IBM SevOne Network Performance Management (NPM) Reviews

We are using this solution for monitoring the network for performance and availability. We have about 25 SevOne peers that are monitoring almost 8,000 devices. These devices include routers, switches, firewalls, etc.

On any outage, SevOne is pretty quick to send an alert. We've got an operations center that consumes the alert and sends it to the device owners so that they can minimize the time of impact of that alert. Such outages happen at least once a month, and whenever there is a real outage, SevOne is the one to detect it.

The comprehensiveness of SevOne's collection of network performance and flow data is very good. For NetFlow, I would rate it a 10 out of 10 because it collects everything that NetFlow delivers. You can also customize the reports to show only what you'd like to see or what your customers would like to see. For network monitoring, I would rate it a nine out of 10 because you can collect all the information and slice and dice that information in whatever manner you feel necessary to consume that data. We've got an operations team that subscribes only to the alerts. So, we've got tier two and tier three people who are looking at reports, and they slice and dice those reports however they like.

Its collection abilities across multiple vendors' equipment are really good. If we don't have an SNMP OID for a particular vendor, the only thing that the architects at my company need to do is to supply us the SNMP OIDs and/or MIBs. We send these to SevOne, and they certify it. We can then install it in the SevOne system, and it'll start monitoring that equipment. Its collection abilities are important because we've got multiple vendors in the network, and each specialty, such as a firewall or a router, has different collection needs. We're able to meet these specific collection needs based on the device types.

For our operations, the dashboard is very important because that's how our customers are making day-to-day and long-term strategic decisions, for six months to a year, about their network. We're not using any reports for capacity planning as such, but this is an idea that is going to be put in place shortly.

It provides continuous analytics of the network, which helps our customers in making smarter decisions and ensuring that things are up and running.

In terms of the integration of network performance management data with our ITSM tool, we don't have a direct integration with ServiceNow. We have integrated SevOne with Netcool, and Netcool is integrated with ServiceNow. It is pretty easy to integrate. We've got people on our team who are responsible for Netcool, and if we want to define a new policy or alert, we show them what alert we're sending over, and they integrate it in a matter of a couple of hours.

Its ability to monitor practically any type of network device via SNMP is most valuable. This is the main functionality that we're using. If a network device exposes a metric, such as interface utilization, SevOne will monitor it for us.

The reporting is very good in SevOne. We have static thresholds that are defined by our architects. They give these static thresholds to us, and we implement the alerting policies based on those static thresholds. We also have the capability of doing base-lining or deviation from normal or mean, but we haven't implemented that in our network. 

The out-of-the-box reports are of quality, and they would get you up to speed faster than having to build custom reports. I wasn't here when the reports were created, so I haven't, as such, used the out-of-the-box reports.

We are able to use SevOne's analytics, reports, and workflows in a single dashboard. Its dashboard is very easy to use and put together. It is also really easy to understand. If I had to give it a grade, I would give it an eight out of 10.

In terms of having a complete view of our network performance, I would rate it a nine out of 10. The reason for not giving it a 10 is that there is no packet capture associated with SevOne, but we do have other tools in place to do that.

In terms of stability, because of our move to VMs from physical appliances, some things have become a little unstable. It doesn't seem to be a SevOne issue, but we had to have a lot of calls with their technical support to figure out what's going on with it, but overall, it is pretty solid. 

I have been using this solution for one year and two or three months.

Overall, it is pretty solid. We've made some changes to the SevOne infrastructure, and we moved to VMs from physical appliances. Because of this transition, some things have become a little unstable, but we're working on these issues. It doesn't seem to be a SevOne issue, but because of the change of infrastructure of SevOne, we have had to have a lot of calls with their technical support to figure out what's going on with it. 

It is extremely scalable. We're managing almost 8,000 devices, and if we need to add 8,000 more devices, we just need to add a commensurate number of peers to handle that load. It is horizontally scalable, which is nice.

They're readily available, and they work with us in a very friendly way. They are very willing to help us. Some support desks, especially in performance monitoring, push you to solve your own problem, whereas SevOne's support is the exact opposite. Everyone I've worked with has been helpful. I would give them an A. 

I think they used HP OpenView. I have no idea about the reasons for switching.

I was not involved in its initial setup. For its maintenance, we've got two people in the US and two people in the Philippines who help us. They do network monitoring. The two people in the Philippines work part-time on it because they also support other tools. So, we have three people in total for 8,000 devices.

I would advise evaluating it thoroughly to make sure it is right for your network, and it meets your administrative needs. This should be a major or key element of your decision process.

SevOne supports software-defined and streaming telemetry-based networks, but we are not using any of that. I've also not customized out-of-the-box reports. I've only created custom reports for various customer groups that are consuming the data.

I would rate SevOne Network Data Platform a nine out of 10.

We primarily use SevOne for performance management. We're managing an internal corporate network for a large Canadian telco. This includes the data centers, the branch offices, media locations, retail stores, and all of those kinds of connections. We use it obviously to monitor performance, and we also use it to do some performance alarming, and things like that.

We use it extensively to help us communicate with other teams, and with executives so that we can present valuable network data in a pleasing way. It's also accurate, easy to read, and easy to digest for non-network teams, executives, and others.

It was very successful during the pandemic because there was a lot of focus on things like capacity, work from home, and VPN capabilities. It really allowed us to highlight those metrics very easily, and communicate that up to the executives on a daily basis in the early days of the pandemic. It helped to bring that sense of wellbeing that we were not in any danger in terms of system capacity, or things like that. When everybody was sent to work from home, a lot of companies tipped over because they weren't prepared for it, but we didn't have that problem.

SevOne was initially installed on a VM on my network, and then another network within the organization implemented it a couple of years later. As the value was identified and other parts of the organization began consuming it, other networks began implementing it.

We don't use much of the flow data but other than that, the data it collects is very comprehensive. It's as comprehensive as you want it to be. You can glance over the surface, or you can dig really deep. It all depends on how you configure it out of the box, including what you want to look at and what you want to measure.

Having this depth is really important if you want to get ahead of the problems and head them off before they become customer-impacting. One of the things that happened in our organization was when the pandemic hit, a lot of our customers also went to work from home. Consequently, it drove a lot of traffic volume onto our customer-facing networks. Having SevOne in place prior to that identified a lot of critical choke points that weren't necessarily identified by other traditional monitoring techniques. Other vendors weren't picking them up.

I am not responsible for the customer-facing networks but I know that when we installed SevOne and got it working on some of them, it identified a lot of choke points, and it led us to fix a lot of capacity issues before the pandemic hit. This allowed us to continue to do business in a big BAU fashion as opposed to reacting to a crisis. We were ready for it because, in part, SevOne helped us to find those problems before they became critical. When people went home to work, and all that traffic volume hit our network, we had already rectified the problems.

SevOne's collection abilities cover multiple vendor's equipment, which absolutely is important to us. On my network specifically, we have a vast number of different platforms, more so than most. That's probably reflective of our corporate network, so things become somewhat less standard over time. As a result, SevOne's ability to work with just about any vendor's equipment was definitely valuable for us. The other networks in the organization are a bit more uniform but ours had a lot of different platforms, different kinds of load balancers, different kinds of switches, and there are many different kinds of firewalls. There is no question that this flexibility and compatibility were important.

SevOne can certainly bring together its analytics, reports, and workflows in a single dashboard. For example, the Data Insight overlay is great, and it comes with a lot of built-in dashboards and reports that have that analysis already included. You can take something like that and you can edit it to repurpose it to your needs, or you can use it as an app to build something for yourself. It also drills down really nicely. You start at a general level and then you can drill down to the specifics. You can start with a group, you can drill down to a device, you can get down to an interface, and so on. It's a good tool in that sense because you can look at it with as much detail as you like.

It's pretty easy to use. It's intuitive and menu-driven. It's got the familiar menu across the top as well, that you can tab through. If you know how to use a mouse and a keyboard, you're not going to be lost. But again, with a bit of training and a bit of insight from the developers of the platform, it can really unleash a lot of new ideas and new abilities, but right out of the box, it's pretty easy to use and pretty easy to figure out.

Using SevOne has enabled us to detect network performance issues faster, and before they impact end-users. You can just look at the capacity, and the ability to identify those interfaces that are being over-utilized, over time. Whether you're looking at the last weekend or the last week, or the last month, finding over-utilized links is important. It allows you to either offload that traffic somewhere else or augment that capacity. Importantly, SevOne allows you to get ahead of that. You can anticipate reaching a capacity issue in advance of it impacting your customers.

Another thing to consider is that we have a very large WAN. Canada is a big country, so my network end-to-end is from coast to coast. With such a large network, having real-time information on those links and how they're being utilized, or whether they are up or down, allows us to find and address issues before they become serious problems. You know, if you have two links and one's a primary and one's a backup, and your backup goes down, SevOne helps you understand that there is a gap and that you can get that addressed before the primary fails and you find yourself in an outage situation.

