IBM SevOne Network Performance Management (NPM) Reviews

Positive

Generally speaking, we use SevOne as a central data collector for network components, routers, switches, load balancers, WiFi, and SDN. We also use it for server databases, cloud integration, and all the scenarios where we collect information.

SevOne produces a number of solutions for carriers and enterprises. The ones we use right now are software-defined networks, which are similar to Cisco ACI. We also use the WiFi solution to support Cisco WiFi and some other vendors. There's also a SevOne product for SD-WAN that we'll probably deploy in the next year. SevOne provides resources to come in and set those up. The solutions are basically visualizations and sometimes custom collections that combine the data insights product with SevOne NPM.

The two solutions provide a series of dashboards that give you insight into how your environment's working. We have full visibility into the health of Cisco ACI, including what's running on it, errors, performance, etc. It's the same with WiFi. We can track every access point, look at each connected station, and see the various metrics relevant to each connection. SevOne ensures everything is configured and operating properly.

SevOne monitors multiple technologies from different vendors. We're primarily a Cisco network, but Cisco has adopted some technologies from other vendors, and we've had no problem incorporating them. We also do F5 and other standard vendors that everybody uses. We manage everything on the network and infrastructure with SevOne. We have integrations with numerous products, third-party applications, and data from external sources. SevOne is fairly flexible as long as we can bring the information back into the system.

We get the most benefit from SevOne's ability to forecast capacity planning trends. We can look at growth in particular values and combine them to see how they interact with each other to improve our accuracy. We don't just base things on a single metric. 

If I'm looking at CPU, I'm also looking at queue length. The new company we work with is incredibly lean, so we've done a massive amount of work between SevOne and our other products to reduce the number of alerts that go out. It's not a matter of just filtering—it's also about making the network work smarter.  With SevOne, we're able to combine things and provide information out of the same platform. For example, if I have high utilization taking place, I see the packet drops in my critical applications by looking at QLS.

I can also look at net flow to tell if their backups run during business hours when they shouldn't. If I combine all that into an incident, my network team knows exactly what's happening when they get it. They can resolve the issue rather than being flooded with tickets that are caused by the utilization exceeding a specific percentage. We get those day in and day out. 

The network is sized to run near capacity, so we get the maximum use of the bandwidth. That also means it'll fluctuate over the threshold periodically and generate alarms, but we're able to combine it with additional data to tell us whether it's a problem or not. We don't need to raise incidents because the utilization went over the capacity anymore. The reason for the high utilization can be identified, so we can make better decisions on what to alert on. SevOne makes our support teams more productive. 

We use SevOne with virtualized next-gen network services because we run Cisco ACI, and we're on AWS and Azure. We can monitor network components on all these platforms. The company is in the middle of a transition because we spun off another company. We started on the cloud, so we never migrated from legacy into the cloud. It's a little different, but we are using it to manage the cloud environment. From a practical perspective, SevOne would give you the ability though to do both, so you don't need to change tools if you move from one to the other. 

SevOne has the ability to transform raw network performance data into actionable insights. Like most products in the network management space, SevOne doesn't have this capability out of the box because networks vary. However, it has the tools to customize it and adjust it as you go along. You get a solid platform that collects information and displays everything you would generally need to see. You can make it more effective by utilizing the data, API, and customization capabilities within the product. 

SevOne looks at indicators. In SevOne's terminology, a "device" is like a router or a switch. An "object" might be a CPU or an interface. It monitors the utilization or dropped packets on an interface. With each of those indicators, the smallest measurement is the baseline, and they do a baseline on everything. The baseline is based on a polling interval over a period of time. That information lets you review and see what's normal.  

They don't aggregate. They keep a year's worth of raw data, so I can do comparisons and see what occurred last month in this particular time period, like the end of the month or fiscal year. I can look at those networks and switches involved in those systems and see how they were performing at any given time each month back to a year ago. I can also set up alerts based on anomalies. I can look for standard deviations or numerical values above or below a threshold.

For example, let's say I'm expecting a certain amount of utilization. If it drops below that baseline, we get alerts that something isn't normal. We combine this in our upper management systems where we apply AI. The manager of managers gives us background information, so the AI can predetermine what might happen next.

