When you click on resources, it opens up the entire CMDB or the entire data stored in Device42. If that could be customizable, it would be good. We should be allowed to add our own columns to that by writing a script or something like that. There should be an option to add or limit whatever we want.

There should also be a customized dashboard. We should be able to include widgets on the dashboard. Currently, for app insights, only predefined dashboards are there. There should be an option to create our own dashboards. Instead of using scripts, they can provide a bunch of widgets, similar to what SolarWinds provides.

The discovery option is fairly simple to understand and use. If they could include an option where we could discover devices using an IP range for a subnet, that would be helpful. I'm not sure if that option is already present because we are not using this tool for monitoring.

I have been using this solution since July. It has been five months.

It's stable. We haven't had any major issues since I have been here. 

It's scalable. It all depends on how a customer purchases its license. Overall, it's able to handle the capacity.

It's being used in just one environment. It's not deployed across multiple environments. There are four to five admins who use this solution. 

They're good. I've spoken to two guys from their technical support. Whatever they told me, I have not forgotten it yet. They're good. I would rate them a 10 out of 10.

Positive

I've been working in this organization for the last five months, and I am not sure which solution they were using before. 

I don't know about its deployment, but in terms of maintenance, every now and then, we need to do some upgrades. We recently applied certificates. So, there was a little bit of downtime. That's where maintenance comes in.

Go for it at your own risk. There is a learning curve to it. There are some options or tools that I don't clearly understand. So, there is a learning curve, but once you get a hang of it, it's pretty easy.

It does agentless discovery, which has its advantages. If there is an emergency and we have to commission a server, we don't have to first install an agent on it. If it's a critical server and the customer doesn't want any downtime, we don't have to reboot the server after we install the agent. A reboot is a recommended action across all environments for any agent. However, the disadvantage of being agentless is that it limits our options for monitoring because agent-based monitoring is a good way for gathering data from devices. SolarWinds does it, OpenManage does it, and most monitoring tools, including even Splunk, have agent-based monitoring. So, not having that as an option is probably a disadvantage.

Overall, I would rate it a seven out of ten.

We primarily use the solution for asset management and use inventory management and asset discovery quite frequently.

We haven't been used to it for a long while, however, it's actually essential for our customers. 

Device42 is a really impressive tool. Their discovery seems to be really coordinated, in the sense that we have different types of discoveries we can actually run. That's one unique aspect about them. 

The way they manage the assets, in general, is actually impressive, and the way they recognize, the software is good. 

The fact that you really don't need to put an agent on is helpful. That's really an impressive aspect of the product overall.

The initial setup is easy.

The stability is good. 

The pricing is reasonable.

They always say and recommend that we should run one remote connector, and one discovery service for about 500 to 1,000 devices, which actually means the productivity of this remote connector. Even then, probably in different subnets, they'll also advise you to have different connectors. If they could make it so their remote connector could do as much as 10,000 devices, that would be better. Just one remote connector to manage about 10,000 devices and still not reduce its productivity would be perfect. That would be a bigger picture item. Then, we wouldn't need to install or set up more than one remote connector on different subnets. That's one thing they could do to improve their services.

It would be nice if they could add support tickets into IT service management.

We've been dealing with the solution for a while. We've been partners for years now, and are quite comfortable with the product.

The solution is quite stable. We haven't had issues with bugs or glitches and it doesn't crash or freeze on us. 

Technically, the solution scales. The only issue I have with this is that it needs various remote connectors to get as much information as you need. Depending on the number of assets, you can just add connectors and you're good to go.

Technical support is okay. I'd rate it at a six out of ten. The device response is quick.

The initial installation is easy. Where it gets complex is when you're configuring the environment for the customer. The initial installation, therefore, is really straight up. It's just handing the IOS to the virtual machines, and you're good to go. It's the subsequent configurations on the platform, where you have the platform, and there's configuring, you're discovering assets, et cetera, that's when it gets difficult.

I'm a reseller.

I'm more on the technical side and don't really handle billing and payments. Therefore, I don't have any details on licensing or costs. 