These are the ways that we use it on a daily basis. I am in operations but I know that in our engineering teams, they do the capacity planning and the network planning, so they use it too. You can easily set up a threshold, as well, to alert you when certain links get over-utilized or become highly utilized. Again, you can get ahead of the impacts and ahead of the customer complaints.

In 2020, we went for 11 months on my network without a major incident. We didn't have even one P1 or P2 incident, which is something that we'd never done before, and I credit SevOne with that success. A lot of the issues that we found and fixed with SevOne, prior to going into the pandemic mode of working, may have caused us problems. Our ability to detect and address issues ahead of time, which included monitoring, capacity planning, reviewing those numbers regularly, and paying attention to the alerts of critical links when the pressure increased in terms of capacity, allowed us to stay ahead instead of being purely reactive. It's been a godsend and has brought us 11 months of stability, the likes of which I'd never seen before in 15 years with the company.

In terms of speed, SevOne makes it so that we're faster than the NOC. As a company, we're supposed to rely on the NOC to find these faults, get the alarms, and respond. That's how it works with the other networks in the company, generally speaking. But with us, because we're so deeply integrated with SevOne, we tend to know these things immediately, or within five minutes of something happening on the network because of our chosen five-minute interval.

The bottom line is that it's five minutes or less before the operations group is alerted to a critical situation on the network. Whether it is a hardware fault or something else, we know the issue and the impact of it almost immediately. We find ourselves informing the NOC, "By the way, this happened and you guys should get organized because there's something coming." This means that as an operations manager, I'm quicker on the draw than the NOC, which puts me ahead of most networks.

We find that the reporting is particularly valuable in terms of not only communicating with our peer teams but also with the executives. This is an excellent feature that we didn't have before.

The reporting and workflows absolutely help us to understand what is normal and what is abnormal in our network. Out of the box, it's immediately going to highlight things that you didn't know were there. For example, we have a large retail fleet of stores, and they have a network connection, but they also have a backup LTE connection. This means that if their landline fails, they switch over to a wireless network, and continue to work that way.

Before SevOne, we were largely blind to when those switch-overs took place. But with SevOne, there's a report that comes right out of the box called The Top End. Which, if every morning you run it, it's going to tell you where your top utilized points are. For me, it was interfaces. Having it pointing out the top-utilized interfaces quickly allowed me to find those stores that had switched over to LTE because the bandwidth used on an LTE connection is many times higher, percentage-wise, than what you're going to see on a landline.

If you're looking at something and all of a sudden there is a store that's at 1,000% capacity, it is pretty obvious that it has switched over to LTE. At that point, you could address that operationally. But prior to that, you might not know, and there could be stores running on LTE. Then if that LTE failed, they would be dead in the water instead of it switching over to a backup. Ideally, the primary will be fixed while it's running on the backup. However, if you don't know it's broken, you can't react to it.

The out of the box reports have helped speed up time to value for us. As soon as you open the box, you're going to get insights into your network, just based on the content that is going to slap you in the face. In our case, with the LTEs, you knew immediately what was happening by using the Data Insight. This system comes with a lot of canned reports and dashboards that are already built-in, and all you have to do is plug your data into it. It's going to tell you a lot.

We're using one for building dashboards for other parts of the business. The organization has a retail business and a big media business. The media business includes radio stations, television stations, and other sites like that, which are not necessarily offices, and not necessarily data centers. They run on the corporate network, but they're a separate part of the business per se. So, being able to just take an out of the box report, or an out of the box dashboard, and plug the retail hosts into it, or the retail data into it, allowed us to spin-off a separate dashboard that the retail support center can use in their own monitoring of their business.

The retail SevOne Data Insight dashboard allows them to do their own monitoring. I am the operation's manager, so I'm the one who's responding to the alerts, but it keeps them in the loop. It gives them that insight, and that ability to look around and see things for themselves, rather than always having to engage the network team just to ask a question.

Now that we have done that for retail, we're going to do the same things for other parts of the organization. They will be able to see for themselves that the Data Insight is amazing, and it comes with so many different canned reports that you can just plug a device group in, or an object group in, or even a single device, depending on how you have things organized. From there, it will give you a professional-looking, informative, and usable out-of-the-box report that you could look at immediately with a minimum configuration of your instance and immediately gain those crucial insights as an operations manager.

We have also made use of the ability to customize reports. When we started using SevOne only, the NMS, we had to build a lot of that ourselves. What we create is reusable so if I build a report, I can share it with colleagues and they can avail themselves of it. But, you have to create that workflow within your team. Data Insight sort of fixes that, but the important part is that we created a lot of our own custom reports and we still do.

Ultimately, I'd like to get to a place where we are the report creators, in operations. That way, people would come to us with requirements and we would build their reports. This would allow for a bit more control in terms of who's doing what and how things are set up in SevOne. There's a lot of value in that because you can build it for your customer, which I think is the greatest advantage.

Every customer has a different requirement. Whether you're talking to an executive, another technical team, or to an engineering group, they're all looking for a different insight from the data. Having those custom reports and the ability to build one from scratch, depending on who your customer is, and who your audience is, and what they're looking for, has made things a lot easier operationally. I can set up a report that goes to a team every morning so that they can see what the last 24 hours look like from a network performance standpoint. This way, if they're having some kind of problem with their application, they can see with their own eyes that there have been no changes to the network side.

The presentment might be a report that comes in a PDF format or a dashboard that we've built for them. On a dashboard, they can choose to look at data in real-time or go back a year, for example. It depends on how it has been set up. In any case, the offering of SevOne plus Data Insight is a huge advantage in that sense. It means that you can really provide the data that people want in a way that they can understand and consume. It can be tailored to that audience, which will vary between entities such as executives and technical teams.

The ease of building custom reports depends on your background. If you have any kind of an IT background and you use these kinds of tools, it's pretty straightforward. We've had some training on SevOne, but we were also using it prior to training. So, it's intuitive in that sense, if you understand and have used these kinds of tools in the past.

Also, if you have any kind of GUI experience, it's pretty straightforward. It's got the menus across the top and you can drill down to the different applications, or use cases. We found it pretty insightful, but that said, the official training that you can get from SevOne will definitely enhance your ability to do that stuff. They bring a lot of insight when they show you what you can do. It's pretty simple to do the basics, to get something done with it. But the training does obviously enhance that ability.

Essentially, you will get better with the training but you can do it without.

The ability to close alarming gaps in real-time is helpful because when you're running a big network, you sometimes don't know that you have an alarming gap until you have a fall, and that's how you find these things. SevOne allowed us to quickly, in real-time almost, close those alarming gaps because we run the SevOne instance ourselves in a hands-on fashion. As such, we can quickly set up new traps, or new alarming on interfaces where it wasn't before, in order to capture data that we weren't necessarily capturing before. We found that really useful, and as an operations team, it allowed us to take our fate into our own hands. We now have the ability to fix things in real-time ourselves, in terms of alarming and closing those kinds of gaps.

The system provides us with continuous network analytics, and we have it set in five-minute increments that go back for one year. The comprehensiveness of the analytics makes our operations easier. For instance, it frees us up in so far as it keeps other teams out of our hair because we can quickly provide them with the data they need. When issues arise, the team with the best data tends to win the standoff, and SevOne can really arm you well.

For example, when teams are saying that there are network issues, you can quickly show that there are not. It is like the Mean Time to Innocence concept, but it also gives you confidence in your network because you can see the performance statistics and the Delta change over time with your own eyes. It's a great little tool.

The completeness of the view of network performance is as complete as you make it. Of course, there are limitations based on licensing. In the beginning, we had to pick and choose where we spent those licenses. We have since solved that problem by purchasing more.

The reporting of NMS is good, but it could be better. The challenges and deficiencies in the reporting are fixed with the Data Insight overlay. Generally speaking, the NMS reporting is excellent and it's fairly easy to use, but it can get complex as you get deeper into it.

We have been using SevOne for approximately four years.

The stability is rock-solid. In the past four years, it has been great, and I can't think of any stability problems. It has never been unavailable. We have a cold standby in another data center and we have never had to use it.

This product is eminently scalable. It is a matter of compute resources and licenses.

We have between 25 and 30 people who use SevOne on the front end. Those are the other operations teams and their engineering counterparts. 

I am in the process of publishing some dashboards for some other parts of the organization, such as the retail support center and the media teams, so our usage is going to expand. These are not going to be power users but rather, they are going to be limited to a specific dashboard and a specific set of elements, as opposed to being able to look at the entire network. 

Counting those people, that is going to be an extra 20 users. Then, when the NOC gets integrated, we will probably be up to more than 50 users.

It is slowly but surely being implemented on each network in the company, and becoming the performance front end for each of these networks. We are a cell phone provider, we are a cell service provider, we are a cable television provider, and we are an internet provider. As such, we have many different customer-facing networks nationwide, and all of our networks except maybe the one used for radio broadcasting will end up using it. Through this, the user base is expanding.

The main reasons for the expansion are that it is so intuitive and accessible, and I found it just takes the pressure off me as an operations manager to check on these things for people when they can check for themselves, and see in real-time that the network is fine.

