IBM SevOne Network Performance Management (NPM) Reviews

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.

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're using SevOne to monitor our network infrastructure. We provide monitoring services and performance capacity management for network gear, including routers, switches, wireless controllers, firewalls, and load balancers, to name a few. We have various manufacturers and different device models that we leverage the solution to monitor in our organization.

Our deployment of SevOne is mostly virtualized. We have gone completely virtual in our environment. We have SevOne deployed in different regions of the world: the U.S., Hong Kong for Asia, as well as in London for Europe. 

We've been able to expand our service with this tool, without the need for additional tools. In addition to being able to monitor network devices, the tool is capable of monitoring server-type devices as well. That means we didn't have to get a separate tool to monitor servers. We're able to ingest system log information and create alert policies on it. Overall, end-to-end, it is very flexible, enabling us to leverage the lessons learned and apply them to all the different component gear, whether it's server gear or database gear. One of the benefits is that we've been able to leverage one tool to do a lot of things.

SevOne also enables us to integrate our network performance management data across our ITSM and business decision-making tools. One component of SevOne is called Data Bus and that allows us to stream and share performance data from SevOne with external applications. We have some use case scenarios where we are sharing the performance metrics being captured in SevOne with other applications in the business. Integrating the network data with other solutions wasn't difficult. The way it works is that we're streaming the database, and small JSON payloads, into a Kafka Messaging Cluster, where external applications can just subscribe to that topic, download the data, and use those metrics as needed.

When it comes to detecting network performance issues faster, the tool is very capable. Being able to set up alerts and policies based on baselines, and deviation from baselines, is pretty good, without our having to set hard thresholds on a performance item. We have discovered things that way. Since leveraging SevOne, we see most of the outages or pre-outages in an alert from SevOne, and we can dispatch to troubleshoot the issue. We depend on it a lot at this point.

For me, the most valuable feature of SevOne is the capability to monitor any device that has SNMP availability. We can pick up any KPIs that we need, regardless of the model, type, or manufacturer. As long as the device is able to respond to SNMP, we have a way to put our SevOne hooks into the device to capture some KPI data.

One of the solution's biggest strengths is its capacity management performance, with out-of-the-box reports through NMS, as well as its ability to collect NetFlow-related data from devices. The collection of network performance and flow data is important because we have many critical business applications. Whenever there is slow processing or slow response from these applications, the first thing that the user community will look at is the network. They'll wonder, "What's going on with the network? Why are we getting a slow response?" Having those capacity-management KPIs around the components that make up that application helps greatly to narrow down where the root cause is when there is an incident.

It's also very critical that SevOne's collection abilities cover multiple vendors' equipment. Depending on the business unit's needs, it may have a combination of many manufacturers. It's very critical for us to be able to have that flexibility and not to have to worry about a specific manufacturer.

There is also support for software-defined and streaming telemetry-based networks, and we are starting to do a little bit more on that side. That's the direction in which everyone is going: telemetry and data science around the collection of the data, and proactively identifying an issue based on data models. Telemetry, and the ability to capture data in that format, is going to be a big push.

In addition, SevOne's out-of-the-box reports and workflows for automatically helping us understand what is normal and what is abnormal in our network are very comprehensive. One of the things that we like about the reports and the data we see is that, over time, we are able to create a baseline and look at it versus the actual data points. We are very quickly able to see any deviations from that baseline. It's very useful for us.

Those reports definitely speed up the solution's time-to-value. We have business timelines to deliver on. The ability to quickly onboard devices from different manufacturers and collect KPI data, and being able to leverage some of the out-of-the-box reports fairly quickly to look at the performance data, is very important to us.

We are also able to create our own reports. As a matter of fact, we allow many of our telecom engineers to come into the tool and build and customize the reports they need for their specific use cases. It's not only easy to make those reports available, but our user community can be the creators of their own reports. It's easy to use for them. The learning curve is not big. Anybody can start picking and choosing how they want to visualize the data.

For example, right now, we're working from home. There's been a lot of importance around our load balances, for how people connect remotely through our network. Being able to monitor the behavior, the active users, and any drop in users has been key. We have a custom report that we built around each of the load balancers that people come through from their homes, regardless of the users' locations. We can see the trends of active users, and how many users are dropped down. We leverage that report to communicate to our executive team how well we're providing remote workers access to the network.