That said, my understanding is that it is cheaper than other enterprise products on the market.

This solution would work best for organizations with 1,000 to 2,000 devices. However, large organizations, that may have 10,000 or 20,000 devices may not be best suited to this product. 

Most of the organizations, especially the financial institutions here in this country, are always on-premise. That includes our organization. 

I'd rate the solution at a seven out of ten. 

We use Device42 mostly for asset inventory because our compliance rules require us to know what devices we are using: the warranty for each device, when we install it, when we remove it — so full tracking of the device lifecycle. We use Device42 mostly for asset inventory, including physical pieces of hardware and virtual devices as well.

We expected we would use a SaaS version but it was not possible, so we use the on-premise version.

We have more than one instance of Device42. We have four implementations of it in our company. Each of them is dedicated to a single environment: government, our AWS environment, co-location, and corporate co-location. There is no possibility for each of these environments to speak with each other, so that's why we use four different Device42 instances in our company.

Device42 is a source of trust for many things in our company, like IP addresses. In the past, we tried to have IP addresses centralized in an Excel spreadsheet, but now we have built automation to get information from Device42 with an API call. As a result, it's possible to deploy a new VM in 15 minutes and all the information is pulled from Device42, by our automation, to build that new VM.

It's the same for load balancers. When we want to create a new virtual IP for load balancers, we have it automated with an API call and Device42 provides all the information needed to get the job done. So Device42 helps us to build automation into our infrastructure.

Device42 is also a source of trust for our security scan. When a vulnerability is detected in our system, the system automatically looks for information in Device42 to find out who owns the server that has the vulnerabilities and what the contact email is for that team, etc.

The continuous discovery for us works daily. We can be sure, if a device has been updated, that information will be correct in Device42. We are tracking which devices haven't been updated in the last few days and, for each of them we try to understand why, and to fix things so that the discovery does update those devices' information.

I don't know if we can say it has reduced the time we spend on asset management, but in that same amount of time, we now have reliable information. In the past, we were not confident about the information we had. Now, we expect that the information we have is correct.

Also, we have many audits each year. Each audit requires us to provide evidence about how we manage our assets. There are inventory questions and it's easy for us to provide an audit report. When an auditor asks us information, we just have to a share-screen and show him, in 10 minutes, how we manage our assets, and he understands that everything is correctly managed. The audit is very quick.

We use asset management and program management. For some implementations, we also use the software management.

We use the automatic IT asset discovery for different things, like VMware discovery and SNMP discovery for network devices. It helps us to keep hardware information up to date in Device42, and the VMware discovery helps us to keep virtual device inventory up to date. It helps us ensure that we don't have more entries in Device42 than we have in our actual co-location and that we don't have more virtual servers than we have in Device42. We are sure to have 100 percent of our devices in Device42. Not more, not less.

The agentless approach to asset discovery is a good option. Sometimes it's better off to have agents, but in our environment, for most of our servers, it's really good to have the agentless. For a few of them we would prefer to have an agent because, from the network perspective, it's sometimes difficult to allow external Device42 discovery to have access to some devices for security reasons. The security team does not allow certain kinds of access. That's why it's easier if the secured server can have a call to an external service, rather than an external service calling the server.

Device42 is a main part of our processes. We need reliability, not only in terms of the data but with the solution itself. It's really difficult when we have 10 minutes of Device42 downtime because none of our teams can work for those 10 minutes, and it's more time lost if there is longer downtime. An improvement would be to have a cluster implementation of Device42 to have high-availability and ensure that we don't have downtime in case of failure.

Also, when we do an upgrade, it's mandatory to shut down the application. It takes 10 or 15 minutes to upgrade and it's once a month. It's not a big deal, but if it were possible to have no downtime, that would be better. We can plan for upgrades, but we try to have 24/7 availability in our organization, so there really isn't a good time to shut down service. Doing so always has an impact. We have teams around the world.

We were early adopters and we have used Device42 since 2013.

