IBM SevOne Network Performance Management (NPM) Reviews

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 have quite a few use cases for the SevOne NMS. It's mainly for performance management by our different network teams and we also do performance management of our external customers. That means we offer businesses and schools and others access to a Comcast device for their site to give them internet, or site-to-site connectivity. We also monitor our Comcast Digital Voice in SevOne NMS. For the external customers and the Comcast Digital Voice, we're inputting flat file data into SevOne so that we can get the metrics for that flat file data and provide it to those customers. We're doing SMP and what they call xStats. 

With SevOne DI we allow our external customers to log in and get a report for their data. We give them a subset of the data that we collect so that they can see that we're staying within our SLAs.

I mainly focus on the thresholding capability of SevOne. We configure thresholds on the performance metrics and they send us alerts so that the NOC is alerted about the systems that are having issues. I maintain SevOne and I give the customers what they want. They're the ones who let me know if there's an issue. They're the ones monitoring the health of our network. We have various NOCs, depending on the device type, and they're the ones that will let me know if something needs to be modified or tweaked to enhance that performance management.

We have a SevOne NMS cluster that is also attached to a SevOne Data Insight cluster, and the SevOne NMS system is also sending out the SDB to a set of servers that we maintain for customers for rural data.

We're using the 300K which we've licensed to 200K and we're on version 5.7.22 of the NMS and 3.0 on the SDI.

The main benefit of using SevOne is the fact that we can pull in a new vendor rapidly. With the changing technologies, we can get a new vendor certified and monitored in our system faster than before. With our previous system, we had to wait for them to put it into the upgrade. It could have been months before we would actually monitor new equipment. Now, we can monitor within 10 days. 

Also, with the xStats, we're able to monitor non-SNMP data from various vendors.

SevOne provides us with continuous analytics of our network and that gives us an idea of the health of our network, where our weaknesses are, and what needs to be fixed.

In most cases, SevOne enables us to detect network performance issues faster and before they impact end-users. We've had situations where new issues have come up and we have actually used that to create a new threshold to alert us the next time. But overall, it helps us with early detection.

When it comes to having a complete view of our network performance, I would rate it very highly. It's the key piece of equipment that we use for monitoring our performance.

The most valuable feature is the NMS because that's the core of the system. Without the NMS, the other tools aren't that usable. 

The SMP and the xStats, which is for flat file integration, are both useful for integrating the various metrics that the device provides to monitor the performance of those systems.

It's also important that the solution’s collection abilities cover multiple vendors’ equipment because we have multiple vendors. For each device type, we typically have two vendors, minimum, so that we're not tied down to one vendor. That means we need to have similar monitoring capabilities on those various vendors, which SevOne is able to provide.

The solution’s out-of-the-box reports and workflows for automatically helping us understand what is normal and what is abnormal in our network is very important. That's the whole purpose for using this tool: to pick up anomalies before the customers call us up about them, whether they are internal or external customers.

There are some tweaks and enhancements that I've already requested. One is to be able to make changes per device rather than as a global setting. That has to do with naming. It's minor.

I've been using SevOne for close to 15 years.

It's very stable. We have only had a few minor issues and they were mostly hardware-related.

In terms of scalability, nothing has been able to beat it.

Currently, we have over 7 million objects monitored, and that's over 181,000 devices. We are still increasing. We're pulling in other customers who are using other tools into the SevOne. It's constantly expanding.

SevOne technical support is very good. They're always on hand. We actually have two resident engineers on site who help us on day-to-day issues. We also have help from the support and development groups for any anomalies they can't handle.

We used CA's eHealth but it wasn't very flexible. If you wanted a device certified, you had to wait for the next software release to get that certification. The vendor also wasn't very receptive to changes. It was hard to get them to adopt.

The initial setup was fairly straightforward. The system works off a master cluster, so it's easy to set up and easy to understand.