And as you run some of these reports, like the health summary of the devices, you are also able to drill down to the specific KPIs of certain components. You can have a bird's-eye view, and then drill down all the way to the specific item in that report.

Finally, the solution's dashboard is very important, especially as we do capacity management analysis and as we project the growth of the organization. It helps us understand how certain devices are being utilized. That data is very important for us.

One area that requires a little bit of improvement is the topology of visualization and being able to map out connections, end-to-end. It's able to do that, but it's not as impressive as we would like it to be. We would like to understand the different interface types and the connection points better, through the visualization. Heatmaps also need further development.

In addition, you can take a device and look at all the metrics that are being collected or enabled. But having a quick map view of the KPIs versus the alerting policies that we've built around a device, and being able to map that quicker and have a one-to-one correlation, would be useful.

We've been using SevOne in this company since 2013. Personally, I've been involved with SevOne for the last three years.

It's pretty stable. We hardly have any issues with the product. When we encounter issues, they have a good support structure with their help desk. We get a pretty quick turnaround on any issues that we raise with the vendor.

It's very scalable, especially if you are going with a virtual environment. It's just a matter of deploying the collectors where you need them and quickly discovering devices.

We monitor around 7800 network devices, which includes routers, switches, wireless controllers, et cetera. In addition, we monitor about 21,000 access points.

As far as administration of the tool, we have three engineers who concentrate on the various network types to make recommendations on the KPIs and the monitoring. They also handle the onboarding of devices and configuring of alert policies.

I wasn't involved in the initial setup. Before I came onboard, SevOne was running on a lot of physical devices. But I was involved in doing the upgrades and restructuring it to be more virtualized, so that could expand the cluster and the services. Being able to go virtual, drove the ability to scale, based on the demands of the business, fairly quickly.

We have definitely seen ROI from using SevOne. We've expanded our scope of control and we've increased the number of devices in our environment. Because we have different business units, we have a multi-tenant environment where devices are for different business units. Being able to organize them separately and increase the server count or the device counts has definitely helped us to provide some additional services.

Many tools price things based on the number of KPIs that you're collecting around a device. In many cases, there could be hundreds of metrics that you need to collect. SevOne provides device-level pricing. That gives us the flexibility to turn on, and expand on, the metrics that we're collecting around those devices, without taking a financial hit.

We've looked at other products such as Zenoss and SolarWinds.

What we liked about SevOne is the ability to onboard any type of device that has SNMP capabilities. We could go to SevOne and say, "Hey, we have this new device," and provide the SNMP OIDs and they quickly certify that equipment for us to onboard. And the partnership we have with them is another aspect we like.

My advice is to have a good architecture review with SevOne to understand what your business needs are. Make sure that you are deploying the SevOne collectors as close to the network gear as possible, so you have the metrics with no latency over the network.

The ease of use of the dashboard has improved, now that they've introduced Data Insight, which is their new visualization reporting engine. That is a little bit more user-friendly. They've made good progress with Data Insight to make things even easier.

SevOne is an eight out of 10. They do a lot of things very well, but there are some areas that need some improvements and they're aware of them. They're working on them for future releases. Every tool has a niche environment, but there's no Holy Grail or perfect tool out there.

Overall, we feel SevOne is well-positioned. It's a very strong tool. What I like about them is the support structure. Being able to collaborate with them, when we need some additional services or recommendations on the tool, is helpful. It's a tool that positions us very well to provide immediate service and meet the needs of the business.

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.

SevOne is used mainly for network monitoring. In my company, there are different services that include mobile data, voice, and broadband. SevOne is being used across all of these three services, and it also covers our corporate network.

SevOne is also being used for business reporting and capacity planning.

SevOne provides a comprehensive view of network performance data. It supports multi-vendors out of the box, which is very good. In 90% of the cases, new devices are plug-and-play, so when a new version comes out then SevOne has support for it out of the box. This is the case with either network monitoring or NetFlow data. In the worst-case scenario, they have an open framework that we can use as the next step. It helps us to get it up and monitored fairly quickly.