The scalability is pretty good. It's possible to have many devices in Device42, but we can see some limits. For a very large organization, it would be a little bit difficult to use Device42 because it's a single server. It's not possible to have scalability by load-balancing the load onto different servers. That's one of the reasons why we decided to have four different implementations, to be sure that we do not have everything on the same server.

We have more than 1,000 users in Device42 and most of them use it for the password management. Some users are using it for audit purposes, for asset management, and to be able to provide reports to senior management.

We have deployed Device42 everywhere. If our organization does not expand the number of devices, we won't need to extend Device42.

Technical support is pretty good. Each time we need them, we can have a call with them. They respond quickly. It's good support.

Before we used Device42 we had nothing except Excel sheets. We began our asset management with Device42.

I was one of the main stakeholders when we decided to choose an asset management tool. When we decided to use Device42 it was mostly because of its ease of use and that it is easy to implement. We had some meetings with other companies that provide asset management tools. With all of them, there would have been months of implementation with an implementation team to help us. It would have been a big project to implement these applications. With Device42 it was easy. It was easy to install, it's easy to manage, and easy to understand how it works. That's one of the things we like with Device42.

Our implementation of Device42 took a few months. After one month we had 80 percent of our infrastructure in Device42, and the last 20 percent took a little bit longer because we had to discuss things with security. Within three months we had 90 percent in the solution and, after six months, we had 100 percent in it.

We were looking to have automated discovery to be sure that when new devices come in, they would be automatically ID'ed in Device42 and we wouldn't need someone to add them. In one month we automated most of the implementation.

We did it ourselves, and that's one of the reasons we decided to use Device42. All of the other products asked us to use an integrator or a reseller or someone who would help us. Device42 was easy, so we decided to run with it. We were able to manage everything by ourselves.

It's difficult to say if we have seen ROI. We need the functionalities so we pay for the service. It did not replace something that might have been more expensive.

We pay $100,000 per year. There are no costs in addition to the standard licensing fees.

The biggest lesson we have learned from using this solution is that if we want to have clear asset management, we need to have the same processes, policies, and rules in each part of our organization. If each part of the organization works only on its side, it's really difficult to reconcile asset management. That's why each technical team that owns devices has to share their processes and work in the same manner. When that is done, it's really easy to have good asset management.

We don't use the solution's Application Dependency Mapping. In our organization, it's too difficult for a team to be able to provide information on application mapping and to be able to reconcile what Device42 discovers with what we have. So we decided not to use it.

Device42 does not affect our security. We try to use it so that it fits within our security requirements.

In the past, one person was working on maintaining Device42 and that was enough. But now that Device42 is critical for our organization, we have two people working on it to be sure that when someone is on holiday, a second person is there in case of trouble. They work as managers of asset management.

I would rate it at nine out of 10. It's difficult to give a 10 because it's always possible to do better, but it's a pretty good solution.

Our use case for Device42 is to capture all our infrastructure in a single tool. We need the ability to have that view of where our infrastructure is: servers, storage, network equipment, and applications sitting on top of servers. Our use case is to have that single pane for where all that is.

When we're doing patch management or when we're reviewing kit (end-of-life), it gives us the ability to manage the data center from a desk. Before we had Device42, we'd have spreadsheets or somebody would have to continually to go to the data center and physically have a look at what's available where. If somebody bought or wanted to buy new kit — if they needed, for example, six U's of space, 10 network ports and five power ports — we'd have to visit the data center and have a look at where we could fit that in. With Device42, we don't need to do any of that. We just need an internet connection to get to the Device42 appliance and we can see where the space is and what the power availability is, as well as what network capacity we've got, in which rack. Everything is there.

The continuous discovery of the infrastructure means we are able to review, and we are able to mitigate things in a quicker fashion than we would have previously. If somebody had asked us five years ago how many Server 2008's we have, because we've got a vulnerability and we need to know how many servers we need to patch, it would have taken us some time to find that out. We would have had to go through all the different platforms and find out where we're hosting 2008 Servers. With Device42, we can go in and, within 10 minutes, tell the business how many servers we need to patch.