Our deployment took about a year. That was 15 years ago, but other implementations have taken a lot less time, moving forward. Our network was very complex so a lot of device certifications had to be done with SevOne, early on, to get what we needed out of it. But within the first couple months it was usable. It just took us a year to finally get us to where we wanted to be, with all the customizations.

Our initial implementation strategy was that we deployed SevOne and left the old system up and running at the same time. That way, we had a failover capability to go back to the old system, if needed.

We have hundreds of people in our company who work with SevOne. We have the NOCs that are monitoring the health of the network. We have the end-users that are monitoring their pieces, whether that would be an application server or a range of business. And then we have our commercial customers that are getting the utilization and health metrics of the services that we're providing to them. We also have salespeople who are monitoring it to make sure that their customers don't need to upgrade.

We used a SevOne resource in addition to our own team. SevOne's team was excellent. Every time we came up with something, they were really rapid to come up with a fix or with a method for us to keep going. They were totally onboard with our solution.

We've been able to get off of other platforms, resulting in a cost savings.

Also, the fact that we can monitor our customers' data performance and stay within our SLA means we don't have to send money back to them. If we don't meet our SLAs, we have to pay them back. SevOne provides us with a great cost savings there.

The pricing has been fair.

In addition to the standard licensing fees, we have the annual maintenance fee because we purchased the hardware from SevOne.

We looked at four or five other vendors and we had a bakeoff among them. The main difference between them and SevOne, at the time, was cost. SevOne could provide the same information and data at a much cheaper price.

I prefer physicals, but virtual systems work if they have the capacity that SevOne recommends. You can't undersize the systems.

We don't do flow data here, although one group tested it in the past but they never purchased it. But it's nice to be able, within 10 days or less, to recertify a new device. That's one of the reasons we picked SevOne years ago. And we can modify those certifications at any time, ourselves, and that is something we do.

Overall, for what we're using it for it's very solid.

Our client who is using SevOne is a large client, it's big. We have to create multiple instances to support their infrastructure on the platform because they are very huge and are on-prem as well as on the cloud. Because Turbonomics is unlimited, they can do certain VM levels. I think you can do 11,000. You can collect 11,000 metrics from the VMs and you cannot go above that number. So let's say if you have 9,000 VMs, you can handle it, but sometimes you become busy and you're doing a lot of collections, or if you start collecting the processes' metrics, that is going to be a problem for you down the line. So we have about eight instances to support the platform on-prem and I think 11 or 12 on the cloud.

In terms of how SevOne improved the client's overall functioning, they reduced the cost analysis for the people. They are not good with the forecasting. They have their own capacity performance management teams that can now rely on this tool. The other benefit they are getting is that they don't have live support. If any issue comes up, like a performance issue, then the VMs are going to scale up automatically, and it is the same as in Azure. In Azure, the problem is that it is going up and down. It's a problem. When you have the SQL Server, there is the issue that we cannot do that with it.

Sometimes we have a lockup. If you have a lockup of the VM in Azure, the scale-up and down won't work. So the benefit you're getting is that we have a maintenance window, and in that maintenance window we tell everybody that we're going to scale-up or scale-down these VMs, any of these issues, and we have the maintenance time to do that. That's the benefit they're getting on that certain time. But it is not doing it automatically because in Azure there is always an issue with that. As for the VMware environment on-prem, you can do it. It does it automatically.

The feature that I have found most valuable is the scale-up and scale-down. The scale-up is an operation where the CPU boosts-up and then the memory will boost-up. That works awesomely. But the problem is when you do the case analysis, like a price analysis. Let's say you have the price. When you go to market, it picks up the cheapest rate or maybe coupons. If Azure sometimes give us a very great deal, then the Turbonomics doesn't kick in to evaluate that price. So that evaluation is always an issue that comes up. They cannot do that. They always have differences in the price. They never get those things right. That could be answered with no problem for the cloud.

