Device42 Reviews

We have a pretty unique use case, one that isn't used by a lot of companies. We have Azure, AWS, as well as Google Compute Engine in the cloud. We want to have all of those in one central station. That's why we're using Device42, so that it can track all of our IPAM in one place.

We have it on-prem in our data center.

The fact that the solution provides continuous asset discovery is key to our operation because we treat our instances like cattle, not pets. If something breaks in the build or along any step of the way, or something just stops responding, normally we just shoot it and spin another one up. So we have to have something that notices that something remotely changed, and that can then pull that back into the records inside of Device42.

The solution's CMDB, ITAM, and DCIM features absolutely create a single source of IT truth in our environment. That's why we use Device42; because that is what we have to have. When I worked at Bluehost, we were using Act! tables and they were really painful to use as a source of truth because they were never kept up to date. Device42 is much easier to keep up to date. And because of the way it works, and the reports that it has, we all trust it as our IP address management tool. It's the best IPAM tool out there.

And deployment of the solution has definitely increased our security posture because you can only secure what you know about. If you don't know about it, you can't make sure that it's secure.

The discovery is the most valuable feature. Device42 has remote connectors that will go out and look for the changes. You can run Nmap. You can do one-way DNS zone syncs and that's pretty important. Those are the things that are really quite strong for Device42 to report back on your infrastructure.

The solution's automatic IT asset discovery and inventory functionality are top-notch. The thing I like is that it's open-source. If I need to change them — and they've given me links on GitHub to have them — I can go and change them to pull exactly what I want, as frequently as I want. 

Also, I can show this to CEOs, and they understand it. So the front-end is awesome. 

Once you get the reports done

• the monthly device add-on trends are awesome
• the changes are awesome
• the IP statistics, device statistics, and your building's statistics are all really good.

A con for Device42 is that Kubernetes integration is lacking. You pay for 10,000 spot licenses and if you're spinning up a Kubernetes cluster, or four or five or six Kubernetes clusters like we do, you're going to have 5,000 or 6,000 nodes in each of those, doing different types of business things. And those don't flow in and out. Yes, you can purge them — they do have a purge function — but the way that that works for security purposes leaves a little bit to be desired. I want to keep track of those for a security solution. If there were a compromise, it would be nice to have that rather than have it taking up some of your spots. Something that's missing is Kubernetes-based statistics so you can get a peek inside your clusters there.

Also, the reports are a little clunky, they could be better.

Finally, the comprehensiveness of the asset discovery is not perfect, but that's part of it being open-source. The scalability, the time that it takes to get things inside, could be faster.

I've been using Device42 for about seven years. At Bluehost, a company I used to work for ages ago, we brought it in and I started using it there. It was in one of its earlier releases. We were buying other companies and that's when I started using Device42.

It's very stable. We've never had a problem with Device42, and we've used it quite heavily.

Nmap is the de facto standard. But Nmap is still slow. If you wanted to look at 10,000 different IP addresses and get a little bit of information from each of them, it would take a little while, unless you multi-fitted them. There's a new tool out called Masscan. I've taken it and written a middleware so that the Device42 stuff uses Masscan now. That would be something that would really help Device42 scale much faster, in the discovery-specific portion of its tool.

For what we're doing, the scalability hasn't been an issue. We knew a lot of people were going to be using it. We have people from all over the world — from three different places in India, seven different places in the United States, and a bunch of people in the European Union —  working on this at the same time, 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

The technical support is fantastic. We wanted to bring in a whole bunch of information from NetBox. We wanted to basically seed Device42 from the information we kept in NetBox, and they made that very easy. It was very helpful.

We used NetBox. We switched to Device42 because it's better.

Device42 is not that expensive. To have something that has all of our IP address scheme in there, something that is up to date and current, is a huge ROI for our organization. The ROI is very high.

At Device42 they were really kind. We were working through the licensing agreements this year and they said, "Hey, we'll open this up for you if you'll give us your feedback." They're willing to make something work, and they are working on a solution that will work better for people who are using Kubernetes.

We follow the Kubernetes lifecycle. Every quarter they release a new one, and then end-of-life every six months. Our development is a little bit ahead of that, so we're testing things, bringing them up, spinning them down, for QA. And that uses quite a bit of address space, so the licensing thing is my only, "Hey, guys, you're not super-hot on the licensing."

I've used NetBox, MyIP, and RackTables. I've used quite a bunch of these other tools out there, and honestly, Device42 is the best. The others don't compare to it. It is so much better.

I, myself, and people in roles up to the VP, looked at a whole bunch of options, ones that they've used in the past. Together, we came to the conclusion that, for pretty much any commercial company — and this is really the takeaway — that would rather focus on making money than spending a whole bunch of time fiddling with different databases, different underlying hardware; any company that wants an app that will get up and running, the very best thing to do is to get Device42.

Just choose Device42 first.

Device42 hasn't reduced the time spent managing IT assets in our company because it has given us a better look at all the assets. It has created some work for us. But once we're done with all that work, I think it will go down.

I give it a solid nine out of 10. If it had a way to better work with Kubernetes and the pricing was different, it would be a 10.

Our goal for using the product is to be able to migrate apps to the cloud successfully. E.g., you can't move something if you don't know all the dependencies or all the bits and pieces that need to go with it. If you move something and forget, "Because it talks to this database," and no one realized, then it's going to fail. You will have downtime and have to move everything back. App dependency is the biggest part for us right now. That is the immediate need. 