The ability to support multiple vendors' equipment is very important. In fact, it is one of our top priorities because this compatibility saves us time and money, as we are able to get new equipment set up quickly and without much effort. That's a key thing for us.

I'm not able to quantify our savings in terms of monetary value but in an ideal scenario, we save two weeks of time. When we add a device, we get data out of the monitoring points. Nine times out of ten, SevOne works immediately. In the exceptions, we reach out to the vendor to clarify what they need from an SNMP point of view. After that, we take it up with the SevOne certification team. With any new vendor that comes up, SevOne provides a 10-day SLA for the free certification. That's a pretty good saving.

It is very important to us that SevOne supports streaming telemetry-based networks. As with any other company, our network is evolving and we are moving towards telemetry. We are in a pre-discussion phase with SevOne to use the telemetric components so hopefully, in the near future, we will have it in our product suite.

We do have SDN but as of today, not with SevOne. That is something that we have aspirations for and will look to in the future.

The out-of-the-box reports and workflows help us to understand what is normal and what is abnormal in our network, and this helps to speed up time-to-value. This is one of SevOne's strong points as I compare them with other vendors that I have seen over the years.

SevOne gives us the ability to edit and customize the out-of-the-box reports and we do that quite a lot. We take what SevOne has provided and we change it to fit our needs. For example, when vendors change their versions and release, we fine-tune them to accommodate these things.

It is fairly easy to customize the out-of-the-box reports, although one needs to have a bit of knowledge to do that. I see it as any other product, but there are some limitations to it. There are complex structures from certain vendors such as Cisco that are not easily supported. For instance, Alcatel-Lucent provides multiple SNMP profiles but that cannot be supported in SevOne. This had to be accomplished using other means. It is cases such as this that highlight why you need to have the knowledge but once you have that, it's fairly straightforward.

Cisco is a vendor that we have had to customize reports for. With respect to temperature monitoring or CPU reporting, some of the out-of-the-box reports don't fit that specific vendor version, so we had to modify them to use the latest MIB and SNMP OID.

We use SevOne for high-frequency polling, where we can quickly flip it on and the network operations team is able to easily troubleshoot issues.

SevOne has enabled us to integrate our network performance management data across our ITSM and business decision-making tools. All of the data that we collect is also shared with other consumers, instead of just retaining it and reporting it. This is done via the Data Bus, which is running over the open-source product, Kafka.

This was fairly easy to deploy and then open using the various device groups and object groups. Once it is open, data can be sent to other consumers. There is no need to do a lot of work. You just quickly enable the component and open it.

These integrations are key to our organization, where there are a lot of users and a high need for the data. For instance, capacity planning. A bit of analytics outside of SevOne has also been implemented, taking the data from different areas including ITSM, network inventory, configuration management, et cetera.

This performance data is key, and having such integration means that we get value out of SevOne fairly quickly. We don't need to invest time and money developing in-house products or looking for other solutions. Of course, the SevOne database component comes with a cost, but it's directly related to what the business needs.

SevOne helps us to detect network performance issues in advance of them impacting end-users through proactive alerting. The monitoring system contains threshold policies that have been configured using the dynamic thresholding approach. Specifically, it looks at a few cases to develop a baseline and calculate the standard deviation. If there is any breach or any high utilization in the specific service of a network, SevOne will provide alerts according to the severity level. It will go to our ITSM and then out to the operational users who will keep an eye on it.

We are using the basic NMS product, and we use it with DNC pretty heavily. These basic monitoring aspects are the building blocks for performance management, which is key for any organization. It is important to do network monitoring and capacity planning, which SevOne is very good at.

The Data Bus feature allows us to share data with other consumers, such as other teams in the company.

The reporting is pretty straightforward but this is an area for improvement. The reports are easy to configure but they are a bit outdated in terms of appearance and visualization. SevOne has some alternatives where you can use Data Insight and it's easy to configure, yet outdated compared to other reporting mechanisms out there.

As we are moving to virtualization, it would be helpful if there was support for Kubernetes or microservices. If this added in the future then this might help us to better manage SevOne in a virtual environment.

I have been using SevOne for nine years.

The stability is pretty good. It is the best when compared to other products on the market.