We work very closely with SevOne. We have a customer success director that we meet with biweekly, to make sure that we're getting what we want out of the deal. They ask us to provide feedback on how things can get better and what they can do better. In my experience, they're very open to that kind of feedback and we've definitely given some.

In terms of the customer success meetings, if there's something that we can't figure out how to do, they help us figure out how to do it if there is a way. They will help us deliver on our requirements if it's, at all, capable within the tool. And if it's not, they go back to the drawing board and they're more than happy to try and make things work the way you want them to.

In addition to the customer success department, we use regular technical support. Often, the customer success department will give us a heads up about something like a code upgrade, or a vulnerability, or something that we need to address. From there, we would engage their regular support in order to get a ticket opened and get that arranged.

Certainly, there's not much daylight between customer support and customer success. There's a lot of coordination there. If we want to raise concerns about a ticket, it's quickly addressed by customer support, or the sales director, or whoever. They are very responsive in that sense.

In terms of technical support as a standalone function, we've been pretty happy with the support we've gotten. So far, so good. There have been a couple of things that we've raised that they've never been able to get to the bottom of, but it's certainly not a showstopper. Overall, we've been impressed.

We've never had a dud or anything like that, where we got somebody that wasn't able to deliver on our requirements. In situations where we've asked for more than the helpdesk, or the regular support can deliver, the customer success teams have gotten us in touch with the people in SevOne who have the knowledge that we sought.

In the beginning, we worked with a guy that really helped us understand how to get the most out of SevOne itself. It was an amazing meeting. You meet these certain people in life that just blow your mind about how deeply they understand the way things work in the back end, and this describes the person who initially helped us with the product. Essentially, he was really good at helping us understand the value we could get out of SevOne, out of the box.

Then, we had another meeting like that a couple of weeks ago, where we were just getting into Data Insight and wanting to get the most out of that. They set up another meeting with a guy who was just an amazing guru of Data Insight, and just working with him for an hour and a half on a call and seeing some ideas, and what could be done, and how to get from A to B, was really valuable.

We did not have a similar solution in place prior to SevOne, although we did have some imperfect spotty solutions that covered certain portions of our network. What we had was nothing that was comprehensive like this. We had lots of fault management software, as well as Cisco Prime for Wi-Fi performance, and other such products. In terms of having one end-to-end performance tool, we didn't have it, and I think that's what really opened our eyes.

Fault management and performance management are different and what we did have was profoundly manual. As a result, a lot of stuff got missed.

The initial setup is straightforward. If you know what you want, you can just go through the list, and it basically involves ticking boxes or radio buttons to turn on the features you want or turn off the ones that you don't.

I was not part of the initial setup because it wasn't on my network. What happened was we bought SevOne when our network operations team was part of IT. Sometime after that point, we were reorged into the network part of the organization and came under a new director who ran several other operations teams. It was that exposure to SevOne, through our team, to this director, that allowed him to see the value of it immediately. After that, he was pretty quick to say, "How do I get this to my other networks?"

After that, they stood up their own instance and put it into their critical elements. Since that point, they put in the rest of their elements and it's continuing to expand. I don't think they're going to stop there. I think they're bringing in other networks within the organization and the deployment continues.

Importantly, if you don't know what you want then SevOne is going to be there to help you get it to where you want it. They've been excellent. You can call the help desk, the support center, or you can call your customer support person, and they will find a way either to get you the data or to get you in touch with someone who can help you, or they'll call you back and do it themselves.

I don't know how long the initial deployment took, but our second deployment took about two weeks. It was completed by one or two people on our side. They set up a VM, installed the application on it, imported the data, and started configuring it. In total, fewer than five people are enough for deployment.

The maintenance requirements are pretty low. We have to do upgrades, but it doesn't take anyone as much as a day to complete them. It's not very labor-intensive in terms of support and over the past two years, we've needed to engage support only two or three times to assist with upgrades. Overall, it is not a product with heavy manual maintenance.

I did not set it up initially. We had another manager that brought it in at the time, and he'd used it at another company in Canada, which was a bank that he had worked at. He knew exactly what he wanted out of the box.

He deployed it, set it up, and only then did he turn it over to us.

The setup process is simple, straightforward, and obvious enough that you really don't need a third-party integrator. We're moving on right now to integrate it with Netcool and other solutions that our NOC is using. For alarming, they use Netcool.

The other networks have already done this and they're ahead of us, but we're in the process of integrating it now, and it's not hard. The hardest part is getting the NOC onboard and configuring their side, as opposed to SevOne. With SevOne, it's as simple as pointing it toward the new tool and it starts sending traps there.

With respect to ROI, that 11 month period without a P1 or a P2 incident was the best return on investment I have seen as an operations manager. One does not make money with this product, but in terms of savings, you are not addressing P1s in the middle of the night because you saw that coming thanks to the performance data.

There is also time saved in terms of engaging with other teams. You can provide your data right upfront and data is often unassailable. This means that when a team comes to you saying, "Oh, your network is not performing.", you can pretty quickly put data in front of them either real-time on a screen, or in a PDF, or in any way that you want to deliver it and show them the data that says, "No, the network is performing. So, whatever your problem is, it is not here."

Although I don't have exact details in terms of cost, my experience has been that SevOne is willing to make a deal with the customer. They are certainly not pricing themselves out of the market. There is lots of room for negotiation in terms of pricing, in terms of components, and things like that.

We have not evaluated other options. We've just been leaning on this, heavily.

Overall, I'm pretty happy with this product and how it's used day-to-day.

SevOne is a product that can integrate network performance management across ITSM and business decision-making tools, although that is not something that we have implemented. That said, the data that it produces is very insightful for that type of planning. Capacity planning and engineering are examples of that. I'm fairly certain that it will enhance your decision-making, although it may depend on how you want to set that up. Specifically, you might want it to do that automatically with some kind of an API call between SevOne and another tool, or instead, just provide the metrics to feed into that decision-making process.

There is definitely a culture of continuous improvement with SevOne. With every code upgrade, there's a quality of life improvement and there are customer suggestions that get worked into it. As a company, they're definitely open to working with us, as well as others, to make things better and to bring about those customer asks.

The biggest lesson that I have learned from using this product is that whatever I thought I knew about my network, I was wrong. When we turned it on, it immediately highlighted a lot of issues that we did not know about. That goes for my network and it goes for the others as well. It is an eye-opener when you first start seeing the metrics come out of it.

My advice for anybody who is considering SevOne is not to hesitate. You will be amazed by what you learn about your network. You will be amazed by what you thought you knew but isn't true about your network. It will give you a level of confidence in your network to allow you to focus on other things, like making your network better as opposed to constantly fighting a losing battle against the challenges that can sometimes consume an operations team.

Being able to produce the data in a pleasing and understanding way really stops a lot of the burn, or the churn, that happens to operations, where you waste a lot of time chasing things that aren't there. It has really helped us in that sense. It saves a lot of time and a lot of frustration. It allows us to produce the data, and then move on to the next thing.

It also frees up my guys a lot, to search for those problems that they can find and identify ahead of time, and then fix. It gets you out of that reactive mode as an operations manager, where you're constantly reacting to incidents.

Suddenly, you have that time for preventative maintenance, where instead of reacting to incidents, you can actually go out and find these problems using SevOne. You can make use of the performance analytics and see things coming down the pipe before they become impacting and get them fixed. As an operations manager, that's invaluable. You're going to get a lot of value out of it with very little effort on your part and, the more effort you put into it, the more value you get out.

In summary, SevOne solves a lot of problems for me. Not only has it allowed me to see my network in a way that I hadn't seen before in terms of performance, but it allows me to communicate with my peer teams, and my executives get that data constantly. Especially during COVID, it was very helpful. That said, nothing is perfect, and there is always room for improvement.

I would rate this solution a nine out of ten.

We use the solution for performance and capacity management reports. The product gives us flow data that helps us determine the top users. We also use the solution for LAN, WAN, and Wi-Fi.

I like the tool’s scalability and real-time reports. Earlier, we struggled to give real-time reports to clients. I also like the tool’s deployment model where we can deploy it either on-premises or in-house. We don’t have to carry the data all over the globe. Also, I am impressed with the tool's flow reporting and Wi-Fi.

The tool needs improvement in non-Cisco SD-WAN.

I have been using the product for four years.

My company has 500 users for the solution.

We talk to the tool’s support on a daily basis or whenever we need their help. The product’s support is good.

The tool’s setup was easy. We were able to onboard two major customers within two months of the product’s deployment. The overall deployment took around three months to complete.

The tool is not expensive. We were able to negotiate with SevOne on pricing.

I would rate the solution a nine out of ten.

Sometimes we get requests that a customer needs CPU or disk or memory performance or utilization graphs. We add those servers or devices into the tool and then we can generate the graphs and provide them to the customer.

Customers also ask us to create alerts. The tool generates alerts for CPU utilization when it is close to, for example, 90 percent utilized.

It is deployed directly on servers as well as on virtual machines.