Also, the solution's CMDB, ITAM, and DCIM features create a single source of IT truth in our environment. These too make it a lot easier for the operations team. When incidents come up on the operations monitor, that team can easily ascertain who the owner is of these devices, where they sit, and who's responsible for them. They ensure the correct people get things looked at much quicker.

In addition, we're currently on a cloud project, so we have been using the solution to assess what we have in our environment, what we want to take to the new environment, what we need to drop in terms of hardware, the age of the hardware, as well as end-of-life operating systems or applications. It has helped us a lot with getting that kind of data.

We use the solution’s Application Dependency Mapping and that gives us some insight into a number of things. For example, if we're looking at a server that currently has a problem, the operations team can look at the Application Dependency Mapping and see what the server is part of in terms of the service. There may be a number of things that are connecting to it or that it's connecting to. That mapping gives us that insight into how parts of the infrastructure are talking to each other.

Previously, when it came to asset management, people would have been updating spreadsheets or documents about where they've moved things or what they've been doing, or they would have had to visit multiple areas to find out certain information. Device42 turns that into a hands-off approach to everything. We know it has been doing discovery continuously over evenings and weekends. So whatever data we are pulling out is fairly up to date. The time saved by using Device42, across the teams, is easily equivalent to a couple of people at least. A full-time member of staff would normally work seven-and-a-half hours every day so you're looking at 146 hours a month of savings, times two, of people not having to visit data centers to do things like capacity planning, auditing, etc.

We also use Device42 for internal audits. In that context, it saves a considerable amount of time. If we were to do it manually, we're looking at a couple of weeks' worth of work, but if we're doing it in Device42 we're probably looking at a couple of days' worth, maximum.

One of the most valuable features is its ability to auto-discover a lot of the infrastructure, without having to manually put everything in. The auto-discovery is brilliant. You can have it scheduled to run on a regular basis, and the infrastructure is always getting updated within the platform. I would rate the asset discovery very highly. It's very comprehensive. It covers quite a lot of different methods for doing discovery and it supports a lot of different types of hardware as well.

The agentless discovery is the one thing that makes this a brilliant tool. The fact that you don't have to deploy an agent onto anything and you can do discovery directly through the appliance, just with credentials, is what really makes it stand out.

It's also easy for everybody to go into it and search for something, and the searching is very quick as well. You can get to get the information very quickly.

Room for improvement would be in the discovery. Although the discovery it does is really good, there are certain elements that could be better in terms of a deeper discovery. An example would be teaming on Windows Server. It doesn't currently pick up that functionality well. 

Also, the dependency mapping can be quite slow sometimes, if you've got a lot of things connecting to services. It can be very slow to build up the map. 

The certificate management could also be a little bit better.

Finally, it would be good to introduce a mobile app. At the moment, you can connect to the web interface through your mobile and select a mobile view, but it's still very much a desktop view on your mobile. It's not very mobile-friendly. So it would be good either to have a mobile app, or a specific mobile endpoint on the web front. You would visit a separate URL or it would detect that you're on a mobile and rearrange the view to be mobile-friendly, like dynamic websites do at the moment.

We've been using Device42 for about five years now.

The stability is very good. We've never had any stability issues with the appliance where it continuously goes down or anything like that. We've not had a problem with that.

Scalability-wise, there could be improvements. Currently, the scalability is only upwards. You have to increase the resources that you apply to it. You can't have multiple instances of the same thing. You can't scale horizontally; it's just vertical.

Technical support is excellent. The engineers are knowledgeable and they respond in a very timely fashion.

The initial setup is straightforward but, at the same time, depending on your business and the complexity of the infrastructure, it can become complex. Not the actual implementation of Device42, but to get Device42 to the point where it can do the discoveries on your infrastructure can become complicated, depending on how your infrastructure has been set up. But to actually get Device42 up and running, in terms of just the appliance, is very easy.

Our deployment took six to eight months. Getting the appliance running was very quick, but to get all of the integrations done, and working with all the different teams to allow the agentless discoveries to happen, and configuring firewalls, policies, etc., it took that long to get it all in place and to make sure that the data that we're capturing is actually useful and correct.