We combine anomaly checks with static thresholds. We'll raise an incident for a static threshold breach, but we'll also have the anomaly data so the AI learns what happened before the breach took place. That way it can predict when it will happen again. It's good as a data collector and for feeding the other systems where we apply a bit more intelligence to the data.

SevOne has rich API capabilities, giving us the flexibility to control what we collect and customize the collection, creation, and manipulation of metrics as necessary. 

Any solution can provide the out-of-the-box capability to collect SNMP. But the ability to combine various metrics and apply logical or mathematical operators to yield a new metric offers an enhancement we can't get with a vanilla solution. For instance, we're monitoring our network interfaces not only by utilization but also by QoS packet drops, so we know whether the network traffic is being impacted because the utilization's high.

The data collection capabilities are pretty broad for time series data. The out-of-the-box capabilities are extensive in terms of anything that's not agent-based, SNMP collection, and AWS API integrations. You can also create your own integration with it and feed it deferred data. It'll take the data and process it the same way it does anything else. It automatically baselines every indicator that's collected. We can trigger anomaly-based or threshold-based alerts off the data. Everything's kept for up to a year with raw data.  

SevOne gives us real-time insights into network performance. Collection and visualization are almost immediate. There's no aggregation delay while it calculates things and rolls them up. It pretty much displays the data as you collect it. We trigger alarms off of important events and generate events up to our manager of managers, which creates incidents.

We collect WiFi data in abundance down to individual stations that are connecting to our access points. That can be tracked throughout the day, so you can determine where a user's been connected in order to troubleshoot. You can identify the specific access point they're on. We pull in everything the cloud watch is collecting. We ingest it, display it, look at historical patterns, and do anomaly-based checks and threshold alerts on the data. 

The data collection is pretty broad in our case. In the former company that I worked for, we had 350 wireless controllers over 14,000 access points. They actually rewrote the collector for WiFi so that they could scale up and finish the collection within a polling cycle. They're also very responsive about updates and adapting the product to demand.

SevOne's base dashboard which comes with the network performance management cluster is easy to use. It's easy to create graphs and leverage them, but there's a lot more power available underneath. If you understand the principles of grouping and creating custom indicators, you can take the product to advanced levels. The base out-of-the-box functionality is pretty easy to use. The data insights product that sits on top of it provides BI-type functionality. It's no harder or easier to use than other BI tools. It's designed to work with SevOne, so once the connection's been set up and you're pulling the data in, you apply the SevOne groups that you've already created. It's fairly easy to create reusable dashboards. Right now, we run probably about 180 dashboards that my team has customized for various groups.

The device support is pretty extensive. SevOne has continued to expand device support since the IBM acquisition. I can certify a new device type within 10 business days. If there is a device that's not supported natively, you can collect the MIT files, do an SNMP walk on the device, and send that to SevOne. They'll return the appropriate drivers to install on my system to support it, so I can get the out-of-the-box building functionality out of it. I would say it's pretty extensive. It's vendor agnostic. As long as the vendor has SNMP, API, or some other means of collecting data, we can usually figure something out.

It's quick and easy to set up reporting and get it running. Reporting is based on how you group devices together, so there's only so much you can do with SevOne's out-of-the-box reporting because they don't know your network. For instance, we have colo facilities separate from my various sites. I have manufacturing sites that are separated, so we group them together in reports. SevOne wouldn't have a way to know how to do that. So the reporting that's available quickly helps to get the job done, but there's more sophisticated reporting with a little bit of time you can develop that provides more value.

The one area with room for improvement is probably administration. They added data insights to make a better user experience, but I'd like to see some improvements in the way the system is administered. 

We'd like the ability to do more templates at a global level to affect things across lots of places where we need to go and make adjustments. I'd like to see that become a little bit more unified. It's on the roadmap, so we're waiting to see what direction they take with it.

I've been using SevOne for more than 15 years.

The system is highly stable, so we generally have zero downtime. We only take the system down for patching and upgrades about twice a year. There aren't usually patches in between upgrades unless there's a security emergency where they release a hotfix to address something. That's rare. Since we got the system up and running, we've had a few problems with it. We've not had any significant downtime related to the system.