One of the benefits is its ability to transform raw network performance data into actionable insights. That's one of the keys for us. When something goes above a threshold, we can see it in the alerts and take action. Likewise, we can see graphs and reports and we can judge what to do before something goes wrong.

Some of the teams that are using our graphs from SevOne, and the capacity team that uses the data it generates, are able to make decisions before something bad happens.

We use SevOne to monitor a multi-vendor network. We have a lot of different kinds of devices in our scenario. We have Cisco switches and network devices from various vendors. The alerting and reports that we can generate help us see if something is not the way it should be.

• Reports
  
• Alerting

These are the most valuable features for us because the customers in our company primarily want to see performance and usage graphs, and they are always concerned with the alerts.

Another useful feature is that SevOne gives you real-time insights into your network performance. It polls every five minutes. That is important for our customers because there are some network teams that are always monitoring their networks. There is an option for setting the polling frequency to less than five minutes. That means you can monitor your infrastructure faster and we do that for some of our devices.

And the data collection functionality, using SNMP protocol, is good. It's doing its job.

I'm not really sure if this was the software's fault or a server issue, but a couple of years back the disks were failing on our SevOne physical server every month and the server would go down. The secondary server took over from the primary until the disk issue was resolved. That was annoying.

I've been using IBM SevOne Network Performance Management since 2013.

It is resilient. If the server goes down, all the data and functionality is taken over by a secondary server. In our scenario, there has been no data loss.

You can add as many devices as you want, but I think you need to buy more licenses to add more devices. But scalability is not an issue. We have seven to eight clients and we monitor more than a thousand devices for each one.

There are no new clients in the pipeline, but if another comes along, we will definitely recommend SevOne to them.

The SevOne support team is very good. Whenever you have a strange issue or a big issue, something you have never seen before, when you reach out to them they are always available. They are very fast and always help us.

Positive

I deployed SevOne on a virtual machine a couple of years back. The deployment was easy and straightforward. The installation wizard helps, giving you all the details of what is happening. There was no confusion. And it was fast as well. It took roughly two hours.

Someone from our deployment team helped me. He told me to just "apply this, do this, do that," apart from what the wizard showed me. I believe he was in touch with the SevOne guys.

I can't say anything specific about the investment in the solution because I'm not given that data by my company. But our clients are still using this solution after many years with our company. That is a good indicator that they must be getting a good return.

There are other tools that we have used, like eHealth from CA. It also gives you graphs but we don't like that tool. We like SevOne. It is older than SevOne. We are using it for some clients that have had it from the beginning, so we cannot remove it. But eHealth has bugs. With SevOne, I don't have any complaints.

Definitely go for it. The interface is user-friendly, and it provides so many reports and alerts. It gives you a good, total package. And the support team is also very cooperative.

I can't think of very much that the solution lacks. Everything looks okay to me.

Our company provides managed services to our global customers for our networks. We also sell our WAN networks and provide managed services on the LAN network. We use SevOne to look at the performance management of the networks that we sell to our customers including routers, switches, and network links as they go up and down. We have installed more than 100,000 devices on the non-SD WAN side of SevOne.

We can determine the performance utilization with metrics of the devices including fan speed, temperature, and other generic health checkups. If the utilization is high we raise an alarm in our ticket managing system and then our service desk can start looking into them.

We use SevOne quite extensively. We use all the modules extensively both internally and externally with our customers. They log in and use SevOne to access the tools.

The modules and the performance management reports that come with data insights are two of the most valuable features. I also find the reports for Wi-Fi, Netflow, LAN, and WAN for monitoring to be very good. 

SevOne Network Data Platform could improve its SD-WAN side. The system is still maturing. Cisco is always changing their product and new products are coming to market, they have an opportunity to focus and forge a good relationship with the SD-WAN product. They could build a strong product to provide services to SD-WAN.

I would like to see live maps as an added feature. Also, build modules on AI and EML to provide better data insights that would proactively tell us what we should be looking after.

I have been working with SevOne for three years.

There are no issues regarding scalability. You can scale horizontally as many as you want. We are able to deploy across customers. We have a regional deployment model. For one of our customers we have deployed it on their cloud so that they can keep it close to their customers and have better performance.

We rely on technical support a lot. We use them for upgrades as we can not upgrade ourselves.

I have many clusters deployed so it is difficult having to rely on them for these upgrades. It can take six to nine months for me to complete the upgrades across all the clusters. It is not just one component that requires the upgrade, there is also DI, NMS, and Wi-Fi as well.

I would prefer that SevOne release service upgrade modules that would allow our team to conduct the upgrade rather than relying on them.

The relationship we have with SevOne is good. They have maintained a good relationship with us.

We have been deploying to various customers over the past three years. we face some challenges in the SD WAN space but with LAN, WAN Wi-Fi and Netflow deployments.

We have evaluated LiveAction. LiveAction has a good interface and navigation screens for SD-WAN.

I am impressed with their LAN side, WAN side on the Wi-Fi domains, but  the SD WAN has room to improve.

If not for SD WAN, you can blindly use SevOne as a solution.

I would rate SevOne Network Data Platform an 8 out of 10.

We use it to look into performances in our system and different dedicated environments. We try to draw graphs that represent what we have in terms of time response, bandwidth, and input and output across all our data centers to see if the load balance is correct. We have some traffic flows that say if the traffic is dropping and being taken by another data center. There are a lot of reports all around about different points of our architecture.

It is deployed as a physical appliance on-premises. So, we have the SevOne appliance in our data center.

Based on some metrics, we have policies that will raise issues and tickets internally, in case thresholds are being crossed. 

We have benefited mainly from the use of the dashboard interface. It makes the network visually interesting for people who are not in the network. A lot of people are not network techies who understand streams in the network. Based on location, we have streams coming in and out. They can see visually when there is some problem. They don't need to understand all the network technology behind it to be able to understand if everything is working well or if there is a problem. 

The visualization doesn't remain in the network. It is available for everyone in production management, etc.

We don't use all the features so far because we are just using the product that was there without supervision for one year. So, with a couple of colleagues, we are doing a lot of work to put everything back on track. We know that SevOne can do a lot, in terms of hitting some baselines, especially with their new visualization software, SevOne Data Insight (DI). This gives a new perspective in terms of dashboarding. It is something more dynamic and flexible than the previous version.  

There are different types of reports based on the metrics that we want to monitor and check.

The most valuable feature is that we can draw reports with the historic value of data. So, we can see if there is a trend in the past or if something has been changing over the past couple of weeks. When we have an incident, we need to go back to the occurrence of this incident some time in the future. We can see if it is something that happens regularly or not.

Data coming from our system to SevOne needs to be comprehensive. This is the way SevOne works around data flows. So far, it has been good.

They support software-defined networks as part of another module. They have their main module, which is called NMS, then they have other side software which complements the main architecture. They also support software-defined networks, like Cisco ACI. 

We made assessments internally about the system, i.e., about what could be done better. There are a lot of points. 

With the administrative management of the appliance, if some object appears from SevOne because something changed in the network or whatever, then as an administrator you will not be aware. If you are using this object in a report, this object will disappear from the report and you will not be aware of it. So, if you have 1,000 reports, you cannot always check these reports everyday to see if objects are missing or information has disappeared. We don't have any information on alerts, saying that something is happening there and maybe we need to take action. If an object was replaced by another one, or if a link was replaced by another one, then the graph needs to be changed because it doesn't exist in the graph anymore. However, we don't have this information.

This is also the same in terms of the internal architecture that we put in place inside the system. We can tag our network device based on the firmware, some rules, or a manufacturer/vendor. But, it is not always clear when we add a bunch of devices that they will mark these categories. For example, we need to make sure that one device is from a specific vendor. We have to dig deep in each device to make sure they are really attached to the correct vendor. If they're not attached to the correct vendor, then information will not be pulled in the same way, and we might be losing information. So, small tweaks need to be made to the internal management, making it easier for me.

SDN networking is going from legacy towards object-oriented, so we don't have a choice. It is something that we are using and need. Unfortunately, our IT lead is not really into the SDN solution of ACI, as apparently it is missing some features in terms of deep analytics and monitoring of ACI hardware infrastructure as-is. In the future, we may use SDN infrastructure because I know they are releasing features every month.

We have had it in service for five years. I was not there when it was installed at the beginning. I have been handling it for a year and a halfs.

It is really stable. We don't have any issues, except when we do our disaster scenario a couple of times a year. We have to physically cut the connection between our sites for redundancy and compliance. Then, we can sometimes see that we need to ask the help of support to put back the database in a correct state because the replication is not always clicking well. But, that is most likely because of the technology used behind it. MySQL is always a bit sensitive in this kind of scenario. So, I am not sure it is really the SevOne application that has an issue. It is more the technology that lies behind it which can be a bit faulty in these kinds of scenarios. Besides the replication, it works really nice. 

Without disaster scenarios, we are reaching 100% of availability easily.

We just scaled it up a month ago because we were reaching some limits. It is quite scalable. It took a day to scale it up with the new appliances that were delivered. It is quite easy to scale.