The implementation strategy was quite straightforward because we didn't have anything else before. We started from scratch to capture everything, starting from the network layer and going up to the server storage layer, and then the application layer.

We deployed it ourselves.

Effectively, we didn't have a product before Device42. But with it, we're looking at a reduction in terms of man-hours to manage IT infrastructure and do asset management. That's where the return on investment has come. 

Another part of the return on investment is when a vulnerability comes out. With this solution, we can identify the machines very quickly, rather than having an engineer sitting there for a whole day or two working out what needs to be done. An engineer can go through Device42 and spend half an hour to pull a report.

We pay annually for our licenses, which includes core, the Application Dependency module, and software discovery.

We evaluated two or three other options on the market. At the time, we chose Device42 because of its effectiveness in actually discovering the infrastructure. The second reason was the cost and the third was its ease of use.

We looked at RackTables, OpenDCIM, and we looked at another one from BMC and, for asset management, we looked at ServiceNow.

The biggest lesson I would take from using the solution is to have an understanding of your infrastructure so you can better plan how you implement Device42. As with anything, there are obviously limitations as to what it can do. Sometimes there are certain politics within your business that may stop you from getting the most out of Device42.

Also, although we didn't actually do so, I think it would be good to have a close relationship with the vendor of Device42, at the implementation stage. Our relationship has matured and been built post-implementation of Device42. It's going to be beneficial, for anybody who wants to put Device42 in, to get the vendor onboard before you implement it.

I don't think Device42 has really affected our environment's security posture, as long as we understand how Device42 is doing these discoveries. We actually have Device42 in a fairly locked-down environment. Only certain teams have access to it because of the sensitivity of what's inside it. On the flip side, it provides that single pane of glass. You could say that there is a higher risk with it because we now have one place in which all the information is held. But I think the benefits outweigh that little bit of risk that we've taken on by having all the information in one place.

In terms of people using Device42 as a platform, we're somewhere around the 50 or 60 mark. They range from service desk analysts who use the secrets vault functionality, to the infrastructure team — system engineers, network engineers, infrastructure architects, network architects, desktop engineers, database administrators. Those are the kind of people who tend to use Device42's core functionality which is asset, infrastructure, and data center management. The secrets vault is spread across our whole department and the infrastructure side is heavily used by the infrastructure teams, which includes my team, systems, the network team, and the architects.

Deployment and maintenance are quite lightweight. To manage the whole thing you only need one or two people, and they are spread across the different teams in our environment. We have one person in the network team and one in the systems team to ensure that things are ticking over and for planning upgrades.

Our environment is not massive but it's not a small environment. In terms of what it costs us to run Device42, we find it a very good value for money. We will definitely be using it for the foreseeable future and our plans are to extend its usage into the cloud where we are already capturing things. But we want to make the visibility of cloud resources in Device42 much better. Device42  are improving cloud discovery as well. The way we've got it set up, it doesn't give us the same visibility that we have on-prem. So we want to start working on making sure that the visibility of our cloud deployments is just as good as we have on-prem, with deep discoveries, etc.

The first use case is the most important. It is Application Dependency Mapping. We want to track what is dependent on what. We want to know when something goes down or a change is made. We are also trying to use it as a change management database for what hypervisor is in what rack which links over to what business application is running that uses what services and has what account. We have information scattered in a lot of different places. This seems to be a very nice solution for taking everything, integrating it together, and linking it all up. 

There seems to be a lot of automation available with our inventory. We have been putting a lot of work into getting our entire infrastructure into Device42 rolled out. However, we have had a lot going on recently because we're going through a merger and acquisition so this has been a bit of a chaotic time. So, we are trying to get everything smoothed out, put in, and figure out. It hasn't been too bad. 

Since we upgraded recently, we are probably using the latest version.