I have been focused exclusively on bringing in data, connecting it and making sure all the servers and network devices are being scanned. I haven't spent any time trying to figure out how to get data out.

We are on the newest version of the next-gen line.

I know they're using Device42 to prep for moving stuff to the cloud. I'm not aware if they've used that data to move an app to the cloud yet. I think we are still learning the product and figuring how to get the data out so we can get the right reports, giving us the information we need.

I like the solution’s agentless approach to asset discovery because the IT and OS teams don't want to go install and maintain an agent on their systems. It's just more overhead when they have to do something like that and make sure there's enough space on the server. It's nice that it's agentless, as it will go out and connect, then do its thing.

It is not about the app affecting our security. Instead, it is about how the app will change to adapt to our security, which is very tight. Security was discussed from the very beginning and all the way through. However, we didn't change for the app. The way we deployed the app, it had to change to fit our security.

The most valuable feature would be the scanning stuff: the discovery. It has a lot of different hardware that it can talk to, providing a lot of good information. The way the solution’s automatic IT asset discovery and inventory functionality works is you set up a discovery job, then you can schedule it to run. I schedule all of the runs daily at different times so nothing is interfering with anything else. It's nice to know that you can set up the scan, schedule it, and sit back. You can check them every day and make sure everything ran, making sure nothing had errors, then you're good to go. Anything new is going to automatically be discovered, which is nice. It takes some of the stress off because you don't have to know, "If this team opened new servers, we need make sure now it will automatically pick them up." It is one less thing to worry about. It gathers a lot of data points.

We use the solution’s Application Dependency Mapping. It was the biggest reason that we went with Device42. I've seen some eyes open in surprise, for example, "Whoa, I didn't realize this talked to so many things." It's really eyeopening. This is the whole point of app dependencies. Sometimes, you're not able to take a step back, look at the big picture, and go, "Wow, things talk to other things a lot more than we thought they did."

Since I was focused on deploying connectors and getting all the servers to be scanned, one of the biggest pains was when a job would fail, then the output (logging) was poor. For example, "Why did it fail?" In these cases, you get a generic error. It doesn't point you in the right direction and tell you why you got the error, which is really annoying. There have been times I asked, "Is there somewhere I can see a better log as to why is this failing?" That would be a really nice improvement.

I was brought onto the project five months ago.

For an enterprise solution, it seems pretty stable most of the time. The discovery scans just work. When they don't, it's sometimes difficult to figure out why. We have had the odd occasional issue or two, which I don't know if it was just our environment or due to instability in the app, like a remote scanner suddenly becoming corrupt to where I had to remove the scanning software from the computer and reinstall it before it would work. Twice that happened, and I had to call support. When you go in and tell a piece of software to uninstall, and it's like, "Error, couldn't complete." Okay, that tells me nothing. Then I call support who has to send me a special script that cleans things up in the background. Finally, it will let me do things in the normal way that you're supposed to do them. This is something that they have some things to work on.

It is scalable, though it all depends on the size of the database. If that grows, you have more room to read in more devices.

We are looking at some long-term goals of other teams using it. We are looking at having the network team map out everything, then letting them have access to go in and look at all their inventory. However, for now, we have started the push to the cloud, which is about mapping all the dependencies into the topology of the network, such as what talks to what ports so nothing gets left behind, firewalls, dependencies, etc. This is all flushed out ahead of time.

Device42 is currently hitting about half of our environment/LOBs, which is approximately 4000 servers. From what I've heard, there are plans to extend it to the rest.

There are two to three system admins who I have handed the project over to for day-to-day operations. The project that I was on, which was on hold, has picked back up, so I'm on it full-time. Therefore, I have been training other people to take over Device42. Right now, I'm in more of a training role than an active user of it.

The two times that I had to contact the technical support when the machine went corrupt, they were helpful. They sent me a script with a nice email telling me how to use it. I got on the phone with them just to make sure everything was going correctly. We have no issues with them.

Previously, it was just a black hole. People guessing they knew what talked to what. There was no centralized tool for bringing it altogether.

We primarily chose to go with Device42 because we needed to know our application dependencies before moving to the cloud. We didn't want to rely on individual teams, like the network team, to say, "We have this diagram, app, or program that we use." We needed somewhere where we could see it. We also needed all the different parts to come together to see what's going on.

I took over the solution because a project that I was working on was put on hold. They handed this solution to me after the initial setup was done, and I ran with it from there.

The deployment is easy. I did it myself. You don't need a lot for this application. I handed it off to two or three people because they also are doing other things. This way, they can share the load. Once you get everything set up, it just runs. It is not like it needs a whole lot of constant handholding.

For deployment, you need to roll out the servers, install the software on them, and get the firewalls opened up. Each company will be different on how long stuff like this takes. You could have something up and scanning servers in a couple of weeks.

The deployment strategy that we used was hitting environments that needed to be moved to the cloud first. Once that is done, then they will to start expanding into other areas.

Be careful who you partner with. We partnered with a third-party to come in and help us set everything up. The first technician that they gave us did not know what he was doing. Every time I would ask about something, he would say, "Oh, this looks different. They changed that from an older version." He didn't seem to know the current version. He was stuck in the past. Finally, we got a different guy who knew what he was talking about. So, it stunted our growth in the beginning.

