ITRS Geneos Reviews

We have multiple teams in multiple locations using it to monitor multiple environments, including UAT, production, and dev.

The solution has been instrumental in reducing our incidents that were related to monitoring issues that we had spotted, but because in our previous system those issues were sent by email and none of them got action. It has helped us avoid many Sev 1 or “system down” issues, as well as Sev 2 issues, because the monitoring is so effective.

It has also detected issues before any other of our corporate monitoring tools have identified them. For getting out in front of a problem before it happens, it's absolutely superb. Obviously, that's down to the design of the actual alerting that we put in place, but Geneos allows us to do that. Alerts are quite visible, very obvious on the console in the tree structure. It’s helping us do what we're trying to do, which is avoid instances for our clients before they notice them. It has been instrumental in doing that.

I'm a massive fan of Geneos and I’m not even sure where to start when it comes to valuable features. I live and die in it and that has been the case for the last four or five years.

The ability to completely tailor and customize what it's monitoring is one of its strongest points. A lot of other monitoring tools are good at certain things, but one of my colleagues described it as the “Swiss Army Knife” of monitoring tools. It can do anything you want. And if something you need is not built-in to the product, you can quite easily build it yourself. As a developer/support engineer, that's perfect. The capacity to completely customize it in any way — incoming stuff, outgoing integrations with the tools — is quite powerful.

The tree structure that you can create in the monitoring tool itself is also very useful.

We've also bought Datadog at an enterprise level. That solution looks really pretty. Personally, I don't like that but a lot of senior management, the non-technical guys, do like that. ITRS have started to make some major changes that we haven't taken on board yet, in the creation of dashboards and more visibility of the metrics that we collect. At the moment, that's something that's lacking, but I know they have addressed it. Still, it’s not that easy to create stuff to help with visibility and dashboarding in Geneos.

I have been using ITRS Geneos for about five years.

The stability is better now. We had some issues early on, about three years ago. I'm not saying that they were the product's fault, they may have been mine. But now, it's very stable and doesn't require a lot of coaxing to keep running.

It’s scalable. We've gone from one product and about five servers up to eight products that we supply, and there are over 300 servers that we're monitoring now. And I envision that doubling, at least, in the next couple of years.

We have it in three data centers across the globe. Although I work for one particular part of our company, with one particular product, which is where we started, I have also rolled it out to other teams and trained them. We use it in a federated model where we provide the platform, train up someone on those teams, and they then administer their own alerts.

We have about 400 users who have access to the console itself.

Their technical support is superb. Absolutely amazing. If our support team for our own products was as good as theirs, we would be brilliant. They are really good. There are a couple of guys there who are absolutely excellent.

Positive

Prior to Geneos, we had enterprise-level tools like SCOM, and CA's APM, which is a performance monitoring tool, and there were elements of Tivoli and other big-company monitoring solutions, but they were never very customizable. We would never have been able to monitor the completely custom-built application that we provide.

You can't just go and buy a tool that will monitor a custom application, so a lot of our monitoring prior to Geneos was via bespoke scripts that were running and sending emails. You can imagine how nightmarish that was. We had a large volume of emails, no persistence, and no idea of who was looking at an alert.

Geneos was able to execute a lot of our custom scripts along with a lot of its core plugins. And because it has a console, with a means of tracking alert volumes and for designing the rules, it was very easy to tailor our rules to avoid false alerts.

A manager of mine came in from a previous place of employment where they used Geneos and he was singing its praises. It replaced our completely custom-built, email-based solution.

It's a complex product, but we had some direct onsite support from two implementation guys for several weeks and they assisted. Once they'd shown me the ropes, it was fairly straightforward.

In its out-of-the-box form, it takes a few hours to deploy. But it then takes a long while to build up that monitoring catalog.

From a technical point of view, we started seeing results instantly, because it resolved the issue of our having to maintain all of our custom-created scripts. But it truly came into its own only about a year after deployment. It took us six months to a year to fully implement it. But Geneos knows how many alerts it has created for a certain “client environment,” and we could then look at those alerts and tune them a lot more easily than we could have with an email system.

Our implementation strategy involved starting out with fairly vanilla, cross-environment samples that we created in Geneos, while running the old monitoring tools, our script/email calls, in parallel. That allowed us to gain confidence in Geneos. We ran them in parallel for a few weeks and analyzed the results. As we gained confidence, we slowly moved more and more of the functions of our old monitoring tools into Geneos.