In terms what could be improved, they need to integrate and get a better price. They can do cost analysis with Azure. They need to have a live cost analysis for the discounts, because if you have multiple thousands of VMs that you're doing, of course you're going to get a discount. Correct?

If you're only doing a few of them, you won't get a discount. That's the reason why they have to value the discount and coupons. The other con is that they need to be better with the accountability. In other words, the accounts or reports are not better than the others, compared with vRealize. The other thing is that you cannot write any kind of script in it to customize it to get other reports. So I'm shifting the gear into reports now.

There can be a problem of Microsoft versus Turbonomics. Because Microsoft won't allow the bigger clients to know what they're giving as a discount and they don't want Turbonomics to know what kind of discount I'm giving them. So there are pros and cons. Because these companies have a monopoly, they don't want the information of their biggest client to get out and say, "Okay, these are the coupons and these are the discounts I'm getting and let's see what Turbonomics can do."

In terms of stability, if the box is getting hot, is it having a performance issue?

It is a stable solution. They don't have to call anybody. If anybody is having any problem or performance issue, it's going to scale-up from a VMware point of view. But in Azure, sometimes if the VM needs more memory, more CPU, it cannot do that upgrade because of the lockouts. Then it's SevOne and there has to be a call out to the technical support team who comes from the bridge and starts checking the issue. That is a possibility. You can consider this tool a stable solution.

Scalability is great, amazing.

The technical support is pretty good. They are very helpful. You will have some folks who have a lot of knowledge and some who don't. So you always have this pro and con there.

The initial setup is a little bit complex and you have to first create the main database. After you create the database, make sure you start collecting. Then you have multiple collectors that start collecting the information and send it to the database. They are really technical and it's Linux based.

The setup takes about one or two days.

Usually, when you do an upgrade it takes eight hours.

In terms of ROI, when we implement SevOne, issues and calls come in and there's the reduced cost of not having a person look at it because it does it automatically. When it does it automatically, you have a timeframe if the issue doesn't resolve automatically, at which point you may have to report to a person, "Okay, this application or these VMs or whatever are having problems right now." Then you have to take a look at it and see what happened. Sometime you can clear the logs and do all the other basic techniques like the other tools do. You manually clear the log and then you look at these things. Or you can create a policy and then the extra policy will come into place. Or sometimes the time doesn't match right or your timestamps changes and you'll face these kinds of problems.

If you're asking for technical comments, then I can describe it in detail, but this is more general. For example, the IT operation can continue working the way it is, but they have to integrate SevOne into their environment. How do they want to do it? We don't know. It all depends on the different clients.

I use a lot of tools, actually. Here are the things I can recommend about Turbonomics: Scale-up, scale-down. But again, for reporting purposes, sorry, no recommendation there. The customizations are very hard. The person doing it has to be very good at analytics and has to be very good in all languages, like C-Sharp, unless you want to use the Python tool. I don't know if the Python evokes the scripts in it. I think it does, but it's very, very hard. You need a developer to write the customized reports for whatever you're looking for. If a regular person were using Turbonomics, like admin folks, they wouldn't be able to do that, unless they are a programmer.

They have to make it better for reporting. That's the first thing. Also the discount, like I mentioned about the Azure discount. It would be good if they could just get the number right.

On a scale of one to ten, I am neutral because it is not too good and not too bad. I would give SevOne a five.

In order to make it a 10, they would have to get their staff members highly active and focused on the customer's issues, and just focused on the product, on saving money. On-prem, they need to focus more on the Azure side of the house and cloud. The need to improve their internal technical knowledge and expertise. They need to hire really top-notch folks in Turbonomics.

We use SevOne to display all the information from Cisco IP SLA regarding the delay, voice quality, etc.

It's a great solution for highlighting and discovering useful information regarding our network's elements.  There is a cheaper solution available,  but in general, SevOne is a good solution for analyzing network information. It's also very easy to use.