The second guy comes along, and he's like, "App dependency wasn't even checked in the scans," because we weren't told to. We didn't know that we needed that checked to get what we needed until we talked to the new guy. We were like, "This has been useless so far," because this one checkbox alone is essential to what we want to get out of it. He had several suggestions on tweaks to the scans, etc. 

If you're going to partner with a company to come in who are supposedly experts to help you set up and configure it, pay close attention because there are a lot of things about the app to learn. You need to know exactly what you want out of the app so they can help you figure out how to get it.

It has not had an impact on our managing of assets yet, as we are still in the learning phase.

I believe that they evaluated one or two other options.

The environment is a lot more complicated than I thought. It is like, "Wow, there are so many more servers, devices, and things talking to things." I have been in corporate enterprise environments for many years now, and this is the point of the app. I never really stopped to look at the big picture: "Wow, the environment is really complex." It's an eye-opener and makes you think about things differently. E.g., when you make a change to one thing, it helps you understand all the different things that could or could not be impacted. If you think small, then, "I will make this change to this one server." But, if you step back, you realize, "That's part of this, which is part of that. These things are all connected." It's like the butterfly effect: One thing will affect another, and another, and another.

There is an enterprise architect who is focused on getting information out of Device42:

• The right reports
• All the app dependencies
• The data that we need to help us get stuff to the cloud.

We are not using the solution’s CMDB, ITAM, and DCIM features.

If you know what to put into the app to get out what you need, then it can do it. I would give it an eight (out of 10).

In the beginning, we were looking to use it as an IPAM device but we saw all the benefits in having control of the assets, the racks, and how the physical servers are connected to the switches. We set up our data center with all the racks inside and all the devices inside the racks. 

So at first, we used it for IPAM, but after that we constructed the building with the rooms and the racks. So IT inventory is the second purpose of this tool. We use it to track how VLANs and our different virtual devices are connected and to inventory VMware and Xen virtual machines. 

But the main purpose is IPAM and inventory of the physical devices. In the case of networking devices, we are using SNMP, and with virtual devices we use an administrator-user to check different aspects of the ESXi in VMware.

The solution itself is a virtual machine over a SAN server and it's running in our data center.

We were working with Excel sheets and they were not automatic and were difficult to administrate and update. It required manual work every time we needed to add new hardware or new virtuals. With the automatic discovery in the tool, we have been able to leave these Excel sheets behind.

The continuous asset discovery is great. For example, a few months ago we installed new racks with new servers and, with automatic discovery, all the new racks are showing inside the tool. The people who have a password to get into the tool can check what kind of hardware was installed and how many virtual machines are inside the servers. That's great.

The solution's CMDB, ITAM, and DCIM features create a single source of IT truth in our environment. For us this has had a very good impact. It's easier for our managers and others who consume this tool. We can show to the rest of the teams how things have become more visible throughout the company.

Device42 has also saved us a lot of time, not necessarily in managing the devices but in collecting the devices. And with the inventory tool, we discovered that we have a lot of old things configured in the devices. That saved us a lot of time because, for example, we had old VLANs around that had been forgotten. With the tool, we can discover which devices have old configurations and we can remote to them and remove these configurations. If we didn't have the tool, we might have to go into each, device by device, numbering in the hundreds or thousands of devices, and check if they have this configuration in them. But with the Device42, we have this information in a few minutes. A task that might take two or three hours a day can be achieved in 40 minutes.

In security, we can check specific things that have to be configured in devices. While the security team is not 100 percent involved in the project, they have started to use the tool to check different security things on the networking devices. With the inventory check, they can see if a specific configuration in various routers has already been configured.

The most valuable feature is the part that enables us to draw or build our rack and represent all the devices and interactively click on a physical device to "see" inside it. We can see the virtual machines inside a given server and all the details about them, with the storage connected to them, etc. From a global, data center perspective, you can see the rack and you can click and see all the virtuals running inside. That's a cool thing.

Overall, the automatic IT asset discovery is very comprehensive.

The solution's agentless approach to asset discovery is very important for us because installing agents on physical or virtual devices is not easy in our company. We have to escalate these kinds of things to different levels of security. Not having to install agents makes it easy for us.

While the automatic IT asset discovery is great, the first time using it can be confusing when you are configuring the SNMP. I don't remember for sure but I don't think it said "SNMP community," it said "password". The first time I used it I was thinking about communities but the tool said "password," and when you say "password" in SNMP you are thinking about SNMP version 3. This is the only thing that is confusing, although there were some devices that were not included in the discovery.

If we count the PoC time, we have been using it for about one year.

For us, it's very stable.

There were some problems at the beginning because the Xen server was not supported. We started with VMware, but we were migrating from that where to Xen. But the problem lasted for two days and then we fixed it quickly.

We haven't reached the solution's limits. The solution's collectors give it very good scalability because you can separate the manager from the collectors.

We continue to check its capabilities. We plan to expand to another, small data center, a location with, say, 10 racks, with a rack dedicated to communications — such as a firewall, router, and switches — and the rest of the racks for servers. Expansion depends on the plans of our regional offices in other countries. The idea is to test if we can install info-collectors in these offices to give us information about their assets. We are planning these kinds of projects. Maybe we can expand our usage in this way.

Technical support is very good. The support person we talked with was very kind. For example, we opened a ticket for a specific case and the support person who took the case explained more than we asked about. That was good.

