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 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. 

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

We have been using SevOne for approximately four years.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I would rate this solution a nine out of ten.