We are monitoring 886 devices. That is infrastructure monitoring. There are more devices that we still want to monitor. Our plan is to reach 1,300.

We use the technical support quite often. It is good, though it depends on the location that is doing the support. There are several locations that do support, whether it's India, Poland, or the US. Depending on that, the support can vary as well as the response time, because we're not always in the same time zones as their support. Sometimes, it can take a long time to receive an answer if we have been redirected to the wrong support.

Since it is something new, we are in contact with the vendor. We can give them some updates about what issues we are facing and if we are happy with the product so far. 

We are using another tool called EMC Smarts, but it is more for event monitoring. So, there isn't any drawing of dashboards. It is more only thresholds for SNMP Traps that can be received. Based on that, it distributes tickets. So, we cannot see the history nor draw the status of a link. 

A long time ago, I used Nagios, which is kind of the precursor to monitoring. However, I cannot compare it to SevOne because I used it about 10 years ago. 

You have to try it. The first step may be a bit harsh because of the layout. It's an older type of layout, but it works. Once you find your way with it, it is quite easy and straightforward. But, at first, it's not always easy to handle. But, it is a good tool that works nicely. So far, we don't regret it.

We need to master the system to be able to fully grasp what can be done. It is not for every end user who wants to go into the system and start monitoring whatever they want. They need to be able to grasp some content before that. Without training or previous knowledge, it is not always easy to grasp every concept behind the solution. It is a monitoring system so it's not a system where you click, then drag and drop.

I know they support telemetry. But the device on the end user side needs to be able to send telemetry information, which is not something we can do yet. We don't have enough devices doing telemetry to really use that feature to its greatest potential. So, this is something we have on our roadmap, and probably we will dig into it in a couple of months or years when our infrastructure is evolving in that direction.

Telemetry is something that we would like to invest some more time with, because it is different from having just simple SNMP polling, which is heavy on the system. It puts on a lot of overload based on the frequency of polling. By default, it takes five minutes. We want to have something with a frequency smaller than five minutes and maybe pause every 10 seconds, and SNMP can do it, but it puts a lot of overhead on the system. With telemetry, the big advantage of telemetry is a constant stream of information. There is no overhead. We just have a constant flatline of internal usage. We don't have huge peaks. We have fast information, close to real-time. We should have closer to real time monitoring in the future, instead of just being passive and waiting. There is still a ways to go for telemetry, but most infrastructure is capable of doing it.

Nothing is perfect. I would rate it a solid seven (out of 10) because a lot of points could be improved. I have a long list of small tweaks and customization that can be brought to the system. We give some of them to the customer support, but we are not their only clients. So, they go through prioritizing all their processes. Sometimes, our propositions are refused. It is a good system, but there is still some room for big improvements.

We are primarily using SevOne to monitor bandwidth utilization. We also use it for proactive monitoring of the CPU, memory, and other resources. Our main goal is to monitor the network health and proactively upgrade before any issues occur.

We use the alerting function based on the standard deviation of our network health. When it is beyond the threshold, an alarm is generated and a support ticket is automatically created using the ServiceNow integration. This improves the way our organization functions because we know what we need to upgrade or what issues are in need of attention before they become a problem. It helps us with troubleshooting, as well.

The out of the box reports and workflows are pretty good and they meet our requirements well. Using Data Insight, we can create variables, filtering, and good visualizations. The reporting has improved with Data Insight over NMS.

SevOne brings together its analytics reports and workflows in a single dashboard, and we are able to create a dashboard that contains many tabs and links. From this one dashboard, we can go to other reports and pages.

For DI, it's very easy and clear. For NMS, it is simple, but the visuals are not as pretty as they are with DI, and some of the functionality is missing. There is also a difference in the way that DI exports files, versus NMS.

We have been able to detect issues faster using SevOne, although it depends on how we set up the alerts. When we create them according to the threshold or any of the status change options, it automatically notifies whoever is watching over those devices. It is quite flexible in the way that we can configure alerts.

The alerting has saved us time because the operations team can see them act immediately. Also, an incident ticket is created automatically. We used to have to manually check to see which devices were either having issues, or we could reasonably expect was going to have an issue, and then create a ticket manually. Using SevOne, all of this manual work has been automated.

We haven't done the automation for every case yet but if each was done, we would likely save between 60% and 70% of the time required for each task.

SevOne provides us with continuous, real-time analytics of our network. Over the long term, the data is aggregated. This is helpful because we can see the history of our network. For example, we can see the state of the network before a problem occurs, as well as how and when it happened. For troubleshooting, it's very useful that we can go back and see how our network was doing.

We do not have a complete view of our network using SevOne because we are not using all of the features. Unfortunately, I don't really know all of the functions because we have a limited license and limited resources. This means that we have to combine with other tools that can watch the flow and other characteristics in our environment. Although I cannot speak for all of the features, I can say that it is meeting our requirements to this point and so far, we are happy with it.

The modeling and reporting features in Data Insight are good.

The visualization and the control we have over what we can see in the reporting are very good. It is also easy to use.

The integration with ServiceNow is very good. We have set it up to create support tickets automatically after receiving an alert from SevOne.

The user guide is pretty detailed and easy to understand. If there is something that I don't know or understand then I go to the user guide and just need one click to get the page that I'm searching for, which describes the window that I'm on. The guide makes it easy to find resources and figure out problems on our own. Only if we cannot find the answer in the guide do we contact technical support.

Integrating SevOne with our other tools is pretty easy. The API documents are pretty good and it's easy to understand the functions that they have if we need to use them. This integration has helped with collaboration between support teams and specifically, the integration with NLI and ServiceNow is helpful for troubleshooting and proactive change. Overall, it is not too difficult to integrate.

The user management features need to be improved. It would be nice if we had more granular control, or layers of control, out of the box. The way it is now, it is simple to configure, but if we want to add greater restrictions with more detail, it becomes quite difficult to do. 

Depending on the task, there are too many things to control. For example, there is no problem if I simply need to create a user role. However, if we have to create with LDAP then we need to manage many groups and different cases. This is something that I wish we could do differently.

I have been working with SevOne for close to two years. As a company, we have been using SevOne since 2018 or 2019 but I personally became involved in 2020.

When I started, it was in the pre-production testing phase, and not yet fully deployed.

Stability-wise, so far, it has been good. The only trouble we had was when we suddenly exceeded our license count. That was because of the mistake that we made in the object rules.

SevOne's collection abilities cover multiple vendors' equipment, and the scalability in this regard is important to us. When we make changes to our environment, such as the addition of new devices from a new vendor, SevOne very quickly upgrades the system to meet our requirements. They are quite flexible and whatever we have, they try to accommodate. I have never heard them say that they could not do something. Rather, if something is not available then we submit a request for it to be supported.

Scalability really depends on the license. I think that they have a per-device license but this is not what we chose. We opted to purchase the license on a per-object basis, which is why it is difficult for us to scale. We are continuously monitoring the system to ensure that we don't exceed our number of licenses. If we had a per-device license then it would save some unnecessary tasks, and we could use it fully if there were no license limits.

We primarily have two types of users. There are those who add and monitor devices, and then simpler users that only view the reports. Anyone from our technology department may need to monitor bandwidth, or CPU usage, or another resource, which is something that they can request access for. 

At this time, it is mainly the network operations team that handles troubleshooting, and our team, which is in charge of proactive updates. Between our two groups, there are 261 users.

Over time, our usage will increase, albeit slowly. We have to be careful that the SevOne functionality does not overlap with our other tools because we don't want to duplicate it unnecessarily.

The technical support is very good, as are the sales engineers and the general troubleshooting staff. Compared to other vendors that we have worked with, they are really good and very helpful. They respond quickly and their explanation is very thorough.

Overall, they communicate better with their customers than other vendors do.

Prior to SevOne, we used CA eHealth. SevOne provides better visuals with more variety and better detail, and it gives us more control over what we can see. Overall, our new system is easier to use, easier to configure, and the visuals are nicer.

We switched to SevOne because eHealth reached end-of-life.

It is difficult for me to compare between tools because I did not begin working with SevOne until 2020, so I do not know much about the old tool. 

I don't know how long the initial deployment took, but I just recently added two extra nodes, and I am setting them up right now. Because we have the VMs, setting up is pretty easy. It is just a matter of the firewall rules and how we monitor only the objects that we want to monitor.

Our license is based on the number of object accounts and this is a challenge for us because if we enable every interface or every object on the device, it will exceed our license limit. Initially, we had trouble with how we can limit the number of licenses, and also how we can monitor only the objects that we need to monitor. Ultimately, it means that our object rules are a little bit complicated.

Our in-house team deployed it with the help of a SevOne sales engineer and their customer support. The process included four or five people from our side. One person was contracted to do the actual configuring of SevOne, and another was mainly in charge of creating reports. Somebody else was responsible for helping to transition and move our data from the older system to SevOne, making it easier for the end-users to adapt to the change.

With respect to maintenance, I'm the only person who regularly works on the setup and configuration. There are one or two other people who are working on the reports.