The setup was easy. We are used to using these kinds of tools — not specifically inventory or IPAM tools — but we have installations of solutions that collect things and give us information. So for us it was very easy.

The PoC was ready within one week, where the data was in the system and we got information from it. In production it has taken more time because we have different kinds of devices and every device or every brand requires a new configuration. For example, HPE enclosure devices take a lot of time to configure, although VMware was easy to configure as were network devices. But when you move to a new brand you may have more complex tasks to do.

When we did the PoC, we focused on it as an IPAM solution. In the PoC we saw the benefits of the hardware inventory. So we changed plans in the middle of the PoC. When we focused on IPAM at the beginning, everything looked fine, it was quick. But when we saw that the inventory is available in this tool we moved the PoC toward the hardware inventory. So the deployment took more time than we planned because of the change of plan.

We did it ourselves.

We have seen ROI because it saves us a lot of time, and time is money.

For our budget it's okay. It's not an expensive tool, although we are not used to paying for software because we are using a lot of open-source software. But within our networking budget, we needed an IPAM and it was easy for us to justify this kind of tool, given its cost.

We evaluated KiwiTech, but only for IPAM. We also checked out some free tools.

The main advantage of Device42 was the ability to have IPAM and another solution in the same tool. The rest of the vendors had different tools for different purposes. There were different KiwiTech tools for IPAM and for hardware inventory. It's not easy to administrate four or five tools. It's easier to administrate only one tool. This was an important advantage for us. Also, the discovery process was very easy with Device42 and more complex in the other tools.

Test it. You may discover that tools that you hadn't thought about. As I said, we tested it only for the IPAM, but we saw that we also needed the hardware inventory. If you do a PoC, you may discover that you need other features that are part of Device42.

The biggest lesson I have learned from using this solution is to stop using Excel sheets. That was number-one. And the visibility that we have made available with Device42, to the rest of our company, has had a very positive impact on our team.

In terms of the automated asset discovery, we have had to configure and customize some things because, for us, some aspects of the virtual machines and the physical devices are important and these were not reflected in the inventory. Since then, everything has looked good. We achieved visibility of all the parts that we need to see.

There are five administrators using Device42 in our company. These five participated in the development of the solution in our company from the beginning and they maintain it. There are also three networking guys, two sysadmin guys, and the rest of the technical area's team members are users, including security and security compliance users.

I would rate Device42 at seven out of 10 because we need to fix it to find the devices that are not discovered.

We mainly use it to keep an inventory of everything, because we've got 77 offices and data centers globally. We use it mainly to keep track of assets we have in cabinets and the like. Also, some of the other teams use it for the auto-discovery and license renewals. Device42 tells you when a license is about to expire on a server. 

I'm sure there are a lot more uses but because I work in data center management, and from my side we mainly use it just for inventory. We're aware of exactly what we have, where it is, whether it's powered on it, whether it's in service, etc.

Before Device42, the company didn't have any kind of asset management software at all. So if there were to be a fire in an office, for example, and we would want to make a claim on insurance, we would have had no idea what, exactly, we had in that office. Now that we have Device42, we're integrating every single office into it so we know exactly what's where. That's a huge improvement.

It has also reduced the amount of time spent on managing our IT assets. It has probably halved the time it takes to do the management side of it.

I think the auto-discovery is very good. It works well. I don't use it too much myself, but from the feedback I get from other teams — they use it a lot — it seems to work really well. From what I understand it's very comprehensive because it picks up everything: all the IP address ranges and locations, as long as we've input the devices correctly. It is very comprehensive and picks up a lot of stuff.

Also, the continuous asset discovery is good because it means not having to manually input all the small data, such as IP addresses, leases, etc. It helps and saves us a lot of time.

The DCIM makes everything easier. If we need to do something remotely, or if we need to get an engineer out to a comms room somewhere, we can tell them exactly where it is, what it's called, and what's patched into it. It ensures that people don't make mistakes.

The overall speed could be improved. Sometimes it's very slow to do certain functions. General navigation is quick but if I want to delete an asset from a cabinet it does take a while. And if I'm doing it in bulk — say, for example, if we have one cabinet that has 20 servers in — if I want to remove all 20 servers, I have to do them individually, which is a bit time-consuming. If there were a way that I could just bulk-remove everything from there, that would definitely save some time.

Also, I know there is a function where you can add cables in Device42, as in you can say: So-and-so port on this server is connected to this port on that server, for example. But that's quite a drawn-out process, trying to use the spreadsheet just to add a single cable. I think that could be simplified a lot. You could just have a column for the device name, the port, and the end-device port. If it could be populated that way it would be a lot easier. At the moment, the spreadsheet that you have to use to add cables has a whole bunch of columns which I think are irrelevant and shouldn't be there.

I've been using Device42 for about 18 months now.

The stability is good. There have been a couple of times where it's been down for maintenance, but it's never down for too long. 

I believe Device42 has some software where it clears out old or redundant stuff after a while. We've had it happen that things we put into cabinets have suddenly disappeared. However, I'm not sure if this is actually a Device42 issue. It might be somebody on our end doing something wrong.

From what I understand, it's very scalable. It's very easy to scale up on it as well. But it's more the app team that would know that kind of stuff. I deal more with the DCIM stuff.