Device42 instantly improved password management because we didn't have a solid solution for that. Upon installing it, I saw that was one of the little hidden gems of functionality for this. Instead of going with a single solution or platform that we weren't interested in for password management, we have that built into this functionality. It covers a lot of bases and hits a lot of points needed for an IT department. Everything is all in one boat and the solution links up to LDAPs. Whereas, if you don't go with them, you may need to get two or three solutions from different companies or providers. 

It has definitely given us an idea of dependency mapping. We have been trying to see what we can do to link all of our applications. This would improve our security posture for auditing into Device42, as we integrate that with Jira, then link all three together. It's still a work in progress, but it's getting there.

• The password management feature
• Data center management and tracking
• Room management
• Application Dependency Mapping
• Automated asset tracking and inventory

Any successful IT department needs to have the functionalities that these features provide, whether through Device42 or through a different support application. The better that they can be supported, the more organized and successful a department will be, especially when an outage/issue comes up. Device42 has everything in one place and links it altogether. This helps when you need to figure out where things are going wrong, where things are happening, or how everything is linked together.

Application Dependency Mapping is in a lot of places scattered through different applications. We are trying to centralize that into Device42. When you first start, you look at things like they are just one application or issue. However, when you can think of it as a dependency map, then you can trace any issue you have back to the source and figure out where the issue is happening and what will be affected when I change this one thing. It has improved our thinking about an IP application or IT system in a sense that everything is linked together and one thing will change another.

The asset discovery is pretty comprehensive and covers everything needed.

The solution provides continuous asset discovery, which is great. If there wasn't continuous discovery, then there would be no way to have devices updated if things changed.

Right now, we have full use of the password management functionality that Device42 provides. The main thing is everyone can login to use it for all their setup. This is the password management under "Secrets".

The solution’s automatic IT asset discovery and inventory functionality functions pretty well. There could be some improvement if there were some automated scripts to get it off the ground. I know it takes a bit of effort to get all of various managed devices into one place. We have to go and change how they are managed and make sure they are all linking up correctly so they can be tracked in Device42. Some type of automated script for each to get over that initial activation. Once everything is in and tracked, it is a very robust solution. By the end of this year, I am looking forward to getting it rolled out and properly set up in our organization.

It gets a bit confusing sometimes when you're trying to map things to a certain spot when you are trying to configure it. The only trouble we have had with it is the initial activation to get started and get things linked in there. 

Approximately six months.

It is pretty stable. I haven't seen any stability issues yet.

Device42 links up to LDAPs. We've had no issues with managing that.

We need one person (an IT business analyst) to maintain and deploy the solution. I currently perform this function and fulfill a lot of different functions for the company. I wear a lot of different hats. I'm one of the more veteran people in the company here. I have a lot of different roles: application administration, application architecture, and account management. All three of those come together to loop in infrastructure, architecture, and administration. All those come together to get this application ready and deployed in our environment to improve our IT posture.

We upgraded in November.

The scalability is very capable. There are a lot of things that you can do with this solution. I'm hoping that as our configuration matures that we can take more advantage of them.

We have 15 users who are segmented into users of the application. There are administrators of the application and super admin accounts for the management of the back-end. We have two super admins, three administrators, and then all of the rest are users.

A big push will be when we build our new data center, then that will be hopefully set from the ground up when we redo our network. The solution is not being used too extensively right now. The infrastructure upgrade network is the main upgrade component. You have to start with the networking in Device42, so I'm hoping it will give us a fresh slate to do everything properly instead of mismatching everything in there. We definitely have plans to use the software fully and to fully utilize all of its functionality. However, we're still in the early phases.

We have had very positive experiences with the technical support. They have been great. We have received so much support from their end that sometimes it may have even been too much. Anytime I'm looking for something, support is coming at us. I even had a little trouble figuring out who I should reach out to when I needed something, but that was clarified recently. There is no lack of support with Device42.

We used different solutions from different platforms. Some of them only fulfilled one specific portion of what Device42 would fulfill. They were coming from all over the place. E.g., we were using Excel spreadsheets and Word documents for some stuff. It was a mess and all over the place.

Our IT lead worked with Device42 in the past. He heavily recommended them so we moved forward with it. There has been a big need for our organization to centralize everything and have a proper change management and inventory system with live updates.