As I mentioned before, there are cheaper solutions available. Earlier, our management team only managed ICMP, like IP SLA. That's why, at that point in time, we decide to use Cisco IP SLA.

Well, I don't know if it's in development at SevOne, but some similar solutions offer end-to-end visibility, both regarding the server and also the network elements.

Other solutions also include the server and some additional layers, like an operating system or database, and in some cases, the application, too; their network elements are designed for management-level.

I don't know if SevOne plans on incorporating these features into their next release, but they should.

On a scale from one to ten, I would give SevOne a rating of nine.

I have been using SevOne since 2016.

SevOne provides us with great stability in the production environment. It's also very scalable, too.

From my personal experience, the support has been good.

Initially, we wanted a specif look and feel regarding our SevOne solution. That took some extra time, but that's to be expected. In general, we got some useful information right out of the box with SevOne. Overall, it's easy to set up.

• Flexible architecture: You can extend the system and its capacity by attaching another cluster pair.
• Very intuitive management interface: Adding and discovering new devices is a very simple process.
• Very useful and flexible end-user GUI interface: Reports or statistics can be prepared by a person who has no knowledge of performance monitoring.
• Automatic reporting: You can very quickly prepare a report to be periodically sent to recipients.
• Very fast reporting engine: Even very complex reports are generated in seconds.
• Many predefined Top-N reports are available out-of-the-box.
• Grouping capability: Each device can be assigned to many groups, which means you can report any interesting network factors according to the multiple group allocation.
• Baseline: The functionality that allow us to monitor a particular factor (like throughput or CPU load) based on some historical data (the value of the factor at similar period of day should be more or less the same)
• Virtualization of network elements: Many physical interfaces that exist on different physical devices can be aggregated as a single logical device with many logical interfaces. This is very useful functionality for network operators.
• Trend analysis: The system predicts the value of the traffic in the future based on existing behavior.

We provide customer internet access services and the 95th percentile is our target. Every month, we prepare a detailed report per customer that shows the current percentile value (does it exceed 95 or not), and we have to prepare detailed traffic reports that show the real traffic graph in the last month.

All of this was done manually. With SevOne, this process is fully automated and the reports can be sent directly to business customers (after a simple verification performed by another colleague).

Our version is quite old. In version 5.3.3.0, we see a lot of room for possible improvement. However, from SevOne support, we received confirmation that most of those expectations are met in version 5.4.x or higher.

Therefore, we have to think about upgrading to the later version as soon as possible.

SevOne should work with the graphs legend functionality. Now, you are able to put a part of the graph description as a customer description, but most of the original description stays unchanged. This means that sometimes the legend under the graph is unreadable (indicator names are sometimes not humanly readable). It would be nice to have a solution similar to the one in Cacti, where you can replace (or rather overwrite) an existing description with your own string.

It has now been almost one and a half years.

Currently, we are using version 5.3.3.0, but we are now just upgrading the system to version 5.3.10 due to several minor issues.

Not, over the last one and a half years.

Yes, but this was caused by special and very uncommon expectations from our side.

Together with SevOne, we implemented the solution which allows us to automatically add any new network device that is added to our external (independent from SevOne) database.

We use the SevOne API to add those devices and interfaces to SevOne. In case of devices with a huge number of interfaces, more than 100, SevOne was not able to load them into its own database.

SevOne recommended an upgrade to a later version to resolve this limitation.

This is the part I am happiest about. Their response is great.

Of course, I sometimes have to wait a week or two, but mostly that is because of the nature of the problem and its complexity.

Most problems are resolved within two to three days.

In our case, the SevOne platform was implemented by a third-party integrator. So, at the beginning, our contact with SevOne was very limited.

Now, for simple or medium issues, we contact SevOne directly through the SevOne support webpage because it speeds up the problem solution time. However, for more complex issues, we still contact the third-party integrator.