It's being used very extensively in our company. As I said, we've got 77 offices globally and about half of them have been populated fully in Device42. The rest still need to be audited, so we are going to be increasing the usage of it. It just takes a bit of time.

Technical support is excellent. I've used it a couple of times and it is really good. They always reply very quickly and they always give you a very simple way of doing what it is you need to. I would give technical support a 10 out of 10.

We have seen ROI with Device42. It might not be easy to see but, for example, when we have had stuff go down we now know exactly where it is so we can fix it a lot quicker. Before, we might not necessarily have known and would have had to do a lot more searching. There's definitely a return on investment in that sense, but I can't really put a monetary value on it.

Before Device42 we trialed dcTrack for a little bit, but it was over-complicated in terms of usability. You would really need to do a training course on how to use it properly, whereas Device42 is a lot more user-friendly. So we ended up going with Device42 because a lot of people in the company do you use it. It's not like it's a select few people. Most people have access to it: the server teams, the network teams.

Device42 is user-friendly in terms of navigating through all the pages. Everything's very simple. If we want to find out, for example, what we have in a comms room in Bahrain, we just click on the Buildings tab, scroll down to Bahrain, and it will have the comms room on there. We can then have a look. Whereas with dcTrack, doing that was a lot more complex.

Be very thorough with it. Make sure you put in everything you need to put in and make sure the auto-discover function works properly.

The biggest lesson I've learned from using Device42 is the importance of keeping it up to date and taking out redundant stuff. Especially with the auto-discover, if I've decommissioned something but not taken it out of Device42, the auto-discover will still think something is there and that creates a bit of a problem for us internally.

In my department, there are only two of us in data center management. But the whole network team use Device42, as do the whole server team, as well as security and the app team. Company-wide, some 150 to 200 people have access to it. I'm not sure how many of them actually use it often; probably about half that number. 

In terms of updates — as in if we get new assets coming in or coming out — that's mainly my thing. In terms of the monitoring side of it, that would be the network team. They use SolarWinds, which is linked and will alert them if any device has gone down and that is linked to Device42.

Also, any time we do an audit of IT assets, the results are updated in Device42. We try to maintain a complete record of exactly what we have, although that's proving a bit difficult in certain offices which are harder to get to. We have offices in places like Ecuador and Chile and we're having to rely on people onsite, but there isn't always an IT presence there. We're having to rely on general office staff to try and give us an audit of what's in there. So from our side it might not be fully comprehensive.

I would rate it at eight out of 10. It's very good but it's not perfect. Nothing is. I'd probably give it a ten if it were quicker at doing certain things or if certain functions were more simplified. But it's a very good product.

We use it for asset tracking, cabinet modeling, data center modeling, and we use it for asset disposition and to keep track of our spare parts.

It makes it easier for anyone to find an asset in a cabinet and it makes it easier for me to figure out if I have room and/or power in a cabinet to rack servers.

It has also reduced the time spent managing our IT assets by a good 40 to 50 percent. We have also used the solution in conjunction with audits of our IT assets and, in that context, it saves a lot of time when everything's right there at your fingertips. I would estimate that it saves 50 to 60 percent, in terms of time, when doing audits.

The most valuable part is the ease of use. There's no training involved. It's pretty simple and straightforward.

I also like the inventory functionality. I don't know that we're using it exactly how it's made to be used, but it works for us.

The asset discovery goes out and finds new devices and puts them under Unknown Devices, and then we go in and have to fix it and change it to what it is. It works really well. The fact that it's continuous is convenient. We don't have to worry about it. It just works.

My biggest problem with the product is the upgrades. First, we have to do them manually and second, not this last time but the time before that, we actually had to build a new VM to deploy the solution again. We had to back it up and then restore it to the new version. That was inconvenient.

I would also like the ability to bulk-delete. The application is great, for the most part. There are just a few little bugs and quirks that are annoying to me.

I've been using Device42 for almost five years.

I have no complaints. It's still working.

My boss loves the fact that he can run API commands and get information that way. He's a huge API-guy, so he loves it.

I've used Device42's technical support. It's okay.

They had something called Rack Monkey. It was the most trivial program I've ever seen so that's why we looked for something else.

In the beginning, I didn't really know a whole lot about it, so it was a little complex. But once I got a good understanding, it was very intuitive.

We were up and running within a couple of days and when I reached out for some assistance, Raj Jalan actually called me. He's the CEO of the company and it was really nice to get that kind of support.

Our implementation strategy was to get it up and running as fast as possible.

I deployed it myself and there are two of us who maintain it. One guy on the network team does all of the discovery stuff and I'm a senior infrastructure engineer.

I would think we have seen ROI with Device42. It saves us time every day when we need to look up stuff. I can't put a price tag on it but it's very useful.

We evaluated other options but that was quite some time ago. We chose Device42 for its ease of use and quick stand-up.

My advice would be "do it." It worked for us. Made my life easy.

You get what you pay for. It's a good product and I enjoy it and we don't mind paying for it.

I, myself, don't use the IP discovery a whole lot. One of the guys from our network team uses that. I know it helps them a lot. Similarly, with the Application Dependency Mapping, I know my boss has looked at it a couple times. I can't really say that we use it, but it's there. It's a great function that gives us a very good view of our network.

There are 2,500 to 3,000 users who have access to it. They're mostly just adding and updating inventory. When they deploy a new server they go in and give it a name and add stuff into it.

As far as I know, we don't have any plans to change things. Device42 is our solution.