One of the returns we get is an assurance, based on data, as to whether upgrades are necessary for our branches. For example, if one of the branches is complaining about throughput or anything else, then we have data to show them. In this way, we can decide whether an upgrade is really necessary, or not, which is of value to us.

There are different options available for licensing, with the per-device option being more expensive but more flexible. If the company has a sufficient budget then I would recommend using a per-device license. Although it is more expensive, it is better because it saves time. However, if you already have other servers or solutions in place that perform the same function, and you don't have the requirement on a per-device level, then the per-object license is a better choice, as long as you know the exact number that you need.

There is separate licensing and pricing for the support, which also has different options available. We opted to purchase the standard, business hours support. 

We have not evaluated other products for bandwidth monitoring since I have been with the company. Prior to that, I'm not aware of any that they considered.

We are not using all of the features of SevOne. For example, we are not using Net Flow at this time. We are still deciding on what we should do with the data that is being produced by SevOne. For example, we are working on how to manage the users' access because it depends on the visibility that is needed. We don't want everybody to see everything.

To accomplish this, we have to use both NMS and DI creatively to control what users can see and what they cannot. User management is a bit complicated, although I think that most devices are like that.

Essentially, we're trying to combine NMS and DI to meet our requirements. We want to configure it so that some people are very restricted to certain areas that they can view, which is something that we now control using the reporting. They do not have access to NMS, but on DI, they have access only to only a specific report. The problem with doing this is that we have more work to do when we define the role to the user. With their restrictions, they are unable to create a report, so it needs to be provided by us and then we need to give them permission to build it.

I understand that some organizations will not need to have this level of detail for user access control, and for them, the user management page is pretty easy to understand. This is an advantage. However, we need to have a greater level of granularity, so simplicity is a disadvantage. It's both.

My advice for anybody who is implementing SevOne is that before deciding whether the licensing is object-based or device-based, you really need to know what you want to monitor and estimate the number of licenses that you need. This is something that is really important in the beginning and I think that it's something that we made a mistake on. Of course, it is possible to purchase additional licenses later but depending on which model you choose, you really need to think and count how many devices or how many objects you want to monitor. It is also important to understand how SevOne counts objects, before purchasing the license.

In summary, for our requirement, SevOne does pretty much what we ask and does it very well. It is easy to use, the guide is very clear, detailed, and easy to understand, and the support is great. We are not using all of the functions but overall, the out-of-the-box service and customer support are very good. I am not familiar with the other tools in the same space so I am comparing functionality against different solutions. However, I can say that their customer service is outstanding compared to other vendors.

I would rate this solution a nine out of ten.

This is mainly used for network performance monitoring and availability alerting. Also, we are using SevOne to help with the troubleshooting of any issue. For example, whenever there is a service outage, we have a look into the graphing data. Mainly, we are using the SNMP data and NetFlow. Other than that, we are using the ICMP availability, which is just an availability check. These are the major areas that we have been pulling.

It is a physical box installed in our data centers.

We are not building the reports. We just give the reports some basic things. It's kind of self-service for the engineers. They have access to the tool and build their own reports based on their requirements. So, they explore whatever is available out-of-the-box, like the performance report, topology, or any other kinds of alerting reports. Nowadays, they have started concentrating more on Data Insight.

Whenever there is an outage, the first thing they will do is come into SevOne and do security data analysis. They will then contact the next level (the support groups) for troubleshooting. We also get a deep dive into which host is consuming more data and utilizing what protocols. These are all NetFlow, so it is all pretty helpful. It's helping with the day-to-day operations. We have a separate team who consumes the data for the operational analysis. Whenever they do root cause analysis, they look into the data.

SevOne offers multiple integrations. They also have their own collectors and have business partnerships with other enterprise-owned companies, like NetApp. They have efficient integration which comes with the existing support, and we have been working with SevOne to implement it.

Sometimes, there are multiple issues outside of our network, but we have visibility into that kind of data.

It is pretty much a tool which provides all the data sources. You can integrate with multiple other platforms, like SD-WAN. They also do integration and offer the app data. Therefore, you can pull data from many other sources that can be used for visualization and analysis purposes. Also, they have Data Insight, which calls the SevOne API and gets the data in real-time. This is an additional model that gives a direct view into the metrics and imports critical KPIs.

We have a dedicated SevOne appliance for the data flow. The overall comprehensiveness of the data is good. There are no false statuses. Whatever it reports, that pretty much matches the actual device performance.

SevOne provides support for all universal connectors. They internally work with other data sources to get features implemented. We have an SD-WAN implementation and use other app data to monitor performance. If you pull that data into one centralized location, that is very useful for management.

The solution supports software-defined networks. This is required in terms of analyzing any sort of integration or performance issues, which are all very critical metrics.

The out-of-the-box reports help out and have a good design, which provide us with more value. We can import/export them. You can save a report based on your requirements. You can build some templates, and using those templates, you can then build multiple reports. So, their template option is really helping us out a lot. We use the reports out-of-the-box most of the time. We are not customizing them as of now. 

The dashboard is all based on the object indicator and different devices. They have a hierarchy where users create a report and select the required indicators to pull out some data. It is all pretty straightforward and flexible.

We have an integration with ITSM event management, ticket creation, and alerting. It provides good options in terms of REST API and SOAP API. You can follow the trap to the destination whenever there is an alleged violation. They have multiple options for integrating with any other ticketing tool as well as event mapping tools.

We previously have had discussions on some reporting enhancements. So, we raised a feature request, which was delivered from SevOne.

I have been in this domain for almost 10 years. When it comes to SevOne, I started using it two years ago.

The stability is 100%. It is very stable.

All the stakeholders in the organization are using it.

We have two administrators for the solution who are responsible for the application. 

The technical support is great. They are very quick if we get stuck and they need to provide resolution. They are experienced with the product.

We have regular calls with the sales and technical teams.

When I joined, I started using SevOne and it was already implemented. We have done some version upgrades and configurations. I am just managing it because it was already running on-premises.

SevOne offers multiple integrations. They also have their own collectors and have business partnerships with other enterprise-owned companies, like NetApp. They have efficient integration which comes with the existing support, and we have been working with SevOne to implement it.

SevOne has excellent support. They are pretty much available whenever there is an update. That is not run by us. They also work with us to complete any planned upgrades.

Before the upgrade, we have a precheck and evaluation call so we can plan the upgrade. This is based on the SevOne advisory for the version update. The upgrade is seamless, not complex.

We have definitely seen ROI. We are adding more value. This is the primary tool used, in terms of support. So, it does a really good job in terms of getting the data and our current use cases. It keeps us stabilized as well as up and running.

When comparing it with other products, those have multiple installations, e.g., for NetFlow, you need to have a different model, but also you need to have a different application. SevOne is the one tool which provides multiple features. The servers or databases have different plugins. It can be used to monitor various components of the network, applications, etc.

It is a very simple, flexible tool with an easy graphical user interface. This is a great tool for having all the SNMP and ICMP reporting in one place. There are a lot of integrations for this tool.

They offer good monitoring and reporting.

I would rate SevOne as a nine out of 10.

We use SevOne to manage about 10,000 network devices on our system. We monitor those devices with all the performance data, run reports, and see alerts. We have a manager of managers that sits above SevOne that actually displays all of our alerts, does some correlation and other things. We also provide some maps and reporting.

SevOne also enables us to detect network performance issues faster and before they impact end-users. We were monitoring the load balancers on our backstage passes for access to the network. And we can see, it went from around 3% to around 75% over a couple-of-week period where they had to send in all the remote access and change everything. SevOne really did a number for us, during the pandemic, of isolating which load balances were overloaded with users working from home. So that right there, was worth its weight in gold, because the management created all these reports for load balancers, for access for remote workers, and that's all they focused on, for a couple of months. So that was nice.

It has saved at least 50% because if we're just using ping and a couple of other tools, you can't really see that, all these devices went down at the same time, that segment, or that peer.

Data Insight reporting tool is the most valuable feature. They came up with it a couple of years ago. The most pleasing factor is the dark theme. You don't have a white background. It has templates that you can create for all kinds of reports that you can hit on the fly. It has a much better printing of the reports. If you want to send PDFs to people, the reports are actually decent. Whereas for years, the old architecture of the PDFs was rubbish and even our customers said, "We have to manipulate your PDFs because they all have bad margin breaks. SevOne fixed that a couple of years ago with the new Data Insight. It's fantastic. I would say the reporting of the new Data Insight is my favorite feature. 

We also have the Wifi Controller feature and we're starting to turn that up. That's going to be nice because we're going to be able to monitor wifi. Our group used to monitor wifi, about 10 years ago, maybe even longer, and then they took it away and gave it to Cisco Prime LAN. And they come to find out that Cisco Prime wasn't monitoring it as well as they thought. So we got some quotes from SevOne for a wifi solution, and now we're implementing that. We're excited about the wifi solution.

We also use NetFlow and Databus. It's not that new, maybe five years old. But everybody's starting to get on board where we just send our raw data to scientists. They correlate all the data into how they want to report on it. Those are a few of the new things that we like to use.