We were using Cacti and Zabbix (both open source solutions). We decided to switch mainly because there were some business expectations to have a platform that would prepare reports we can show to business customers.

On the other hand, we would like to have a tool ready to prepare reports on demand and by the non-technical staff.

In a standard solution, the instalation is very simple. In our case, we decided to integrate SevOne with an external database (an external application). All network devices devoted to that application should be automatically inserted into SevOne database.

The integration interface was the part of the solution that was performed by a third-party integrator in cooperation with SevOne.

From the operator’s point of view, it is quite painful to have to remember that every device costs us some cash if added to SevOne (CAPEX and, later, yearly OPEX).

Prices per license are not huge, but they exist.

It is very visible when we connect a big number of network devices (due to some new company acquisition). At once, we have to connect 100s of network elements, and it is hard to find extra money for that.

On the other hand, the existing model is very flexible from a financial point of view (pay-as-you-grow).

Yes, but there was a tender, and I am not authorized to provide such information.

I can only say that there were a few big players in the area of performance monitoring system vendors.

• The grouping capability is very simple and a very important issue in terms of system reporting capability. You should do your homework carefully so you will have a flexible reporting tool in the future.
• Enabling baseline functionality: We decided not to enable it at the beginning and very quickly decided to change our minds. It is a very useful mechanism for data comparison (today’s traffic to the week’s traffic, to weeks before at the same time, and so on).
• Report preparation: It depends on the agreement, but SevOne is ready to prepare some predefined report at initial integration. Let them do this to save you time, but it requires some time to think about your expectations.
• In SevOne, you pay mainly per object. Do not enable all object pooling by default. In a case with 10,000 devices, if you decide not to pool ICMP (not to ping devices to check availability), you can save 10,000 objects, and save real money. (We did so and we do not regret that decision, but it depends on the particular expectations of the company implementing the product.)
• The same as disabling ICMP pooling, you can decide to disable memory and CPU monitoring (if it is not necessary). Money that again stays in your pocket.

The platform is as flexible as an open source system can be. It has a very useful end user GUI interface, which means working with the system is very easy and intuitive.

The reports and the graphics. With this tool it is interesting to show the info to the client and explain where the traffic is.

I can't, I arrived in the last days of the project, just to make reports.

The method of searching for SIP and the way to create the groups.

Four months.

No.

No.

Eight out of 10.

I didn’t do the switch, the company had the product when I arrived.

I didn’t do the setup.

I can´t answer that.

I didn’t choose the product but I had used others.

Although it is a very good monitoring tool, it can be confusing when you try to add devices and they don’t appear correctly. Then you need to check SID on the SevOne database. There it does not display when the error pops up.

It's given us the ability to create various real-time network performance reports and distribute them to any colleague who can access these reports immediately. They can access them any time without needing their own user account to the system.

• SevOne threshold monitoring alerts help to improve our network monitoring.
• Procedures in troubleshooting were built on predefined SevOne reports.

Single device-based baseline monitoring works well in SevOne, but sometimes device independent base-lining in redundant network environments. Software upgrades can be tricky is not easy.

I've used it for five years.

The software upgrades can be tricky.

The appliances run quite stable.

Scalability is just a matter of adding new appliances to the cluster if needed.

They have good customer service.

Technical support is very professional and fast in developing solutions.

We chose it because it has a fast working reporting engine and because of the scalability of the solution.

The set-up of the basic monitoring is straightforward, but customizing for special needs, such as calculation pollers, takes some effort.

The implementation was performed by a vendor team together with an internal one. The vendor had a high-level of expertise.

It's provided us with improvements in network monitoring and troubleshooting as well as advanced reporting solutions payback.

The SevOne tool was convincing from the beginning, and after testing it there was no need to test anything else.

By default the tool provides a lot, you need to focus on your needs, adding something else later is usually no problem.

This is a new tool for our company. This project is the first one on which we're using this tool.