Device42 uses your infrastructure discovery and network device discovery to get information about your infrastructure CMDB. It uses this when you are migrating your on-prem servers to the cloud or VMware Cloud to public cloud. For our purposes, customers use it to discover their infrastructure, services, applications, features of those servers, CPU, memory, and RAM. All these details can be discovered in their infrastructure using Device42. Then, you can easily migrate to the cloud. 

We have used the solution in conjunction with our clients’ migration to the cloud. The view it provides of assets and application dependencies assists in getting things to work post migration because of Application Dependency Mapping. We can easily migrate the business and infrastructure applications, thus determining the other applications it is dependent on. This way we can easily predict how to migrate and the things that need to be done while migrating.

We provide support for Device42 as a managed service provider. Currently, I have two customers: one is on Azure and the other is on VMware.

I am using the latest version. 

It is good tool for our customers if they want to go into the details of their infrastructure for migrating their on-prem environment to the cloud.

Device42 provides almost all the details of your infrastructure. Its reporting is very good. It has reports that you can fetch easily and are easily readable. There are a few scripts that you can also use for downloading reports in different formats.

It requires only two or three ports to be open while doing discovery. Therefore, you can have an environment which can be installed in a DMZ environment or on the customer's environment. It won't affect the security or customer's infrastructure.

Continuous asset discovery lets you continuously monitor the resource utilization when using Device42, such as: 

• Resources being used on your infrastructure. 
• If there are new communications happening on your servers, then they are being captured in Device42. 
• If there are any changes in your CMDB infrastructure, they are getting captured in your Device42 reports. 

You can download also these reports with a ServiceNow and other tools.

• Device42 is very easy to install.
• It has lighter graphics. The graphics are easily loadable.
• The front-end is good and user-friendly. 
• It provides network device discovery and Application Dependency Mapping.
• It has agentless discovery; you don't need to put agents on your servers. You can open one or two ports to discover all your infrastructure.
• It has a Remote Collector facility where you can use that facility to discover your DMZ environment as well as your load balancers and domain appliances.
• It provides inbound and outbound connections for your servers.
• Application Dependency Mapping helps us understand on which servers are our applications dependent and what things affect our application.

For the iPhone, the device diagram cannot be downloaded. You have to go to each device and download the device diagram for that device. E.g., suppose there are a 1000 or 2000 servers. You cannot go to each server or device to download a device diagram for each device. There should be a one-click solution for downloading all device diagrams.

I have been using Device42 for two and a half years.

It is quite a stable solution. You can have 4 CPU or RAM for your appliance. You can also configure more CPU and RAM for your appliance if you want to discover more servers.

They have frequent updates, though sometimes you need to get Device42 updated to fix bugs.

Right now, we have two or three technical service engineers managing Device42.

The scalability is good. Depending on the number of servers that you want to restore, you can scale up or down. You can have one or multiple Remote Collectors for more stability and load balancing.

We have three different customers using Device42, and I have supported seven to eight customers until now. One of our customers, they are doing their plans in waves: wave one, two, and three. In wave one, they managed to discover almost 500 servers. In their second wave, they helped manage 400 servers. In wave three, they are now managing 500 to 600 servers.

It has very good, prompt support.

It is very easy to setup Device42. 

I have setup it 600 to 700 times. 

On average, the deployment requires only four to five hours. However, the requirements gathering that we need to forward to customers to follow their change process to open all ports may take two to three days.

There is no implementation strategy because it depends on customer. A few customers helped us and others deployed it by themselves. In these cases, we provide the documents, then the deploy it themselves. So, it depends on the customer.

The solution has reduced the time spent managing IT assets.

Customers are happy with the solution. They can easily deploy this solution for cost-effectiveness.

The product cost is low. It is quite cheap.

We also evaluated Microsoft Mover, but it was not approved by our management.

I haven't used another solution with customers.

It is a very good tool. It is very easy to use for migrating an on-premise to cloud. The tool is user-friendly, easy to understand, and flexible. It has good support. It is the least expensive. This is all beneficial.

I would rate the product as a nine (out of 10).

We wanted a rich database of all of our assets and multiple teams were keeping different Excel spreadsheets, etc. About two years ago, a consulting firm recommended Device42. We took a look at it and have been using it ever since. We collapsed a lot of information into it, then week by week more teams adopt it.

We are using the latest version that they have out right now.

Having general software inventory in one location has helped us tremendously, even around Service Desk. Our Service Desk tool integrates into the asset management. When a user calls with a problem, we can link their device to it. Then we see a history: 

• Do they have old, aging hardware?
• Does it need to be replaced?
• Is this model continuing calling in for issues?

We have been able to make educated decisions about replacing hardware and software due to this solution.

We are doing discovery of cloud asset management devices. This has given us more rich enhanced data to make decisions on where to place things based on like-minded services.

I have used the solution in conjunction with audits of our IT assets. I am able to pull reports in minutes instead of it taking days of putting everything together.

It has helped us identify some areas of security enhancements.

The asset inventory and software inventory are the most valuable features. The asset inventory is great because previously we had devices all over the place. We have been able to do multiscans to find devices that we didn't know about, which was great. From the software aspect, we have been able to keep a detailed history of software that has been installed on machines and version controls. Then, we are able to make educated decisions on, "Is this software being installed as a one-off and part of the corporate image or should it be deprecated as the software gets older where we plan to do upgrades this way?"