I would rate the comprehensiveness of SevOne's collection of network performance and flow data a ten out of ten. I've used Concord and eHealth before this. I used HP OpenView for 15 years. Right now, SevOne is top-notch for me because it's an all-in-one package, and it's easy for the operator to learn. If I can learn it, anybody can learn it. But it has a lot of features underneath that. I am one of the admins, but we have some really top-notch programmers that go in and get that in-depth data. I operate as an admin, I help people out, create policies, and everything. But when it comes to the in-depth stuff, I leave that to the scripters. I'd rather just click on the GUIs and let somebody else scrub through the comments.

It's extremely important that SevOne's collection abilities cover multiple vendors' equipment. We have F5 Firewalls, Palo Alto load-balancers, intrusion protection devices, ClearPass servers, Aruba, we got it all. SevOne has a good process. We also like the certification where we get the MIBs and the OIDs from the customer or the vendor. And they say, "We'd like to monitor this CPU key performance indicator." Or "These HC octets and the interfaces. If it's above 80% we want an alert."

With the vendors, we just take a new vendor like Aruba, they'll want to monitor the fan speed or whatever, we'll take that OID and send it to SevOne. Their certification team is top-notch. They have a 10-day turnaround, but for us, they always provide it quicker. We tell the customer 10 days but we sometimes tell the customer too, that they're always quicker. And they always are.

The process is easy. As long as the homework is done ahead of time, either by us or the vendor, we just provide SevOne with the OIDs, they provide us with a file, and we import it into SevOne. We apply it to the right vendor and all our key performance indicators are there. It's wonderful.

We're also just starting to monitor software-defined and streaming telemetry-based networks in our environment. We got a new manager and he's been pushing it. He loves SevOne. We use Data Bus, NetFlow, and we're doing the telemetry stuff. I don't really understand it, but we're working with some scientists on ride controls, to send them that data. When they started doing this, I told them "You better get some sharp people down here." And they did. 

The manager is a great manager. He's holding everybody's hands to the fire, and I got a bunch of burn marks on my hands. But we're getting progress. SevOne was great, but we weren't taking it to the next level. And other people were coming up with other tools, saying "This tool does this." And we said, "Well, SevOne does that, if you want us to do a proof of concept." So we've been doing all these proof of concepts.

In the old days, reports had nice baselines and stuff that we could use for deviations. With the new Data Insight reporting tool, now we have percentiles that we could have in the old ones, but when you had a reporting tool that wasn't that good, you're not real excited about baselines and stuff.

With Data Insight, we can see baselines and deviations. We can decide how many deviations we want to view. We can do percentiles. We can do time over time, and the graphing in which you can separate the graphs. Data Insight is a game-changer for reporting. 

You can look at the reports and it's just a picture, so your brain can say, "Whoa, that's out of normal. There's the baseline and there's somebody making a backup in the middle of the day or something." So, the out-of-the-box reporting is very nice. Every time they upgrade us, they upgrade Data Insight and they add more templates that their team has decided that the crews could use out there. They're great. I always see the new templates and I just copy it all over to my environment and change the names so people don't see.

The dashboards are fantastic. I don't use them as much as I should. I just started creating some. I'm doing it in the new Data Insights. You can customize it to your customers. We don't do much of that because we don't have a big enough crew to manage all the users out there, there are hundreds of users. And if we had to be their reporting gurus, we'd be hung up all day long, just clicking on reports for people. 

I love the dashboards because you can put it all in the front. You can have heat maps on the CPU. If you want it to have a dashboard for all of F5 you could just have the dashboard for F5 and say, "Hey, we're having CPU problems. I just want a heat map. Show me something red that I can click on and go troubleshoot." It's so nice.

There are a lot of pain points. My main problem is that we don't have a high availability system. There are 20 peers. We're going to lose the end-of-life appliances that are old. If we lose a peer and it doesn't come back, we lose all that data. The reason we don't have high availability is because it's double the charge.

I wish there was some way that we could just get a snapshot of our system so that if one of our peers failed, we could go through the process and get it back to where it was. If we built another peer, and it took us four days to build another peer and get all the firewall rules and everything it would be nice when it came back if we had a snapshot that said, "Hey, peer two, that died." Then can we just slap all that data onto the new peer two and have all that historical data, as opposed to just importing it new, and it wouldn't have any data from the past. That's kind of a pie in the sky thing. But I would like some kind of backup system.

I've been using it for about eight years now, which is actually a long time. Usually, our applications come and go. 

The stability is dynamite. We are having some issues in our VM world, where we don't have visibility to our peers that are out in the VM world. Sometimes our teams might get a peer locked up or whatever, but it's never SevOne's problem. When we had our appliances, it was rock solid. There were no issues with SevOne. You had a disk array and if you had a disk that went bad, you just ordered the disk and dispatched somebody out. I'd give them a positive as far as stability.

Scalability seems to be incredible. We're adding peers one after another. We got the wifi solution and then we just added four new peers, two on the east coast, two on the west coast of the United States. We just order more peers and get them built. SevOne sends us the OVA files. We install it, we open up a case of SevOne. They help us bring it into the cluster. And boom, we've got another whole peer ready for another 1000, 2000 devices. So its expandability is very nice, much better than OpenView and the other things I worked on.

We previously used HP OpenView. That was my thing. I liked it because of the maps, you could have all kinds of cartoons and stuff in the background. That was fun for the graphic artist people. SevOne just blew HP OpenView out of the water.

We had four servers and around 10,000 devices out there and we just couldn't handle it, it was just too much for HP OpenView. HP OpenView stagnated because I used it for about 15 years, and the last five years it looked like it was dying on the vine, with the support and stuff. They changed systems and our people in charge of budgeting and projects, decided not to go the route that HP suggested and went the SevOne route, which I'm glad they did.

I was the sidekick for the setup but it seemed to be pretty easy. I had installed, from setup, HP OpenView systems with four D80 servers around the world. The SevOne environment was pretty good. We were small at the beginning.

Without the planning and everything, just when we got the devices and turned them up, it took around a week or two. We were in our own little lab, testing.

We had a database and we were taking Cisco devices first. Once we had all key indicators identified that they wanted to monitor, we did it. Then we slowly brought in each vendor with the certified files and checked them as we imported them. It was a good plan.

We've used SevOne any chance we can get. We call them in all the time. They have a really tight relationship with my boss. They bring them in whenever there are questions on anything. And their support team is fantastic. We open up calls and get our tickets taken care of nicely.

SevOne is definitely earning its money because different departments are requesting SevOne monitoring for certain situations. And it's extra-billing, of course. I never see any of it, I just see the devices and we add them and we charge them. So they're bringing in money. 

They're getting their money back.

They were constantly looking at other products. I don't look at them. I don't even have time to think about other products. They looked at NerveCenter but NerveCenter is different. My customer is constantly looking for other replacements that are cheaper. Everybody's looking at their budget and asking "How can we get cheaper?" 

At one time they suggested ThousandEyes. It's much cheaper and easier. Well, they had ThousandEyes monitoring a little section of their network and they realized that there's no way ThousandEyes can do it. It's just too big of a network. ThousandEyes can do little stuff but overall, I work on changes all the time and I do my SevOne stuff, and the guy does his ThousandEyes stuff and his stuff is not quite right. 

My advice would be to read the PDFs they have and then look at the videos on YouTube. That's what I do. I'm not a voracious reader, but I go to YouTube a lot. 

I would rate SevOne a nine out of ten.

My use case at the initial startup was very simple. I had a carrier, which was a backbone globally implemented, and I needed a monitoring solution. The type of solution I needed had to capture SNMP traps, poll my equipment, perform traffic analysis, deal with historical data, and things like that. This requirement has remained constant through the entire seven years of implementation with them.

At the end of the month, we're ending our relationship with this vendor for a variety of different reasons. Among the problems is the pricing model that they have, although a lot of it has to do with the fact that their virtualization solution isn't compatible with our Kubernetes environment.

SevOne has enabled us to integrate network performance management data across ITSM and our business decision-making tools, predominantly through the ServiceNow platform. We also did a Salesforce implementation where SevOne leveraged Salesforce to determine if a circuit was production versus non-production. Essentially, this distinction implies whether we should care about it, or not.

The integration with Salesforce was pretty easy, where most of the work was on the Salesforce side. It was probably one of the simpler integrations that we did for the platform.

The comprehensiveness of SevOne in terms of collecting network performance and flow data, when we started using this in 2013, was very limited. It was developed predominantly for a Cisco network and I'm a hundred percent Juniper. As such, it required a lot of work to get the platform to not only understand it but to speak in terms of Juniper MIB files, and even the nomenclature. For a Cisco network, it would have been a situation where you opened the box, plugged it in, and walked away. With Juniper, it was very much not that.

At this point, our collection capabilities are limited to just Juniper equipment. This is restricted by the tool that we have, which only covers Juniper networks.