SevOne is highly scalable. It's a global cluster, so it can scale much higher than the current implementation. I'm aware of other customers with 80 nodes in their cluster. Your performance doesn't change with each node you add because each node in the cluster is designed to provide the full capabilities. As you add nodes, you keep increasing that capability. It doesn't affect your response times or anything for querying the data.

I have not reached the limit. My current company is a smaller enterprise, but I worked on SevOne with an enterprise of 80,000 employees. We had no problem scaling. I know there are much larger customers that scale the system up. I think part of the system design lends itself to scaling pretty well. I haven't found other products in the space to scale better.

SevOne support is highly responsive and knowledgeable. We've generally had excellent technical support. I rate SevOne support nine out of ten.

Positive

I don't think the product cost compares to the savings we get by detecting a problem and resolving a problem faster. We lose more money in an outage than what we spend on SevOne, so I think our return on investment is fairly obvious.

I rate SevOne NPM eight out of ten in terms of the core functions and how the solution performs them. There's some room for growth in there, but they seem to be on the right track. We're anxious to see where they go with it with the recent acquisitions.

We are a large enterprise and provider. We use the solution to monitor and capacity plan our network.

We also use it for our cable modem estate. We have about 6 to 7 million customers who aggregate onto devices. We monitor those devices with SevOne NPM on a separate cluster. We also have a customer-facing cluster that we are about to install.

It is our strategic performance monitoring tool. So, it is the only thing that we use to monitor our internal network, which is huge. We plan to extend it and replace our network performance monitoring tool, which is another IBM tool and currently a big customer-facing system. We planned for another fairly large cluster of about 20 virtual machines.

We have both physical and virtual appliances onsite. We don't currently use the cloud.

SevOne’s data collection functionality is very good. From a collection point of view, we pull SNMP data, which is simple. It is easy to manipulate the pull in the estate. It is really simple compared to some of the other products that we have used. However, for deferred data, i.e., things that we import or don't pull directly, we tend to have a preplanned integration. So, its Universal Collector is really useful.

I don't know that we use it, in earnest, but SevOne does give us real-time insights into our network performance. We set thresholds on certain connections that are important to us. Should they trend towards an issue, then our capacity planning team is made aware of it.

SevOne is excellent for transforming raw network performance data into actionable insights. Our capacity planning team has been very pleased with the transition to SevOne because we previously hadn't used Data Insights, which is really good.

It uses a baseline. So, it uses the last six weeks of data. It has days of the week and weeks of the month understanding of network volumetric data. This is good because it can show us things that are out of the baseline. However, it isn't better than anything else I have used from a baseline point of view.

It is really easy to integrate our network performance data with our ITSM. The API is straightforward.

We have a real heterogeneous network with a lot of vendors and different types of equipment. Out-of-the-box, it doesn't tend to give us the things that we would like to see. Therefore, we have to raise certification requests.

I would like them to improve the self-certification, e.g., tools that allow us to certify products ourselves.

The event configuration piece could be overhauled. It is a little clunky and old compared to some things that I have used.

You need to plan integrations. That has been the biggest bug with SevOne so far. For the things that SevOne pulls directly, those are easy to understand, modify, and put into the database. For things that need to use the Universal Collector or xStats, you need to plan that stuff well in advance.

I have been using it for five years.

Stability is very good. We have had very few problems, other than during the upgrade process. So, the stability of the product on a day-to-day basis is pretty robust. There have been no bugs or glitches. It is fairly reliable.

I look after its deployment and maintenance.

It is scalable for us. We are probably pulling 1.2 million objects. There aren't that many bigger providers than us, and it covers the majority of our backbone, core access network.

We have internal users who tend to be engineering teams, operational teams, capacity planning teams, and provisioning teams. The main stakeholder is capacity planning. They are looking at our network to ensure that it runs efficiently, i.e., isn't congested or overloaded. They tend to be the main users of the current clusters. Moving forward, we have a customer-facing cluster, which will be customers who buy services from us, but that hasn't been implemented yet.

It has generally been excellent, but not so as of late. I normally deal with the guys in Delaware, or until recently there was a European or Polish support site, but that doesn't seem to exist anymore. Now, we have Indian support and the support doesn't seem to be as good as it used to be. It is still good, but we have some issues that have been outstanding for a month or maybe more, which is unusual. This was not my experience with SevOne support previously. So, support is good, but it used to be excellent. I would rate them as eight out of 10.