I was the main person on our side involved and I had a little help from the rest of the support team.

For us, it doesn't require any maintenance, but it all depends on how you automate things. For example, because we are a multi-country organization, each country has different daylight savings changes. Because we've automated that, it's hands-off. But, out-of-the-box, you don't need to do any maintenance at all.

I don't generally get involved with ROI at a metrics level, but Geneos has definitely helped when it comes to getting ahead of a potential client issue before it occurs. That doesn’t affect ROI directly but, in some cases, it would save us because we have SLAs with our clients. There would definitely be reputational as well as some cost savings, because we've detected problems before or as they're happening and before the client notices. Quantifying that is very difficult. How do you quantify the reputation of how good your service is?

Given our spend and the amount of service we have in it, the pricing is quite reasonable.

We have not bought Geneos at an enterprise level. If we did pursue that, it would be a lot cheaper. But there haven’t been any complaints about the licensing model. And we actually don't pay for UAT, which is quite unique in the industry at the moment. We only pay for production licenses.

Of course, it has to run on a server, so there was a cost for that. There is also a database server behind it with a small cost for that. Other than that, there are no additional costs, and they provided training for free.

We played with Micro Focus SiteScope, Splunk, and various other tools. They're all very good in their own right for certain elements, but Datadog didn’t exist then. Geneos seemed to do everything we wanted in one place, to create that single-pane-of-glass view that we didn't have.

Definitely do a PoC, but beyond that my advice would depend on where you're coming from. It's a very technical tool, but we are doing very technical monitoring. We're not doing website monitoring, for example, although it does do that. 

It is helpful that you understand what you're trying to monitor first. You need to have a really clear idea what is an actual alert in your system before you do anything else. That's critical.

Overall, the tool is superb.

It is for application monitoring. So, we are using it for basic infrastructure, process up/down and log file monitoring to create metrics, and alerts. Then, we extended the use to cover creating more of a system management console, so we could stop and start a process from the console without having to go into the box to do the change. 

Across the bank, every team needs to provide a Ready For Business status, which is shown in a centralised web page for ease of viewing. As the bank is very large, it is down to the application teams as to what tool they choose to use, and in this instance individuals would manually update the webpage status for their area. We used Geneos to start automating that process, which helps provide a holistic health across all applications, and due to the nature of Geneos, also enables downstream applications to understand the health of their upstream providers. 

Geneos is an agent that runs on the host. The agent collects the information, then provides it through to a console. The analysts can then see all the information coming through on the console.

We started linking applications together. As a large company with a lot of individual support teams, most teams will support their own application. However, if you think of it from a business flow point of view, the business requires those applications to work together for the business to actually work. We have been able to link the applications together and can see the health of applications, which are two to more steps removed from where we are. During an incident, people will first start looking at their own application, then realize there is nothing wrong with the application. So, they go and ask the upstream app team. Now, they can see if the app three steps before them has a problem, which is probably the reason why my app is not working as expected.

The solution is used across the entire investment banking division, covering environments such as electronic trading, algo-trading, fixed income, FX, etc. It monitors that environment and enables a bank to significantly reduce down time. Although hard to measure, since implementation, we have probably seen some increased stability because of it and we have definitely seen teams a lot more aware of their environment. Consequently, we can be more proactive in challenging and improving previously undetected weaknesses. For example, we recently started to use it for managing certificates when we were having issues with certificate expiry to validate that certificates were not due to expire, or had been correctly refreshed and as a result significantly reduced the certificate failures in this space by about 70 percent over a period of 12 months. This improvement was predominantly down to the visibility Geneos provided. Due to the certain standard configs leveraged with Geneos this enabled us to be very quick and nimble as we could just create the required scripts and push them out to all the Geneos instances to be deployed easily. So, all the different teams could leverage this capability with a high level of reuse.

In my previous role, I used to use Geneos for market data. It plugs into the Thomson Reuters platform and was very good on the market data. Geneos provides lightweight data collection that sits on the host, which we run on time-critical servers and it doesn't have any performance impacts when doing electronic trading.