Given the peer-to-peer architecture, scalability is outstanding. You can both vertically and horizontally scale. We have approximately 60,000 network devices.

We have three or four people in the company who work with SevOne in at least a limited fashion. I am an architect and there are two advanced SevOne developers. We don't manage only SevOne but other products, as well. There is nobody who is entirely dedicated to managing SevOne.

We use SevOne support quite regularly and in geographically different places. Our agreement includes 24/7 support, which is helpful when we have to reach out. Generally, they are very good in terms of resolving the issue or providing any technical approaches, and they're friendly in nature.

Overall, the support is outstanding.

Prior to SevOne, we used another product. There were challenges with the cost and the growth of the network. Our existing solution couldn't cope, which is why we switched.

The initial setup is complex by nature but comparatively, it is simple when I consider a few of the other vendors that I have seen. Our deployment took between three and six months to complete.

When we deployed it, nine years ago, it was on a peer-to-peer architecture with physical machines. We slowly added a few instances to cover its predecessor. We continued adding appliances and within a year or two, we doubled the estate. Then year after year, we have been adding 20% to 30% to it.

Some of the services and functionality are adapted for SevOne via open-source, and the cost is very high. For the price that they are asking, it cannot be justified.

If the vendor can look into reducing the cost, and then have a different licensing model based on the usage, that would really help. A blocking point is the high upfront cost because it is challenging to get it accepted and the purchase approved. If the cost were lowered or alternatively, if they can split it over several years, for example, that would help to get the product in the door and get going.

When we first selected SevOne, we evaluated between 10 and 15 products on the market.

SevOne was the peer-to-peer technology, from an architecture perspective, which is the first reason we chose it. The second advantage was the good out-of-the-box reporting. Finally, the pricing was comparatively better.

We combine our analytics reports but we don't use SevOne in that case. We have data that comes from a non-SevOne system, we take the data feed and we have a reporting layer on top of it. Sometimes, this process takes data from SevOne and helps to provide a high-level service dashboard view. However, we do not use a SevOne dashboard to display it. Rather, we rely on the reports. 

At this time, we don't directly integrate with ITSM but we have aspirations to involve SevOne in the whole ITSM process. Ideally, any information that has been collected for ITSM can be accessed by SevOne. Also, it's a bi-directional take on the idea, where ITSM can share in the data collected by SevOne.

My advice for anybody who is considering this product is to test it, hands-on, before jumping to a conclusion about whether to implement it. It is important to compare products from other vendors to see how they perform.

Unfortunately, you have to try SevOne using different components that include the basic NMS plus Data Insight, to get a really good feel of how it collects the data and presents it. I'm confident that at the end of the evaluation, SevOne will stand out in that space.

I would rate this solution a nine out of ten.

We use it pretty extensively for all of our network performance management needs. It's monitoring Spark core and network performance. It's managing our managed-data customers' equipment on site, and it's also used to look after monitoring our internet links as well. We use it for any performance-related stats or information of that type. It has the capability for that.

It's all on-premise at the moment. We don't have the Data Insight component of the SevOne offering at this stage. We're still looking at that, but we predominantly use the platform to give us collection capability, and we'll use the data and visualize it on other platforms as well. So we have engineers that can use the data directly or natively in the tool, or we'll take the data or the collections and use those for other purposes, including billing.

It does the out-of-the-box reports and workflows to automatically help to understand what is normal or abnormal in our network. We need to see the Data Insight option to get some more of the smart features to the package. We don't have that option but for a baseline and comparisons, it's sufficient for what we need at Spark. And the capacity we use it in is more to do the collection, so we run other analytics over the data as well. The primary benefit is that we have good collection capability, which is what it gives us.

That is critically important to us. It underpins customer reports, which are contractual obligations, but we also use it for billing data. We must have accurate billing data for some of our wholesale customers. It's critical in that regard. We are so confident in SevOne that we even use it for billing.

The solution's out-of-the-box reports generally help to speed up its time to value. It's quite straightforward to get it to generate reports out-of-the-box. We have teams that use it and like that style of the interface. Even though it's an older interface, they can set up things whenever they want with whatever metrics they need to look at. It's very easy to use.