It is inexpensive compared to other monitoring tools and it provides agentless monitoring, where we don't need any kind of installation of servers. SevOne has a feature which is a policy browser. We just assign the policy and it will automatically apply it to all the servers, and it will create the thresholds as well for each and every server.

The automation feature is good because if your CMDB is OK and it is already in sync, then the automation part is good to go. Auto-closure of the ticketed issue is resolved and ticket will auto-close, which is very helpful.

There is no service mode setup in this monitoring tool if you want to snooze alerts for any specific amount of time, to account for any activity change or major incident. That is one of the drawbacks.

We have also faced some issues regarding SNMP traps.

Another difficulty is reporting. There is a limitation, per report, of 1,000 servers. Consequently, if your environment has 5,000 or 10,000 servers, you have to create separate reports, and each report will have 1,000 servers. That requires us to compromise with customers, that each report will only show 1,000 servers.

SNMP can't page exact disk utilization. So consider Unix servers. Unix servers' utilization is around 95%, and their reserve space is 5%. So SNMP will not page that extra 5%. it will only page the rest of the 90%. So from the OS end, it will see 95% usage, but in your tool you will see 90% usage because SNMP doesn't page that 5% of reserved space. That is one of the drawbacks that is not tool based, that would be considered as SNMP.

One other thing. Log monitoring is not possible from SevOne and that's why we are still using another monitoring tool. URL monitoring is also not possible.

No. There is high availability. We haven't had any issue like appliances going down or the server going down.

The alerts are also properly generating, as per the policies. So if you correctly create the devices and correctly ID the devices in your tool, then I think you will get proper results with this monitoring tool.

No problems here. Regarding reports and alerts, everything is good in this tool. The only thing we faced is SNMP traps, like snoozing the servers for a specific time, which is a maintenance mode issue.

Previously we had two other CA tools. But we wanted to do everything, like automation and all types of URL monitoring, in one tool. So that's why we considered implementing this tool in our environment. Only later did we come to realize that not everything is possible through SevOne.

Setup was simple. It was not that complex because one server, one appliance would be the performance server and another would be a high availability server. The selection part was smooth.

But creating a policy, thinking with LDAP, that part takes some time, but in a good way.

This was a management issue. I, being on the technical side, was not involved in this.

If you want one tool for everything this should not be considered. For example, if you want to monitor logs, if you want to monitor URLs, that is not possible from SevOne.

If you only monitor networks, if you want to monitor appliances, you can go with this application. It's good to go with SevOne because the creation of thresholds, of policies, the grouping of servers, that is easy.

One other thing. This is mainly a web console, it's not like any appliance application that you have to go into some server and open an application. That kind of thing is not there. 

Scalability. I have never had to worry about how to handle really big environments.

The GUI: both the dashboard/user view and the admin tool.

More than five years.

No, very stable.

No.

There are some differences between the Bulgarian and the American support teams.

Not applicable.

Very easy to setup the first installation. It is easy and fast to achieve the basic level.

Choose a SevOne partner who can provide SevOne as a service and can deliver professional services and maintenance.

I evaluated from a reseller perspective to find the best product on the market at that time: CA eHealth, Nagios, OP5, InfoVista, etc.

To get the best value, find a good partner to work with who has experience from more than one product vendor. Then, you can get a second opinion and comparisons.

The monitoring of the network is very customizable. That is its unique feature.

One example is in the way you have information of the status of each component of each device in your network.

User-friendly, multi-tenancy.

One year.

No.

Yes, but it is according licensing.

Very bad. The support it is a kind of blog where you leave your question or problem, then they try to resolve it as soon as possible.

SolarWinds, because we tried for a new and cheaper solution.

Complex for the MIBs.

Have a bank of licenses, because it is about the number of objects (RAM, ports, CPU, etc.).

Yes, NetIQ and SolarWinds.

Not all solutions fit all problems. Also, if you are an MSP, SevOne can’t be federated for clients.