Positive

We did use a previous solution, which was called Intel. We changed for several reasons, and some of them were internal political changes. We were sort of acquired by an organization that has quite a big European presence, who was using SevOne. It was their will and drive to replace Intel with SevOne, probably for the cost of ownership. It was sort of forced on the UK base. It was just an extension of the existing European strategic platform.

It is easy to use when compared to the incumbent system that we replaced. From an administration and monitoring point of view as well as operational system support, it is just much easier to deal with. Our customers can generate reports quickly and get the same results that they used to get from the systems that this solution replaced. 

Our old NPM system was awful to change. It was very slow to create reports. Whereas, this solution is easy to change and very quick to make reports. Should we need to monitor a certain metric that we don't currently have, this solution is very quick to get that into the database, where the previous solution was slow.

We use the trends and thresholds when service may be impacted. However, before we had SevOne, we did that anyway. We just replicated the process.

We have been able to quickly edit the out-of-the-box reports relative to our previous tools, which were awful. So, it isn't extremely fast with an immediate-to-use process when going through a change, but it is doable, understandable, and quick compared to what we had. However, we don't use Data Insight, which seems to be a far better, slicker way of doing this sort of thing.

The initial setup was straightforward. 

We did a piecemeal deployment. The first pilot deployment was three months, but that was on physical appliances, so it was pretty simple.

The physical appliances were easy to implement. We installed it, migrating part of our estate and pulling from the incumbent system. We imported it using CSV, which allowed it to do a dual pull. Once it was dual pulled, we had to ratify the data that was collected by SevOne. This ensured that it was just as comprehensive as the incumbent system.

SevOne comes with multiple out-of-the-box reports. It is difficult when it is a migration. If it was a Greenfield implementation, then it would be easy since all our teams wouldn't have extraction techniques from SevOne, but we do. Our capacity plan team uses it a lot. It is a huge tool for them, but they don't really use the report techniques within SevOne, they just extract data. So, they extract report data and put it into a process that already existed. We had to put a piece of middleware in there to ease that process. All our customers will not change their process for dealing with performance data. So if you change the performance tool, then you have to do something about the bit in the middle. That has been one of the biggest bugs for us.

We already had teams who used performance data. They were used to the look and feel of it in a certain way. We had to accommodate that when we migrated to SevOne, and it is a great tool that is simple to use. However, if you want to change reports quickly, then it is good, but those teams have existing processes where they examine data and look at it, then we have to replicate that. For example, for the event-based stuff, we use Netcool, which is a big event-based IBM product. We had to go through a lengthy process to make sure that the events sent from SevOne matched the current rule files, so when they are plunked in front of the network management center, they look the same as they always have.

We did it with SevOne.

It is very difficult to put a figure on it when it is a support function.

We have a procurement team who goes through the licensing. I don't get involved with the pricing.

The reason that I like SevOne is it is plan-based, which makes things easier. It is also simple to deal with compared to Cambium and some other IBM products that we have used in the past which are similar. Cambium is very overly sophisticated with a lot of services. This solution is just a single platform that is very easy to deal with.

Most products allow us to trend, put thresholds, and send tracking to a front-line or network management center.

I would recommend the product, but not the use of physical appliances.

The SevOne data that we extract isn't used by default. It is more just historical data rather than reactive operational data. So, it is like, "Look what happened yesterday-type thing," rather than how we must react to a situation.

We don't currently use Data Insight, but it looks great.

I would rate the solution as eight out of 10.

We use SevOne to collect and report on network flows.

SevOne improves infrastructure planning by helping us analyze network traffic. We can look at bandwidth for specific endpoints on the customer's network and analyze traffic to identify issues. For example, maybe some connectors are unavailable. We can resolve those issues much faster.

I like SevOne's network flow reporting. 

SevOne could improve its flexibility because it isn't fully customizable and its out-of-the-box configuration doesn't cover all use cases. 

I have used SevOne for one year.

SevOne is a stable solution.

I rate SevOne eight out of 10 for scalability. 