SevOne brings together its analytics reports and workflows in a single dashboard. It's required to have the Data Insight package to properly do that, which we don't have, but the product does offer that. It would require further investment from us to leverage that but it does do it quite well. We're set up in a Splunk shop. So it's very similar in terms of what you can do with Splunk visualizations but just does it much faster and more near real-time.

It provides continuous analytics of our network. The old adage is that you can't manage what you're not measuring. SevOne gives us the capability to measure the things that are important to us. We need that otherwise our operations teams are blind and we can't deliver the value to our customers who have expectations around having a whole bunch of these reports made available to them. It's very critical.

It enables us to integrate our network performance management data across our ITSM and business decision-making tools. We have ServiceNow, so we integrate our network performance alerts up into ServiceNow. It's pretty standard.

It's really straightforward to integrate the network data with these solutions. Our integration architecture is reasonably good to leverage and so we easily integrate. We haven't had any problems with it.

We use SevOne in a troubleshooting capacity for some teams, but I would say the predominant use is more to give those teams a decent quality time series chart at the right level of granularity. They need to be able to troubleshoot and support any work internally and with customers as well. Our internet links, for example, are all monitored at one-minute intervals, which is an absolute minimum requirement. If we have any disruption in internet services in New Zealand, then everyone is impacted. SevOne gives us that level of granularity, which those operational teams use all the time. They're heavily reliant on it.

The integration of network data with our ITSM helps to improve collaboration between operations and support teams. It's just a means of managing the incident, and SevOne provides a source of those, but we don't try to overload our operations teams with spurious alerts based on SevOne. It's only specific criteria that will trigger a ticket for them. It does help our business operations and functionality, but we don't go crazy about how we set it up.

It offers a complete view of our network performance. We have quite an expensive environment and a lot of different technologies. We do use it to give us views across each of the separate technology domains, whether it's a customer network or our core. We don't tend to tie everything together in an end-to-end view because of the way our network is configured, but for the views that we need across the various technology domains, it does a good job at that.

We are enabled to detect network performance issues faster and before they impact end-users. We don't necessarily get full advantage out of it in that regard, because performance alerts are a lot harder to manage than hard volts or up-down problems, but the tool does give us that data. Whether we choose to use it all the time or not is a different question.

The product just does what it says on the box. We came from two very complicated tools that were hard to get to do the very basics. SevOne does the basics very well. It's a no-fuss solution. It's easy to configure and administer. I have a small team. I don't need a lot of people to run it. It scales very well. It meets performance and collection demands. It just ticks all my boxes and therefore gives me very good SNMP collection capability.

The comprehensiveness of this solution's collection of network performance and flow data is one of the basics in the field for what it does. It meets all of our needs. So for all those areas, for the most straightforward collection capabilities, right up to NetFlow and even telemetry, it meets all those demands. Not only just basic or fundamental SNMP collection capability, but the product also supports what we need for the future with telemetry streaming. So it's very comprehensive.

It is very important to us that it provides that. We need to be doing the fundamentals but we also need to have an eye on the future because SNMP is not going to be here for that long. It will tend to drop off over the next five to ten years. And so we still need to do that, but we need an eye on the future for streaming as well. That's something that SevOne has put investment into ensuring their product can support it. It's pretty critical.

Its collection abilities cover multiple vendors' equipment. I don't think we've had an issue with any equipment that we haven't been able to interface to and collect data. We have quite a heterogeneous environment here. We have a lot of different kits. We haven't had any issues interfacing with our different equipment. So it's very flexible.

It's important to us because, like a lot of telcos, while we may be small on a world stage, we still have made various investment choices over the years, so we have a lot of different network technologies. We've got to be able to talk to Juniper, Nokia devices, and Cisco devices. That was one of the criteria when we were looking at assessing our options in the space, and one of the reasons why we went with SevOne, in addition to the other benefits as well.

The dashboard is very straightforward. It is quite streamlined. The legacy UI is not as flashy as it could be, but that's not where their product's going. It's in the data insights, which is far more beneficial for most users.

We have dashboards, but we tend to be event or exception-driven. So the dashboards are there if triage teams or customers need to look at reporting for historic purposes. It does have a fit for customers more so than us operationally because we will use exception or event-driven data if we're looking at performance and other issues.

