IBM SevOne Network Performance Management (NPM) Reviews

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.

Instant graphs, high frequency polling and the ability to create reports on the fly are the most valuable features we currently use.

We are able to see or alert on issues a lot faster.

I'd like to be able to stitch together multiple network elements or services for more of an end-to-end view of network performance.

I have been using this solution for 1.5 years.

I have not encountered any issues with stability.

I have not encountered any issues with scalability.

I would give it a 7.5/10.

I previously used a different solution, but the report rendering was extremely slow.

Licensing costs can add up quickly, so know what you need to monitor and what you don’t.

• The ease of device certification – self-certify or have SevOne certify devices for me.
• Stability has been pretty good for us over the years – it’s a pretty stable platform.

We are actually using it for commercial use. We can see where customers are disconnecting and their orders failing, which results in us continuing to bill them and having to reimburse them. SevOne enables us to look at the data and see that the customer has disconnected so we can stop billing and reimbursing them. We also can discover outages before the customer complains.

I think that the upgrade process could be improved, which can be painful at times. SevOne knows it's an issue and they're working on it.

I've used it for eight years.

We only encountered issues during upgrades. The initial deployment was not a problem as we just deployed three new servers a couple months ago. There was one minor issue which should have been picked up but which we found out later. Typically deployments are pretty smooth.

No issues with stability.

So far the product has scaled to our needs. We broke it early on but the past few years it has scaled to our needs.

8-9/10

7-8/10

We used EHealth (a former CA product). Because of the upgrades and device certifications, we had to switch.

Setup was straightforward.

We implemented through the vendor and they were very good.

We're managing it with one person so the cost is cheaper than some of our other tools.

We looked at other solutions, but management chose SevOne because of its cost.

Test it out in your environment – it all depends on your environment, but it fits very well for ours.

There are several valuable feature, but the ones most useful for us are:

• Capacity monitoring/reporting and graphing
• Netflow stats gathering
• Infrastructure availability monitoring

It's given us the ability to accommodate our company's entire global network infrastructure (routers, switches, load balancers, firewalls, etc.) and provide historical trending analytics for interfaces and network traffic and general production graphing and reporting over a chosen time period.

The graphing function can be tailored for all levels of management reporting.

Also, the ability of the product to integrate into other vendor management platforms to allow the polling and alerting streams to be maintained.

The product is perpetually evolving with a number of complimentary products in the pipeline. However, the basis of the product remains stable and any improvements are regarded as ‘enhancements’ and based upon industry market research at a given time and the facility to provide enhancement requests from individual customers.

The initial setup must be planned well to fit your environment.

I've used it for four years as a mainstream strategic management tool. In total, seven years.

The deployment is reasonably straightforward and documentation is good.

Only a few minor issues which were resolved by SevOne support.

One of the key benefits of the product is its ability to scale. There were no issues with regards to scalability. You can add more licenses or more SevOne appliances into your cluster as needed.

Customer service is excellent. This can be provided via a SevOne TAM (Technical Account Manager) program if the size of the SevOne cluster/estate warrants it.

Technical support is excellent.

Tivoli ITNM for availability monitoring - Too complicated/over engineered and too much of a support overhead to justify remaining with it.

Tivoli NetView for capacity monitoring - An out-of-support legacy tool which had limitations for what our company wanted to do with respect to reporting.

The initial setup was straightforward. Because initial solution design is very important, planning the initial setup with respect to you own environment is key. Ensure that all required IP connectivity and product specific UDP/TCP ports are open and available.

The implementation was done via both vendor and in-house teams. The vendor team’s expertise was excellent.

Our ROI is excellent. The product captures production issues and streams events to service teams who monitor our infrastructure. The product also provides pre-emptive production reporting so that any potential issues can be caught before causing a potential outage.

The licensing is based upon a network element of a device. An element is a single SNMP entity. The product can be tailored to manage to the number of elements that are managed on a device. So start off by identifying what elements are required to be managed and base your licensing on that, allowing room for future growth.

We scoped upgrading our existing product suite.

Evaluate and research to ensure your requirements are met.

• Scalability
• Speed
• Integration of performance and flow data

It allows us to see metrics and immediately map to who is causing an issue so we can react faster. It improves our mean time to resolution.

I would say that incorporating other technologies, we have great performance data, but if it started doing intelligence and looked at the patterns or correlations, that would be great.

I've used it for almost three years.

No issues with deployment – it's fairly simple and quick.

It's been great with no issues.

It has scaled to our needs; if you need more you add an appliance and off you go.

Fantastic – responsive.

The engineers are well trained – have been fantastic.

We were using EHealth (CA) and NetQOS, but we left those products for greater scalability and speed, as well as being able to consolidate those two products into one.

Pretty straightforward, but complex due to the size of our organization. This is not an issue with Sevone.

We did it in-house.

We just evaluated this product based on what we heard and we initiated a POC.

I would say spend the time to learn the product so you can fully leverage it – theres a lot to the product. If you push the solution, it can solve a lot of problems.

• Near real-time raw data availability for two years for analysis
• Scalability of architecture
• Ease of build
• Installation of virtual appliances

It diagnoses and separates network issues from application issues based on flow analysis.

This is my favorite part of a review, so I am providing many ways to improve the product:

• Application session tracking
• Improve virtual appliance scalability
• Dashboard and report delivery
• Integration with service management (ServiceNow, Remedy) should be an out-of-the-box API

In my current organization, SevOne is fairly new. It is being built up to be used in the production environment. But as an architect, I have used this product at various mobile telcos.

No

No

Excellent

I previously used CA and HP solutions. The main reason for switching was the latency in data collection and presentation. Also, the level of customisation required to change the reports resulted in a high capex cost to organization, each time the customer requested any change.

Initial setup was very smooth; we used a virtual appliance.

This product needs a lot of handholding and close collaboration with network design resources, in terms of choosing the appliance and the number of licenses. Otherwise, SevOne may look like expensive, which it is not.

It was chosen over CA eHealth.

It is a very good product, easy to stand up, and a good tool for network engineers.

It has several features, but the ones most valuable to us are--

• Basic Network monitoring;
• Reporting (performance metrics, third-party data, status maps, device configuration, etc.);
• Scalability (monitor devices and metrics, and maintain speed); and
• It's Linux-based.

Delegate some of the networking monitoring work to SevOne.

The reporting capabilities provided important metrics and data that helped in the oversight of our system, network, and overall IT infrastructure, both in terms of applications and hardware.

It needs a platform to add portals. Some of the low-level features and how they work could use some improvements.

A cause-and-effect kind of pattern would be helpful.

There have been no issues deploying it.

It's been stable. We've had no issues with instability.

We've had no issues scaling it for our needs.

Their technical support is really top notch. We've had several instances when our trouble tickets have been responded to quickly and with sufficient fixes.

The initial setup was straightforward. It was simple and quite intuitive.

Make sure you have good, clear requirements for what you want SevOne to do. If you do, then it will do the job very well. If not, you should consider something else.