I rate IBM support seven out of 10. There is some room for improvement.

Neutral

I have worked with many vendors as a system integrator, including ExtraHop, VMware, and Arista.

Deploying SevOne isn't complex. You can complete the initial deployment in a few days. It can take one or two weeks to design the reporting and prepare to use the solution. 

I rate IBM SevOne Network Performance Management seven out of 10. 

We use it for network firewalls, routing, and switch monitoring, including performance monitoring and triggering of alerts.

We have it in our internal cloud. It's an on-premises solution.

SevOne is like a Swiss Army Knife. Because of the architecture and its redundancy, when we acquire a new customer and we are figuring out the optimal monitoring solution for them, we can quickly—within a couple of hours—bring in and start monitoring their devices and showing them data with SevOne. We can monitor CPU, memory, bandwidth utilization, errors, and high octet counts. That is very important for our infrastructure and our business.

And SevOne has helped with the planning of transitioning of our network services. It helped us to know how many objects were involved and what was needed, and let us understand how it was going to impact the installation we had, with respect to installing and using the Universal Collector. We were also able to identify the growth needed for our current infrastructure and to secure and install the licenses. It helped us expand the clusters that we have to support the planned growth.

In addition, the solution enables us to take any network metric and convert it to an insight into what's going on, without having to use a bunch of tools or manually determine things. SevOne's ability to convert that information into insights saves us time and gives us a one-stop-shop.

The integration of SevOne data with our ITSM has saved a lot of time with SevOne being the source of truth for most network device states in the organization. We're able to aggregate alerts, as the ITSM tools aggregate notifications from other vendors in our infrastructure. And SevOne's ability to clear itself when a condition is retired, and to notify the ITSM tools, is very helpful. It helps with automation as well. For example, when a router interface goes down and SevOne notifies the ITSM tool, it equally notifies the tool to retire the alarm and clear it when the interface goes back up. That is great. The ITSM integration has also helped to automate the creation of tickets for customers and internal groups.

Among the most valuable features are the detailed data and performance metrics that are stored in the database. It's implemented well, enabling us to access that data over long periods of time.

Also, the event notification helps us understand the health and state of our network.

In addition, on a scale of one to 10, SevOne's data collection functionality is a nine, because of the redundancy and high-availability design of the data storage, and because of the integrity and choice of the database.

It also gives us the closest thing to real-time insight into network performance that we have, with just a 10-second delay. It's very important for us to know the health of the infrastructure very quickly. SevOne has a feature called its High-Frequency Poller. Standard polling is every 300 seconds, but using that feature I have been able to cut that to 10 seconds, giving us the ability to know about a network event no more than 10 seconds after it happens. That helps us to detect network performance issues faster.

And the dashboard is very easy to use. I do a monthly lunch and learn and everybody who joins always learns something. And they always compliment the solution on how easy it is to catch onto and use the tool.

In terms of SevOne's device support for giving us a complete view of network performance, it supports more network monitoring protocols than we support. It is a great tool with support for almost everything we need.

Another useful feature is that SevOne helps us to understand what is normal and what is not normal across our multi-vendor network. Most of the NMS objects are designed in a hierarchical order. There is a standard interface that is universal. However, below that, there is a sub-interface with object types for multiple vendors. So all the objects or metrics are aggregated to a universal object type. It is very easy to identify performance across multiple vendors. And where there are differences, SevOne has a cross-object calculation tool, where you can bring in the same kind of metrics for different vendors and the calculator is able to aggregate multiple objects from them into one object.

It's also easy to integrate SevOne network performance data with your ITSM. It's easy to configure and manage trap destinations, and that's what we use inside SevOne. It's very easy to manage, easy to maintain, and easy to edit. It's a top-down approach where you can configure it for the whole infrastructure cluster, or you can configure it by device groups below the cluster.

High-frequency polling is data-intensive because you're pulling more. If SevOne could figure out a way to manage the impact of high-frequency polling on the system, that would be very popular.

I've been using IBM SevOne Network Performance Management for eight years.

SevOne is one of the most stable monitoring tools I have worked on. It's stable because every database and every appliance is backed up three ways, which is a little bit more than most companies do. Each appliance is backed up by its peer and also backed up to the cluster master.