If a server CPU is at 90 percent, you can get that alert within seconds with any monitoring system. Therefore, what is more relevant is: 

• How do you manage those alerts? 
• How you consolidated those alerts so you are getting relevant information. 

With Geneos, you can alert on certain thresholds, so there can be warnings, or if you have an action on it, then it can then bump it up to the top. 

We are using it to set thresholds, so we can see what is occurring and intervene beforehand.

Before Geneos, we didn't really have an effective way of managing alerts.

The flexibility of the console is probably the biggest value. It is the ease in which you can pull the data together onto a screen. You can pivot the screen to however you choose to look at it. So, you can take a simple approach, and it can show business flow. Then, you can give it to a manager or business user who can see their flow and it quickly helps with the flow. Therefore, you create more of a technical view and look at more of the environment through a construction or routine lens.

The second biggest value is the ease of being able to configure and modify alerts to better manage them.

The third biggest value is that you can automate responses, so you can get it to run scripts. You can invoke a script automatically based on an event or can trigger manually if you want to carefully manage the situation. We also integrated it into ServiceNow, so if there is an event on the console, then we automatically generate a ticket, so there is an audit trail. The added benefit of ServiceNow integration is that you can leverage the on-call functionality to provide responses out of hours.

Mobile phone integration is probably not as rich as it could be.

Another area where I would like to see some improvement is around visualising the environment. At the moment, drawing the estate within Geneos is a very manual process, so it would be better if there was a reusable database behind it that can link the environment to the configuration. For example, read a CMDB to provide the view of how it works together. Or, if not feasible to read the CMDB, put the effort into creating your diagram and generating a CMDB from it. This would be very valuable because App teams have to pull stuff together, to show where host A is in relationship to host B, and at the moment this is a lot of manual effort with very little reusability.

I have been using Geneos pretty much since I have been at the bank. I have been at the bank for eight years and used it in two roles. When I joined the bank, I headed up market data and the bank was already using Geneos. So, it was already in place when I joined. Then, I changed roles and moved into applications support for the front office, where I introduced Geneos and helped create an enterprise deal enabling it to be rolled out across all areas of the front office.

It is stable.

There is very little maintenance for Geneos itself. Sometimes, you have to upgrade it. Effort is more about building standards and improving the capability of the solution.

It scales relatively well.

About 8,000 hosts are covered by it.

User roles are predominantly application support.

The technical support is good. I haven't encountered them directly, but I know some guys who have and they have been relatively responsive.

I normally deal with the account team. I have had a number of sessions with them, which have been quite good. Where there have been gaps in the product, they have taken that feedback onboard, then tried to enhance the product.

Before Geneos, we didn't really have an effective way of managing alerts.

When I joined in market data, it was being used within market data. Then, I moved into investment banking. Since it was not being used in investment banking, so I took the product into the investment banking area.

There are different ways of doing it. I think installing Geneos itself is relatively straightforward. When you use Geneos to scale, then you can do it one of two ways: 

1. You can give each team Geneos, and they can do it themselves. That is not ideal because they end up setting it up in slightly different ways. 
2. You can try to have a central team engineer it, which is better, but obviously it takes longer to do that. 

If you said, "I have a small estate that I want to get monitored," then getting in and instrumenting your estate from zero to having it done can be done in a relatively short period of time.

When I rolled this out to my area, I just gave it to individual teams, as I felt we were behind where we needed to be from a monitoring perspective. I just said, "Look, get the product out there. Start using it. Let's get some value out of it. Then, at some point in the future, we will work out how we converge onto some standards." Which is what we did.

Another team, who came a little bit later, saw what we had done and the benefits we were getting, but had the benefit of having some central engineering team, took the time to engineer it and have a standard, then they pushed that standard across. Although this took longer to deploy, there are benefits because they can now do things quicker with that standard. My area then started converging onto that standard, but we had to kind of do almost a double build. 

All things considered, if I went through the same thing again, I would still probably do it the way I did it because we started getting value out of the product straight away, which was critical for me due to the immaturity of our monitoring, rather than waiting to build a consistent approach, then pushing out.

For each team in each area, it probably took about two months to start getting them from zero to having it deployed, then getting value back on it. Some of them were quicker than that, if they had previous experience with it. For the teams that had zero experience, it probably took about two months. More sophisticated monitoring and automation takes a bit longer and if you are looking to instrument your whole environment, especially if you're doing it without any incremental / dedicated resources, then you are probably looking at a couple of years. 