I found the overall process of the initial setup straightforward, but certain parts lacked direction.

The install guide could be a bit better. I ran through it to see where to start. Once I figured it out, we connected with support, figured out where to start, and got a plan together. Now, it's been going smoothly. However, when you first start and install the application, you log in and it's like where's the best place to start? For example, "How do I get from here to everything tracking and linking up?" The answer: It depends on your environment. A segmented approach may be more helpful, which support definitely cleared up.

We are still in the configuration phase. A lot of that is due to the lack of time put into getting this configured. The deployment phase probably took a couple of days. We are still working on the configuration phase. A lot of that is due to our own equipment not being supported anymore. We're in the process of infrastructure upgrades now, which doesn't exactly help.

The implementation strategy is to get it installed, then do whatever initial adoption we could (which was "Secrets"), as we're trying to get our network onto it. As we're going through a network infrastructure upgrade, this is a bit chaotic right now but the goal is to start with the network then flow down towards each specific server and VM that we have. On the opposite spectrum, we want to start with our rooms, then build those out into building our data center and racks, meeting in the middle. We're still in the configuration phase, which has been slow.

We have seen ROI, but we are still in the early phases. We still need a bit more time for the configuration on our end to get our infrastructure ready to be able to be imported and managed properly. 

Our IT lead evaluated this.

There are pros and cons to the solution’s agentless approach to asset discovery. Without agents, the benefit is that you don't have to manage an agent, update it, install it, and go through the application management on it. It's definitely easier from a longevity perspective. The con is that it takes a bit more configuration with higher activation to set up. If there were agents, it might be a bit simpler to deploy.

Something that we are in the early stages of is the solution’s CMDB, ITAM, and DCIM features creating a single source of IT truth in our environment. It is in our roadmap plan and where we hope to see ourselves at the end of our configuration phase.

I have learned is that there are ways for various different types of networking equipment, servers, and systems to all have ways of reporting into an application. The biggest one is SNMP. Finding out that those are not all configured properly leads to a lot of headroom once the application's already in place. I know I have to go back and configure all of our switches to be doing what they should.  The biggest lesson is that there is a lot of preconfiguration with your infrastructure to ensure that it is ready to be imported into Device42 due to the various ways that equipment can be reported.

Look into getting SNMP configured on everything ahead of time. Ensure you have an LDAP ready for use with the products. Definitely keep support in the back of your mind because they have helped a lot as we have gone through our process.

I would rate the solution as an eight point five (out of 10).

Device42 will be the single point of truth for our network, service, and device documentation. The first step is to put all data inside with the goal to discover all things automatically. We do have a few things we must fill in manually. The second step is to use this data and create automation. When we can do this, it will be a big step towards successfully automating our processes overall. Processes can be in connection with the driver ticketing system, the installation of new virtual machines in new containers to grab data automatically to ask the system what is free, determining what we can use, and also automatically returning data to Device42.

We now have nine data centers in Device42. We have data centers in Germany, the US, Singapore, and Australia. 

The company creates software and sells those services. The software send mails, SMSs, and faxes globally. We host everything ourselves. We have security, network, and infrastructure teams, which are all in-house. Nothing is outside in the cloud. We can create everything that we need in short time and easily ourselves.

I am using the latest version.

When all data centers have been added, it will be a success at this time. It is a time saving tool because we can connect all our other tools to Device42, which gives them the advantage to speak with Device42 and the ability to use data in all directions.

Device42 will be our single point of truth, and only Device42. There will be no other tool, no other person, and no other Excel sheet; it will be only Device42.

A big plus for Device42 was the auto-discovery. With it, we have updated devices, updated systems, and up-to-date systems. 

The auto-discovery and API are big values for us. We like these features because:

• They make requests easy against the Device42 system. 
• They are an open standard that we can use for all our other systems, connecting to all our other systems. 

The solution’s automatic IT asset discovery and inventory functionality is a great feature. It was a great idea to create this functionality because we have thousands of systems. To do this manually, it's really a pain.