It's very easy to scale because you just add a peer. It's been the easiest to grow. Internally, that is one of the selling points to other teams. If we need to grow with a new appliance peer, the turnaround is very fast.

We have more than 1,000 users because all the network engineers that have LDAP access are automatically integrated into SevOne. Other users' roles include technical account managers who manage the relationships with the customers whose infrastructure we monitor. We also have internal security teams that monitor the security equipment with SevOne, and network management systems engineers who use SevOne to troubleshoot problems in a network.

We use the solution for a lot of our large customers, to monitor their infrastructures for them. We use it to monitor almost every network asset in our company as well. We use it extensively.

In terms of maintenance of the solution, for the last five years, I have been the primary person responsible. SevOne allows me to do my work, which would normally take about five people to do. I am able to do it very well with all the help that I get from SevOne support.

I've worked on this platform in two major telcos and I've worked with newer support staff as well as seasoned support staff. If their staff doesn't have the skill for, or understanding of, what is needed, they respond very well to the critical level of the ticket and bring in any resource necessary to help identify the problem and turn it around very quickly. That's been very helpful and very rewarding. They deserve a 10 out of 10.

Positive

The initial setup of SevOne is very straightforward, due to the architecture of the platform.

We have different installations of SevOne and they do different things. The quickest deployment took about a month, including planning and securing internal virtual environments and licensing. But with respect to SevOne itself, the turnaround for deployment is about two weeks.

Our implementation strategy is to work with the support staff and the SevOne developers to run with it. All the assets, meaning the virtual environment, are secured internally and all the firewall ports needed are implemented internally. But we do the deployment of the instances hand-in-hand with SevOne support.

We have definitely seen ROI using SevOne. For example, the tool has the ability to put the devices that we're monitoring into a maintenance state, which automatically puts the SevOne alerts into "snooze." We have customers that work with us during their maintenance, and they notify us to place their devices in maintenance states inside SevOne so that they don't get notifications. That has helped us to build better, continuous relationships. It's another opportunity for a relationship with our customers.

It also comes with out-of-the-box reports, and they help with time-to-value.
They serve as a proof of concept or a proof of configuration that we can use to design other reports. It's really great to have those examples, out-of-the-box. And we are able to quickly edit them.

For the value that you get from SevOne, it's worth the price. There are a lot of cheaper alternatives on the market, and even free options. But they require more staff, more resources, and engineers with more advanced knowledge of monitoring. That's what makes SevOne worth the price.

In addition to the standard costs, we pay for support. And because we have installations in a number of countries, especially in Europe, there are additional costs for the installations in those regions, costs that are based on the different forms of taxes. If you just have an installation in one location, the cost structure is straightforward.

Locate a SevOne sales engineer in your region and identify which products you need, in the suite of NMS tools, for the problems you're trying to solve. Work toward a proof of concept to realize the value, and usually, you'll easily see the benefits after going through those steps.

The biggest lesson I have learned from using SevOne is its ability to support SNMP, ICMP, and different data across objects, and to support custom objects. There is no limit to solving any problem because it supports custom and non-standard networking protocols. It's amazing, and SevOne makes it very easy to do that. It makes it hard to look at other vendors if they don't have all these capabilities.

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 are a VoIP company and we use Cisco BroadWorks as our voice platform. SevOne monitors all the servers, the uptime, the bandwidth being used,  and everything else. It also monitors the trap that it gets from these servers.

It's running on VMware.

If we did not have this tool, we would be virtually blind. We wouldn't know what's going on with all the servers. We would end up having to rely on someone calling us and saying, "Hey, this thing is not working." Then we would have to deep dive into the problem to find out what was broken. Having SevOne monitoring all these different aspects of our platform really helps. Based on the graphs, we are already aware that something might break and what might happen. We are not blind anymore. It is one of the most important systems we have in our environment for monitoring devices.

We usually look at a 24-hour graph. If the graph was around 2K yesterday, and it's about 1K today, then we obviously and immediately know there is something wrong.

We are able to monitor our multi-vendor network switches, including Juniper, and Cisco, as well as our BroadWorks systems.