The solution’s automatic IT asset discovery and inventory functionality was great when we first implemented it. We made some changes that didn't allow us to use some of those automated discovery tools. However, the software was good and adapted to our needs. We just went in a different way using the same software. The asset discovery is very comprehensive. We found a lot of information that we didn't even know we had.

We use the solution’s Application Dependency Mapping. It has been able to help us with troubleshooting. We now have a deeper understanding of how our applications talk to each other.

It would be nice for the agent to have an installer versus a single file across multiple systems.

It'd be nice to have the reporting be a bit more user-friendly. The workflow could be a bit more intuitive. Though, the support has been great on helping us when we have ran into educational issues.

About two years.

It is very stable and updated on a regular basis with new enhancements and features using a very agile approach. Every week, we can get a feature in the pipeline that we/they have needed.

We require two people for deployment and maintenance for Device42: a network administrator and a dedicated system admin.

It is very scalable and have had no issues. We are running the device across multiple divisions, organizations, and regions across the globe. Device42 is everywhere in our company. There are 30 to 40 users, e.g., help desk administrators and auditors. We will potentially be using it for vendor management down the road. Also, the DevOps teams is using it for information.

In the beginning, the solution did not reduce the time spent managing IT assets since we didn't do any management. There was a lot of turnover of teams with every team doing it differently. Therefore, we had to focus a lot on it. Now, it's part of the day-to-day management.

We previously used Excel spreadsheets.

I took over the solution last year. I set up the whole thing up again from the ground up at that time. The setup was straightforward. The documentation was there. You just followed a few steps to get it up and running.

When we redeployed, it took approximately a week. It took a half a day worth of build, then a week to discover all our assets.

Our implementation strategy in the beginning was to start with each office and redefine what their needs looked like, then scan each network which had devices on it.

As we have grown the system, less time has been focused on managing managing IT assets. We don't need dedicated teams to do this anymore. We have been able to reduce this role to a shared resource across multiple teams.

We have seen ROI. We have been able to streamline multiple teams having different options on how to do asset management and doing different things into one process for every team.

Our licensing costs are on a yearly basis.

You should definitely implement this product. In a normal environment, it is a set and forget it type of thing.

In the beginning, the solution’s agentless approach to asset discovery was very impressive because we heavily utilized it. However, as we made decisions on the network to not trust any device unless it was on VPN, agentless didn't work for us. They had a solution that was good for us, so we were able to pivot to an agent getting that same deep, rich information. In some areas, we do run it agentless. It's just more often we are relying on the agent because of our own infrastructure changes.

Asset management is a difficult, time consuming thing. However, Device42 has helped me streamline that so I can focus on other areas that need improvement.

I would rate this product as a 10 (out of 10).

Our primary use case is to track all of our IT information in one spot. So instead of using spreadsheets and other tools, it's consolidated here for us.

We had all the information in a mix of spreadsheets, homegrown applications, and databases, and then we moved it all into Device42. For example, we had one system that was tracking our device inventory, and we had spreadsheets for IP address allocations, while password management was completely separate. This solution really enabled us to lump everything together in one place.

Having the ability to see how things are connected and keeping track of, for example, which server, and which ports on the servers are plugged into which network switches is very helpful when we're looking at network troubleshooting, and we want to do things like mirror ports and mirror traffic. Tracking which MAC addresses belong to which devices is also linked in there.

The topology view enables us to show how our applications interact with each other and with the rack elevation we can see the equipment in each individual rack and which power outlets they're plugged into. That has also been really handy in a few cases.

It definitely saves us time, but I don't know how to quantify it because we've been using it for such a long time. I don't remember what kind of time it took to track down information in the past. Right now, it's super-simple to find whatever we're looking for. I would imagine it saves us a few hours each week.

Just having this solution at all has been really solid for us. If I had to pick one part of it, it would be a toss-up between the IP address tracking and the password management. I'm not sure which one of those I'd rank higher.

We have a lot of different devices and some of them have many IP addresses, so keeping track of which ones are assigned where is very critical for putting new devices on the network and giving them new addresses. All of our devices are statically assigned, so if we don't keep good records then we could accidentally assign a duplicate, which would cause problems on the network.

As far as password management goes, before we had this we didn't have anything. We had shared passwords, which is always a horrible idea. Now we have the ability to know who has accessed a password, who's looked at it, and when it's been used or when it's been changed. That's helped us from a security standpoint.

In addition, the solution has some very good relational capabilities that show us how certain devices relate to each other and how some of our environment actually works together.

It also helps us track equipment replacement to know when we have swapped out parts and how much money we've spent on a particular server over its lifetime. We try to utilize all the pieces of it that we currently license.

We use it to track our servers, storage, switches, firewalls, and most recently we started putting our desktops and laptops in it too.

One thing I have brought up with their product team, and we opened up a case and a feature request for it, is having a requisition-style system in the software. Right now it does have the ability to track purchases, which is okay. But I would like the ability to create a request and say, for example, I want a new server. 

The way that it works right now is that you have to create the server object before you can assign it to an actual purchase. Obviously you won't have the server until you've bought it, so it's something of a cart-before-the-horse scenario where, in order for me to create a purchase, I already have to have the device, which doesn't make sense. It's fine if you're entering the data after the fact, but I would hope to use the system in a pre-purchase scenario, where I or one of my technicians could log into the system, create the request, and then forward that request to my purchasing people or to our ERP.