We need to be thinking about streaming telemetry protocols. They already have the port for enhanced visualization, which they already have through Data Insight. I can't really think of anything else that needs improvement. It's meeting all the needs in those areas for now and the things they're claiming for the future are where we're hitting as well. There are some areas around multi-cloud or hybrid cloud solutions that we need to look at because we do have more of our workloads in the cloud so we need to consider how we can monitor the foreign stats in that regard. It's not something we've specifically looked at for SevOne at this point in time, but that would be something for us to consider.

In terms of stability, I can only recall one incident in the last four years. Most incidents are due to Kafka feeds, which are not part of SevOne, that we feed data to. I think we've had one problem with one upgrade, but otherwise the platform's stable. It just works. 

One other issue we've had is where we didn't dimension the box sufficiently well, we changed the polling interval and level, and we didn't have enough capacity, but that was simply an under-dimensioning problem on our side.

I bought SevOne because it scales. The rules are very clear for what you want to collect and how frequently, and you dimension it accordingly. It just scales. We have no issue with that whatsoever.

There are several hundred users using it. We predominantly have tier 1 operations people, but the majority would be what we class as tier 2 network engineers so that they're doing an operations role, but in a second-level capacity, and they would be using the tool directly. Then the majority of the rest of the audience are customers who are checking the performance stats because we're providing reports to them of utilization on their links, various other utilization metrics, and availability performance metrics to them as part of the managed services we offer to them. There are several thousand customers.

I have one team that looks after it, they have six people who don't only exclusively look after SevOne. They look after a whole bunch of monitoring and management tools. So we have one staff member and a backup. It's essentially two people, but they're on other apps as well. So we have a very lean number of people working on the tool.

We have licensed it for all the usage we need across Spark. It's already fully deployed at the moment for everything that we need in our organization, so it wouldn't expand much beyond that.

The technical support is pretty good. We don't log many calls with SevOne. We try to be as self-sufficient as possible, but for upgrades, patches and queries, they have been really good. Compared to some of our other vendors like IBM who aren't so Flash, SevOne has been really good and easy to deal with.

We previously used several other solutions. We used an IBM product and we also have smaller solutions still around the company, but they'll ultimately be replaced with SevOne.

We switched to SevOne because the other platforms were too expensive and weren't performing. It was largely a cost-out opportunity for us and a chance to also deliver a better functioning package up and network performance management tool to our business.

The initial setup was very straightforward. It was really more of an issue just to get the money. And then once we had the money, it was very straightforward to roll it out.

We were driven by two migrations off of legacy components. It took us less than six months to get off the first system we were exiting, and then we spent another six months getting off the subsequent system. So it was probably about a year before we got off two of our original legacy performance management tools. And most of that was really around getting the data feeds sorted out, ensuring all the devices that need to be managed were part of automatic feeds into SevOne. SevOne itself is straightforward because it's an actual appliance base and it does not require much effort required to band it up.

Our implementation strategy was to replace like for like before exploiting any extra features of SevOne. We were collecting team metrics of 20,000 boxes. Then the replacement had to do the same as a starting point in order for us to exit the old system. So it was pretty much like for like, in terms of the implementation. And we did have a mix of PaaS and VM boxes as well. So we do have a mix within our environment for the collectors.

I have a team at Spark and we largely like to be self-sufficient. So my own team did some training and is quite familiar with tools in the space. They were able to run with the new technology and set it up. We had established a project team that carried out the implementation and the migration off our legacy platforms. That was all in-house.

We haven't actually measured ROI but in terms of the total cost of ownership, SevOne has certainly saved the company quite a bit of money. It's basically avoidance of paying high licenses with other suppliers is what we've saved. Our operations teams have a system that gives them the potential to give meantime to repair and it gives them the better ability in that area. We don't measure that so much. It's more about the savings we have from moving from one toolset to another. It's also operational efficiencies. I have five performance management tools and we can have one. People have got one place to go.

As with any vendor tool, having a good commercial contract is part of what makes the tool successful, and we got a lot of value out of it very quickly because we were able to secure a good commercial arrangement. It lived up to everything else that SevOne claimed on the box. So we were able to get the value straight away. 