We also use SevOne to integrate network performance data with business decision-making tools. One of the tasks we were recently assigned was to figure out our user growth and to make sure we have enough resources for that growth. It was so easy for us to look at the SevOne graph and figure out what our users' patterns are and how they will shape up in the future. We came up with an estimate for every month over the next few years. It helped us figure out what kind of resources we are looking at. If the graph tells us a server is reaching its peak, we know we need to build new servers and add them to our platform.

And while we don't really heavily use the network, it helps us figure out which gateway is using most of the traffic.

One of the most valuable features is the graphs, which you can build instantly. I have used some open-source platforms in the past, but they are not as good. With SevOne, the sampling in the graph can be every few seconds, not just every few minutes, and that's really helpful. It's really fast.

In addition, its data collection functionality is really good. The solution also has a lot of built-in templates, and those are not available with open-source solutions. They help us build graphs or reports out of the data that is collected. That's really helpful for us. 

And we love the SevOne dashboard for monitoring network performance. We mostly work from home now, but when we were in the office we had a big, dedicated TV monitor and had a dashboard on it with all the graphs. Every now and then we would look at it to make sure there were no alarms. The dashboard in SevOne is really useful.

One thing that comes to my mind is that while I was playing with the SevOne, when I started using it, I tried adding one of the BroadWorks application servers into SevOne. SevOne has all the templates for BroadWorks, but what happened was that it created thousands and thousands of objects from that one application server and we immediately ran out of license. That shut down SevOne. It was a huge pain for me to go into each object and disable and delete it from SevOne.

It would help, when new objects are discovered, if there were a way to categorize those objects and to pick the part of the object you need, rather than just discovering thousands of objects and adding them into the database.

I started with my current company in 2019, but the company has been using it since about 2017. I come from using an open-source tool. I don't have much experience with what other paid solutions can do, but my experience with SevOne has been really exciting.

It is definitely stable. We have only had a few instances where SevOne froze and they were probably related to the small number of resources we had allocated to SevOne when we initially installed it. As the number of objects grew, we didn't upgrade the VM resources.

There have also been a few bugs in SevOne and we have worked with SevOne support to resolve them. But overall, it is definitely stable.

It is scalable, absolutely. The VM was initially built with a small number of resources, and we didn't upgrade those resources for four or five years. But our devices and objects had grown a lot. It is definitely scalable in that sense.

At the moment it's just our engineering team, about five of us, who are using it, but we use it very extensively. In the future, we are planning to give access to the TAC team so that they can have a monitoring dashboard as well. We will probably have 20 users in the future.

We also plan on expanding our usage. In the past, we had only an instance in one of our data centers. But we have a second data center for our applications and if we had to use that data center we would be virtually blind. I believe we have already obtained a license to build a SevOne instance in our second data center. We are struggling with support in getting that built up.

My experience with their technical support has been pretty good. Every time I log a ticket, someone gets back to me within a day or two, and they find a solution pretty quickly. If it's a bug, they give us a work-around and they put the bug fixes in newer versions within a few weeks or a few months.

Positive

I wasn't involved with setting up our production version, but we recently got a lab version. One of my colleagues got involved with SevOne support to install it, but I was involved in adding new devices, and that was pretty simple.

In terms of implementation, you just put up a VM, get the license, install it, and then add the devices. It's as simple as that.

We had to get in touch with support because there was one technical problem, something to do with MySQL, but other than that we didn't need any help. We were already using it in production and were familiar with it.

We don't really need to do maintenance on it at all, unless there is a bug and we need to get in touch with support.

I would definitely recommend the product.

Monitoring is the key to being successful. Without a monitoring platform, you don't know what happened yesterday and what things look like right now. With a monitoring platform and the graphs, you can go back four weeks or two months and look at the patterns. Without a monitoring platform you are blind.

We are a system integrator, so we help the customers implement SevOne NPM and provide first-line support. When the customers have issues, they call us first, and we open a ticket for them if they need SevOne support.

Most of my customers are in banking and finance, so they are more conservative. Some of them are in a period of transitioning their infrastructure to the cloud, but they still have an on-prem solution. In the next few years, some customers may transition to virtualized or nextgen network services, but not at this moment. Some telco customers still have the on-prem appliance to monitor the circuit server-level connectivity or for NPRs.