With respect to streaming telemetry, we do not have it implemented. We were working with them to try and understand what they could do in this regard, but I do not believe that they supported streaming telemetry at the time.

The most valuable feature as of late has been the API integration with ServiceNow. Honestly, the biggest bang for the buck I've got out of SevOne has been this development. The bi-directional integration with ServiceNow has saved me a lot of money in man-hours, over the course of the last few years.

I don't have an exact figure for how much money I have saved, but I can say that it's hundreds of thousands of dollars. What it comes down to is when you're able to automate the console work with the ticketing system, you're saving people from copying and pasting, and other such menial tasks. For example, you are able to auto-populate tickets, update tickets, change the status of tickets, and also do verification to see if something is valid. You can make determinations such as whether there is a ticket currently open or whether there was a ticket previously open. Automating things like that, so a human no longer has to do them, can save hours a day per human per shift.

The out of the box reports and workflows are very sufficient for helping to understand what's normal and abnormal in the network. Out of the box, the reports were certainly there and even though it didn't necessarily understand Juniper, the minute we turned it on, we had a bunch of data. In fact, there was a lot of data that we had never previously seen before on the backbone, made available to us just by virtue of turning it on. It just needed to be cleaned up and polished.

We were aware of the reporting when we decided to implement SevOne, as we had done a lot of pre-sales work with them to make sure we knew what to expect out of the box. Even if we needed to do a lot of customization, it was certainly expected, and that's what we saw. It was important to us because we needed to immediately show some sort of value with all of the work that we'd invested over the course of the implementation. I needed to show almost a day-one value, and that certainly did help.

With respect to customization, the reports themselves didn't take too much effort. We have had a resident SevOne engineer help manage the platform and tend to those apps throughout the entire implementation of SevOne. From my standpoint, it was simply a case of asking the resident engineer for what I needed or what I expected, and whether it was a function of hours or days. Shortly after, I would have exactly what I needed.

An example of how we have customized reporting is the top talking report. It is important because we have a lot of customers that are very bandwidth-intensive. This report is for aggregate bandwidth and it is from a trap-generation standpoint.

I also have a performance metric where we monitor a specific group of circuits that are notorious for having capacity issues with customers. Essentially, it is a top talker traffic graph where I get the top ten circuits for the past 24 hours, and it's a live graph. I get it as a report, but I can also watch it in real-time.

SevOne provides continuous analytics of our network and it's important because if you're in a network where you're polling every three minutes or every five minutes, then you could be missing important events. There's a lot of stuff happening and it can be very damaging in a matter of seconds. If you're not polling or collecting data to absorb that frequency or that duration, then you're not doing anything. You're completely overlooking the important stuff. Being able to see in some form or another, not always in the graph, but being able to see that real-time activity and have it called out to a human is exceptionally important. Again, it doesn't need to be a graph, but that's one of the things we leverage SevOne for.

With respect to giving us a complete view of our network performance, it's been very good. I don't know how many times a week I have a STEM vice president come to me and ask me what's going on with the backbone or how the backbone is performing with a certain world event or corporate event. Whatever it may be, I can get a very good visual summary, very quickly, just by virtue of logging in. It's just a matter of making sure that you have the right graph. You have to tell SevOne what you need and have it presented to you in the right way. Otherwise, it doesn't know. Once you accomplish that, it's immediate.

SevOne has enabled us to detect network performance issues faster, and before they impact end-users. It is very good at capturing those events, documenting them, opening a ticket, and letting a human know about them. There is a definite ability of proactiveness with the tool.

If I consider where we were in 2013, it could take several hours or days to detect events in some cases. I have examples of catastrophic events happening that we never even knew about, that SevOne is able to capture. I estimate that we are 60% faster on average at capturing and actioning events, hopefully proactively.

Their virtualization solution is not compatible with our Kubernetes environment, which is one of the reasons we are ending our relationship with them. I didn't spend a lot of time evaluating with them why it was the case. It was simply not a roadmap item for them, so it was a pretty quick conversation.

We have been using SevOne for approximately seven years.

This product is very scalable, especially if it's just a matter of growing the network. You add more devices, make sure your licensing is in check, and the system ingests it as that equipment is green-lighted.

If you're changing technology, adding layers upon which you want them to monitor, it is still scalable, although it takes a little bit more work.

We have approximately two dozen users in the organization.

Their technical support is very competent. We have had an immediate reaction to our issues, even without the resident engineer involved. Their technical support is 24/7. That said, I've actually had very minimal interaction with them, aside from some hand-holding during software upgrades. Other than that, the platform has been rock solid.

Prior to using SevOne, we were using an internal homegrown solution.

After we got done building it, it largely sat idle until we started onboarding customers. As customers grew, a need for a focused operations group, tooling, processes, and procedures arose. That's where SevOne came in. We needed a legit platform to monitor the backbone rather than use existing processes and procedures that just didn't work or didn't apply.

Essentially, with the growth of the backbone and the responsibility of it, we realized that we needed an enterprise-grade solution.

The initial setup was pretty straightforward. We knew that the biggest hurdle we had to overcome was the Juniper compatibility, so that's where we focused the resources in the planning.

The means of actually getting it installed, upgrading the software, and then actually discovering the network worked as expected. It crawled, it discovered, and it did everything we needed it to. It just needed to be tuned for a 100% Juniper network.

Of course, the Juniper tuning took many hours of post-sales engineering support as well as a resident engineer. It took a lot of work on the SevOne side to actually get it to that point.

In total, the deployment took approximately three months.

I and a colleague were responsible for deployment.

Maintenance requires one FTE.

In terms of ROI, I don't have a whole lot in terms of metrics. However, I would say that with DI, someone has definitely started to come around from a visualization standpoint. Not only do you get an alert with an indicative color like red, orange, or yellow, but it is well represented for different stakeholders. It is not only useful for the engineer sitting at the desk but also for the tier-three that supports that engineer, all the way up to the vice president, who just wants to know how things are going.

They've come a long way in developing that. Back in the day, all people wanted was something that told them the status; red is bad, green is good, yellow means that you should look into it. That was all the information that they had. These days, people want predictive analysis and they want to be able to trend failure. They want to be able to dig into the numbers a little bit more and graphically represent that. To this end, DI is actually something that they're doing to chase that down and fill that void.

Historically, that hadn't been the case. I think DI came out approximately four years ago, and I think that's something that they're really doing to try and add value to the platform.

The pricing has not evolved with the market, which is one of the reasons we are moving to a new product.

When we implemented SevOne, we had been evaluating other options for a couple of years for varying needs, although not necessarily the backbone. During that process, we had noted that SevOne would be the most accommodating and capable for our needs.

At the time, it just wasn't possible for us to implement it.

SevOne is capable of bringing together its analytics reports and workflows in a single dashboard, although I don't actively use that specific dashboard. The stuff that I use with SevOne is very specific to a need at the moment and as such, I don't require the use of a collapsed view. In my world, it's hard to summarize everything in one place. Everything is going to be compartmentalized, so I have multiple dashboards with different data. It isn't that I don't want to use a single pane of glass but it just doesn't serve any purpose for what I need on a daily basis.

Overall, this is a good product and we had a really good relationship with the vendor. When it all started, I had a pretty basic need that I was unable to get any support internally for. We had spoken with them before, and at that initial time, I had some internal obstructions to bringing them onboard. The problems were not financially related and over time, as usual, things changed and the obstructions were gone. Once that happened, I was given the opportunity and the power to develop my own tooling suite for my team, and SevOne was a pretty easy discussion at that point in time.

The relationship continued to be a really good one up until a couple of years ago, when we were growing and of course, they wanted in on that, but their pricing was not adapting to what we were seeing in the market. They were still doing pricing from 2013 when we bought in. Naturally, anytime I expand tool usage, it works in my best interest to make sure that what I'm using is still the best implementation for not only the cost but also, the scalability at the time.

The biggest lesson that I have learned from using SevOne is that leveraging your platforms to do more work in place of a human, isn't always a bad thing. A lot of people think that you're just trying to replace humans with automation and software. What it really boils down to is that you're enabling those humans to do something else that is more important. It's not a function of eliminating jobs. It's letting the humans work on more important, complex items, and let the software and the automation do what they can to contribute to that equation.

It's not that it's necessarily been a challenge or an obstacle for me, but it is important to consider it when explaining the process. When you explain to someone that we're changing this process because SevOne can now do a certain aspect of it, with human involvement starting somewhere further down the line, you have to be able to sell that as an improvement to the process. Ultimately, it's allowing that human to focus on other things that have previously been neglected.

This problem of automating a task that is historically done by a human has been a lesson that I've learned with SevOne. The reality is that you have to let automation do what it can, and let humans do the more important engineering work. Getting away from that stigma and letting the software do its job and really focusing on releasing that, allowing the humans to do the more technical and engineering-level work, is really an act in cost-savings and from a Human Resourcing standpoint, you're getting more bang for your buck out of it. You don't want to pay people a lot of money an hour to sit there and say that red is bad and green is good. If you can get away from that, you're going to be more efficient.

I would rate this solution a seven out of ten.