Every vendor's licensing model is different. SevOne took quite a bit of exploration to understand the license. But if a customer is looking at it, just to understand what they're getting into in terms of managed objects and what counts towards a managed object, then they'll be fine. They'll know what they're up for and you don't get any surprises when it comes to buying additional licenses. The last thing you want to do is invest in a tool and then find out that there are ongoing incremental costs as you add more. My advice would be to secure a good deal upfront at a good price and then it becomes more attractive within the business to sell it.

We have ongoing support and maintenance, so that's an annual OPEX for us, but that's very reasonably priced. If we look at the total cost of ownership of SevOne to our previous toolsets, then SevOne still comes out way ahead by comparison.

We did evaluate other solutions. We looked at the market and ultimately chose SevOne. 

We did look at doing upgrades to our existing platforms. We also looked at Splunk but that wasn't good value for money in terms of just doing SNMP monitoring. We also looked at some other open-source solutions as well.

We had a good license deal from SevOne, which made it appealing, and because we have such a good discount, that really helps in terms of our selection process. The other vendors are all pretty much doing the same sorts of things. So it was most important to get a good commercial deal with the supplier and SevOne was the only one who really stepped up to do that. 

In terms of other criteria, we wanted the scale. We wanted ease of deployment. We wanted the fundamentals to be done straight away and easily, and we wanted low support and high value in terms of meeting our varied business users. It ticked all those boxes.

We haven't done too much with software-defined, but we have certainly looked at the telemetry capabilities, and it does support those. While it doesn't support all of our technology in that space, it does support two-thirds of what we need to do and the other options to support telemetry. Another kit we have is something that we can work with SevOne to do, which is an offer they've made to us. It's quite good.

Support is very key, and with all of our vendors, we want to have good technologies, good function, and capability, but we want to have a good relationship with the supplier, and SevOne has made a lot of changes organizationally and consolidated back to the US. Despite all of those changes and acquisitions, they've still maintained an excellent relationship with us. I only had an update from the COO earlier in the week, telling us where things were going. You don't get too many suppliers that make an effort to reach out in that capacity, which is really good.

We have not done too much in the way of customization. We haven't really needed to. The product is fully featured enough to meet all of our needs in any performance area but it does have options to do that if we needed it, we just haven't had a demand for it.

My advice would be to take the time to plan out what you need and just validate that it'll work with the technologies in your environment. I would also probably go with the Data Insight module from day one. I wouldn't use the native interface within the product. So plan for that as part of any deployment, and then you'll get a lot more value upfront.

SevOne is one of the biggest strategic investments we've made. It just works. It just does what we want with no fuss about it. SevOne is built on open-source technologies. If I had a bigger team, I could have written my own, but we didn't. So it was convenient to buy an off-the-shelf solution like SevOne because we knew it would just work and tick all those boxes and we'd get the value straight away, and for very little license outlay compared to what we were paying. It was a bit of a no-brainer.

I would rate SevOne a nine out of ten. To make it a perfect ten, it should be free. They're almost at a perfect ten. The only thing that worries me with SevOne is that they were acquired by Turbonomic and now by IBM. The only reason I bumped them down a point is because IBM now owns them and in an ironic twist, we exited IBM four years ago and now we're back with them owning the product we moved to. My concerns are not the technology, I think they have a good technology future, but it's more around the vendor who they're owned by now that that causes me concern.

Our primary use cases are for network alerting and reporting.

The out-of-the-box reports helped speed up its time to value. It's very important to make the tool usable, so you can prove to management that money was spent wisely.

SevOne has improved my organization by taking us to a single pane of glass for alerting on the network reports. For NOC, they only have a single pane of glass they have to look at.

It can be very thorough and very complete if you buy all of the appropriate modules and you have enough licenses to cover all the gear on your network. Some of the niceness is the flexibility of the tool and what you can do, but some of the complexity is due to that flexibility. The tool can be very complex depending on what you want to do, but that complexity makes it flexible to see things in different ways.

It enables us to detect network performance issues faster and before they impact users. Looking at IP SLA metrics and seeing that something has exceeded the baseline before users actually call up and say that there's a problem.

I've found Data Insight to be the most valuable for mining the data that the tool collects.