There are three typical use cases. First, most of our customers use the SevOne platform for network performance monitoring, including network devices and connectivity. Customers like the high availability, unlimited scalability, and fast-forwarding. 

The second use case is to provide a central platform for infrastructure monitoring, including the network server and some application monitoring. About 60 percent of our customers use it for this. The third is for server monitoring only.

The use cases are a bit different. In the old days, IBM, HP, BMC, and Microsoft required customers to deploy agents in the server to monitor them. However, the servers used SNMP. And although there are advantages to using SNMP to monitor the server, customers prefer to use a server platform for monitoring. Most of the use cases fall in the first category. The second accounts for maybe 12 percent, and 10 percent of customers only use SevOne for server monitoring.

SevOne NPM helps our customers detect performance issues faster. The solution has a polling engine to check the normal behavior of a given device in an area. It helps the operations team, but you need to configure it properly. It all depends on the implementation engineer, and the operations team must fine-tune the monitoring policy. Once it's properly configured, SevOne will help you address some issues right away. 

Without the solution, the operations team would need to manually check each device when something goes wrong. With SevOne installed, we get the alert right away, so you can say that it cuts the troubleshooting time by one to three hours, depending on the situation. If you properly configure the policy, you can proactively address potential performance issues before a failure occurs.

SevOne has multiple out-of-the-box options for reporting. They have the old reporting portal and the new one. The new reporting portal has more out-of-the-box functionality, and it looks great. It helps the customer gain visibility into the network.

SevOne's Data Appliance, unlimited scalability, and fast-forwarding are the most distinctive features. In particular, our customers like the Data Appliance because they don't need to install anything. 

Once you deploy, you can configure the IT elements and start monitoring the network or server right away. With fast-forwarding, you only need to configure one device to the lever or the server to the second level. It's amazing. The new reporting dashboard is also a lot easier to use.

SevOne NPM is good at data collection, but I think IBM needs to improve the solution's actionable insights. Many other vendors have machine learning or AI that pinpoint the potential problem for the customer or drill down to the root cause. I don't think SevOne has these capabilities at the moment. The cloud monitoring functions are also lackluster. Everyone talks about how good SevOne's cloud monitoring is, but I found it underwhelming. 

Telemetry is hot these days, and IBM can improve SevOne's support for telemetry correction. Reporting is another feature that could be better. It provides the bare minimum functionality, which is good enough for most engineers, but the management isn't advanced. The new portal provides a much lighter view and better visualization, but the management is not so good. 

You can use SevOne to monitor a mixed multi-vendor network, and it provides a baseline. It's a good platform, but we must rely on the implementation engineer who has the necessary knowledge to configure the monitoring policy for the customers. It would be better if they had some out-of-the-box policies that could help the customers.

We've been using SevOne NPM for almost eight years.

I rate SevOne eight out of 10 for stability. Our customers are happy with SevOne's stability because the system is quite robust. Some of our customers have been running it for years without issue.

I rate SevOne support nine out of 10. We've had great feedback from our customers about SevOne support. They're willing to set up a remote session upon request. You have to go through three tiers of support with most vendors, and they ask a lot of screening questions before they will do a remote session. You need to spend a lot of time before an engineer will host a remote session to look at your problematic system. 

When there's an urgent case that affects server performance, like corruption or instability, they respond fast and fix the issue right away. The support engineer can quickly sort out most issues that affect the user experience. 

Positive

The installation is fast and straightforward because you only need to configure the network interface with the proper IP to get the system up and running. It's really quick, just like flipping a switch.

The total deployment time depends on the customer's environment. It takes a little time to set up high availability and configure some aspects of the labor interface, but you can finish all the configuration in a day.

Some of our customers request integration with ITSM tools like Service Cloud. For a typical engineer, it isn't easy, but it's not that difficult, either. Some other solutions on the market have built-in integration with ITSM, but you need to use the command lines to integrate SevOne. 

The license was quite expensive in the old days, but I think the price is okay for an enterprise customer. However, SevOne is still more costly than competitors in the small or medium-sized enterprise market. 

I rate SevOne Network Performance Manager seven out of 10. The support is excellent, but the features are average. 

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.