I tried in the beginning to use the agentless discovery. I had a few problems. There was an employee before me who started with Device42 in 2018. I came to the company in Summer 2019 and was the new tool owner. We had some problems with the agentless, so we switched to the agent discovery. We have a big Linux environment with a lot of Linux services. All Linux services are orchestrated. Therefore, I had no problems rolling out the agent approach to 2,000 to 3,000 machines. The scheduled task for the control for the agent I can create this in a few minutes with the orchestration.

I have a feature requests for the UI to sort numbers or estimates.

When servers have two network adapters, automatically discovered will be only one network card because the other one is a backup. Device42 has some problems to find the other connection. I have open some tickets for this.

For some of the network devices, the auto-discovery could be a bit improved. Some switchboards for some devices have problems to receive their connections automatically, and support names are sometimes incorrect. These are only for special network devices when we have a clustered network device.

I have been using Device42 since last summer (2019).

The stability is great. No problems overall with it.

We have a lot of devices with a modern database architecture. It does not have a problem handling our data. 

Many people from my company are now working with Device42. They switched over from the old tool to Device42. There are about 300 people working at the company.

The whole technical department is using Device42 (120 users). Technical department, at our company, means we have infrastructure, network, application management, and application support teams along with an internal IT department. Even development uses this tool to see devices and clusters.

I'm often in contact with the support team, as I have a few ideas about feature requests or fixing thing. If I do find a few mistake or problems in the tool, then I speak with the support team.

It's good support. I like it. They answer quickly, but sometimes you can feel the support does not know the solution. The roadmap from the development is now cloud-based, which is a big thing. The development is going to cloud and cloud discovery, but some of the basics are not working perfectly and development has no time to fix them. It would be great if they could fix these basics, then concentrate on bigger, newer things, such as, the cloud, container discovery, and database discovery. They need to fix these basics, but overall, I'm happy with the support.

Our tool before was Rectangles, which is an open source tool. The usability is a bit old but people like to work with it. However, everything in this tool is created manually. To create all devices manually, it's a big pain. To update everything is another big pain. In a big environment, it is not possible to use. With the auto-discovery of Device42, we are nearly up-to-date with all our systems.

I have also used another tool that was written by an application developer inside the company. It contained some special reports and other things.

In our solution, configuration was easy because we can automate this configuration over all the servers in the world and roll out the configuration in the agent. It's done in a few minutes.

For a very small installation with a few devices inside, the tool is too big. If you have a few different devices and are using cloud virtualization and cloud applications, then it's a good tool. Though, it is not specifically for this. It is a good quality tool, which is easy to manage.

One person is needed for deployment and maintenance. 

We have not yet seen ROI.

The solution has not reduced the time spent managing IT assets. I must first add all data centers in the tool. I'm not finished yet. But in the end, it will reduce time for the company as a whole.

On a yearly basis, our licensing is $10,000. However, our license is now nearly full with devices. We need the next bigger license with 5,000 devices, which will cost us $19,000. We pay for a set of licenses, a maximum number of devices, and a maximum number of IP addresses. We have the smallest amount of features, which is enough for us at this time. E.g., we don't need application discovery, but possibly in the future, it will be a good thing.

We evaluated a few other tools, even open source tools. Big pluses for Device42 were the price was clear and the features received. 

The problem with using other vendor, like BMC, is the pricing. The price is so horrible and nobody wants to pay this money.

Overall, I am happy with tool because we have a big infrastructure across the world with a lot of different devices. We have a lot of service, virtualization, hardware machines, and network devices. You can't find a perfect tool for all devices in this world. You must find something in the middle, and Device42 is a good tool for this. 

The agentless approach is a good feature. It didn't work for me. I was happier with the agent, as I had immediate good results. 

There are only a few people still manually creating tools because we have no option for these specialty devices. For these specialty devices, we not need automatically update them because these devices are aesthetic. It's only a few devices, so administrators for these devices do this work manually.

The solution doesn't affect our environment or security.

Compared to other tools, I would rate this solution as a seven point five (out of 10).