Without data insights, it's really hard to mine the data out of the NMS tool. Data Insight makes it more flexible.

The network data collection has been very flexible for us. It's been thorough in areas that were lacking. They have a team that I've worked with to add other pieces to it. So if it's missing something out-of-the-box, they work with me to add it. I was able to collect that data. It's not perfect, but it's pretty thorough.

The ability to assess the comprehensiveness of the solution's collection network is important. I wish they had some things in there that they don't for us to sunset some of our homegrown tools, but it's not a showstopper.

Its collection abilities cover multiple vendors' equipment but that's lower on our priority list for our deployment. We mainly have one vendor for the majority of our environment but we do have some others, so it is nice having the ability to look at other vendors.

The out-of-the-box reports and workflows for automatically helping to understand what is normal and what is abnormal in our network are very poor if you only have NMS and that is the only portion of step one that you own. DI makes things a lot better. 

DI actually lets you get to the data in a way that is easy to view without DI getting the data out of NMS. NMS is great at harvesting the data and storing the data, but it's terrible at giving managerial style views to see the data, as well as reporting is hard to mine the data in the reports. It's a very old-school feeling. DI puts a modern view on top of the tool, allowing you to get to the data in a cleaner fashion and faster data mining.

We use its ability to edit and customize out-of-the-box reports. It's been easy to edit, but I've run into some bugs. I'm focused solely on DI because NMS reporting is not very good. DI is a newer tool for them. I've run into several bugs that have slowed me down. It's easy to use other than I've run into the occasional bug that has caused problems.

I've given the firewall team reports that only look at their gear versus NOC is able to see all gear. I have done team-specific views. 

It provides continuous analytics of our network. I find it helpful, and I believe other people on my team find it helpful to be able to see all of the stats in a single tool. They can see an alert and then they can see the stats for the gear that was associated with that alert. I think that is very helpful.

NMS has several areas for improvement. It should be more user-friendly inside of NMS for some of the functionality in there. It's been getting better the last version or two, but there have been bugs in there whenever I've gone to new versions. 

There have been some features that were advertised that I would have that weren't actually there yet. They were kind of there, but even their tech support team didn't know how to use them because they were so new, and the documentation wasn't very thorough around those bleeding-edge features.

I have been using SevOne for two and a half to three years. 

It is very stable. 

Scalability has been good. It apparently has the ability to scale very broadly as long as you have the resources to deploy more instances of the tool, it is very nice on that front. The scalability is good.

We have around 30 users. Some of the users are in network operations and network engineering. Obviously, the network management team and some management use it to be able to get their visibility into how the network looks.

We have essentially two people managing the environment and they're both in the network management team. It eats up a fair amount of their time in order to really take advantage of what the tool can do.

It is used pretty extensively for the gear that we have deployed it on. We bought it for the monitoring. There are plans to expand, to include more of our network gear in the tool. I have no idea of the timeline, but I would say it's used pretty extensively. The gear that is modeled on there is only mounted on SevOne. We've taken off of all of our other monitoring to get down to a single pane of glass.

I would give their tech support very high marks. Tech support has been very helpful.

The initial setup was straightforward. 

I don't know that we've ever finished the deployment. The tool is flexible so we're always trying new things. But getting it off the ground and running and alerting, I would say took about a month and a half to two months.

We deployed it in parallel to our existing monitoring tools and then took devices out of our existing monitoring tools as we proved that they were inside of SevOne.

We did not use an integrator for the deployment. 

I have seen ROI. 

Be careful of how the licensing works. From the administration side of things, I am a propeller head. I do not know anything that has a dollar sign in it. Those are numbers I do not know.

We looked at large, standard NMS tools as well as open-source options. 

My advice would be to plan exactly what you're trying to get before you do the deployment and do as much research as you can before you go through the week-long training session that they give you with the initial purchase. There was a week-long training that we got as part of the initial purchase, but the training came before we even had the tool onsite. So I was not able to ask questions intelligently.

With flexibility comes complexity, and the other is going to be management. See everything that SevOne can do, they are going to ask for a lot. So you need to get management understanding what the tool can do with what you have deployed right now. Don't promise them the world. Filter down what management's expectations are.

I would rate SevOne a seven out of ten.