The other area where it causes us a little bit of a hassle is if I want to track the cost of spare parts. Recently I had to order about a dozen hard drives for servers. For me to use Device42, I had to wait until the drives came in so that I could create the drives and assign the serial numbers to them, and then assign a cost to each drive. A better scenario would be where I'd say, "Hey, I'm buying 12 drives," and be able to have 12 generic drives in the system without serial numbers. Then, once the drives came in we could assign serial numbers and then further assign drives to servers as we need to.

I worked with their product team at least a couple of years ago to express that concern. They claimed to like the idea, but I haven't seen it implemented yet. I don't know if it will ever make the cut. And I would like it not to be a paid upgrade feature. If they could include it with the license we use, that would be extra nice.

I have been using Device42 for at least five years, if not longer.

It's been very reliable. We had a case last year when it was unavailable because I failed to pay attention to the warnings about our license expiring. That temporarily caused us a glitch because I didn't have our subscription renewed on time. But that was entirely on me.

I would assume it would be fine for all of our future needs. But we're a relatively small organization, so I don't think we're ever going to really stress it.

Tech support has generally been pretty good. Over the years there have only been one or two cases that maybe took a little bit longer than I thought was reasonable. Other than that, they've generally been very attentive and responsive. There have been no major hiccups with any of their support.

I've never had to escalate. The few times that I've had to talk to support, whoever I've talked to initially has been able to get things addressed for me.

We were using spreadsheets and we had a couple of homegrown databases. We weren't using any commercial product prior to a Device42.

We came across the solution because we needed to find a better way to do keep track of all the data. We did some Google searches at the time to see what other people were out there doing. I'm also part of a few different online communities, and I'm sure I asked around those, at the time, if anybody had thoughts or suggestions.

The initial setup was very easy. It was restoring a virtual machine image. It gets delivered as a virtual disk file. Spin it up on your choice of hypervisor and it's ready to go instantly. For us it was ready to go, full-production. I'm sure there are some scenarios where it could get a little bit more complicated, but ours has always been very simple. It was deployed as a virtual machine. We didn't have any wrinkles.

Even with version upgrades that have had breaking changes — and that we had to do backups and restores for — even that hasn't been that terribly difficult. I just I told the people that use it, "Hey, we're going to be down for about 20 minutes," and ran the upgrade and everything was good.

In terms of a learning curve, it's relatively straightforward. There are a few things here and there that, when you come across them, seem a little bit backward. I can't remember specifically what those issues are, other than the purchasing one I mentioned. But it's mostly straightforward, mostly easy to use.

There is a value to it. 

The part that makes some of the solution's add-ons a little bit harder for me to justify and get approved is that I don't have any mechanism to show how much they could possibly save us, or what we're currently doing on a day-to-day basis that they would somehow help us with. Maybe if they had some kind of ROI calculator or, "Here's what you could be doing if you added on some of these extra features," that might help.

Their pricing model is very poor. For instance, software licensing, at one point in the distant past, was a standard feature. At some point they broke it out as a separate, paid license upgrade. That was kind of rotten. 

Right now I'm looking at my license page and all of the add-ons are disabled because we didn't pay for any of them. The solution is helpful and it is useful, but it makes adding on any of the extra applications or any of the extra components cost-prohibitive, for us at least.

We've looked at a few different products. One of them was called Sunbird and there was something by HPE that we might have looked at a long time ago.

Sunbird did not have a full web interface for the solution, so you had to have desktop software. Quite honestly, I wasn't interested in desktop software. I wanted something that I could hit with either my computer or my tablet, or even my phone for that matter, and still be able to get at our information.

It's all pretty easy to use and you'll get out of it what you put into it. We try to make sure our information is accurate and up to date and we periodically do audit against the information to make sure it is current. The biggest advice I would give is to make sure you don't let your data get stale.

Documentation is important. We've had internal problems where we've lost a hypervisor or our network has gone down and we haven't had access to it. Those scenarios have proven that we rely on the info and we need it. So having some kind of high-availability solution would be good for us at some point. We do have a standby server that takes backups of our data and sends it to a separate Device42 instance, but I have not experienced trying to fail over and make it active.

Maintenance of the tool does not even require one person. It's just something that runs in the background and it doesn't take any extra effort, other than what we normally do with our virtual machines and hypervisors. We treat it the same as any other server that we manage. Because it's deployed as a virtual appliance, we count on Device42 to have things hardened and patched. I'm not sure if their normal software upgrades include any system-level patches, but it's nothing that we manage or maintain.

There are five people using it across our organization. I use it in my role as IT manager. The others are server admins, a desktop admin, and a couple of people who have access to it to retrieve asset information.

We're subscribed to just the core product and we utilize pretty much every bit of it. It would be great if we could get into some of the other stuff, like the application discovery and the application mapping; software license management would be sweet, and power and environmental monitoring would be nice too. But those features are all paid add-ons. Right now, the biggest challenge for us is what we currently pay with our base licensing. It's reasonable in terms of the world. We've looked at competitive products in the past and either the other products weren't as well polished and as well put together as Device42, or they were just completely out of our reach in terms of price.

It has generally been a really solid and useful tool. It would be cool if they could get around to getting that purchasing aspect worked in. Other than that, it's been solid. It's done what we've needed it to do so far.