We didn't have any incremental bodies to go and do this. The existing production support team did it themselves. There was no additional funding to go and build this capability out. It was just the existing guys during their day job. I was like, "This will help you. Get this done, and start using it."

We have seen ROI because the environment is far better managed.

When I first came in, their pricing was very high. ITRS had a high expectation of what their price should be based on perceived value. I think they have been realizing, more recently, that there are other competitors, so their pricing is a lot better. Licensing for on-premise is okay, however I feel there is quite some work to be done for cloud and  containers. We're still working with them to try and work out what that pricing should look like.

In terms of value, you have to negotiate with them to get a good deal for the product, but that is no different to any other vendor. I think if you don't negotiate, then you will end up paying a relatively higher price for it. If you negotiate, you can get a lot better deal.

We have a tiered pricing model with an ELA. Every other year, we agree on what the pricing is. We work out how many licenses we are using. It is all predefined, because when we started the contract, we agreed the rate card and made sure that price increases were RPI type price increases.  I feel that is a good model, as previously we didn't have an ELA, we had loads of individual contracts and everyone was paying a different price. The pricing wasn't that competitive nor that great, but we spent some time putting all those contracts together to get a global pricing.

There are some optional add-ons, if you want them.

We looked at some other tools, predominantly AppDynamics. It comes in a slightly different perspective. It is aimed more at performance monitoring. It was a lot harder to derive the value out of it, than what we have done from Geneos. Geneos was an easier tool for the teams to get used to, on-board, and immediately get value out of it. AppDynamics was one of those things where you have to spend an awful lot of time before you can get value out of it. It is also more suited for certain applications than others, where Geneos is a bit more generic and can probably work in most spaces.

We were also evaluating some home grown solutions, which were lower cost solutions. In my opinion, Geneos wins against homegrown solutions, as it has been around for a number of years and a lot of people have fed into the ideas. So, it has evolved due to feedback from various clients, because there is a dedicated team behind Geneos product. Whereas, if you think about home grown solutions, they are limited by your experience and rarely mature as funding ultimately becomes an issue, so end up not as function-rich as Geneos.

If you look at some competitors, such AppDynamics, they probably have a better way of discovering dependencies as well as connectivity to them. That aspect is probably another area for Geneos to improve on.

Determine the scale you need. If you do want to go enterprise-wide, it probably is worthwhile standardizing on the design. However, if you're already a small shop and bleeding (have no effective monitoring in place), then just get out of there as quickly as possible and think about standardizing afterwards. Think about what you want from the product. The product is very capable, so you can just use it for monitoring, but you can get a lot more value out of it by sharing with a business to demonstrate business flows and picture it in that dimension.

Definitely consider the automation or scripting capabilities of the product, which are very powerful. This avoids you having to jump onto boxes and run commands yourself. You can script them, which means you avoid people making mistakes or human errors.

The solution’s web-based UI is functional. It is not as rich and as powerful as a console, but it gives managers in business a high-level view of the environment. An analyst or support person is probably better off with a console rather than a web-based view.

We haven't really played with the application performance monitoring too much. I believe the stuff they have come out with will help us start seeing trends over time and be better improved in them. However, I haven't really tested that part out.

We are not using it for predictive analysis.

I would rate this solution as an eight out of 10.

We use it for application monitoring, monitoring of our business applications to provide our support teams with alerts around the problems and events that may be occurring within the apps.

We're a financial company and we monitor applications for trade entry, trade management, risk, and order flow. It's used for any application that's being used in the tradeflow stack.

Because we're a large organization, we've built some really great management dashboards that show the end-to-end flow of how our applications are fitting together and any alerts that are occurring on those applications at the moment. It provides a management-level view of the underlying data.

While we don't use it in a predictive mode—we are reactive—our reaction time is greatly improved using Geneos. We've gone from hours down to minutes.

It's hard to say how many issues we have detected and outages avoided using Geneos, but I definitely know that prior to Geneos we had hundreds of events a month that we were slow to react to. We may still get those events, but we are much faster at reacting to them, and that has really improved our interaction with our users. The confidence of our users has greatly improved because of our ability to react much faster.

The biggest benefit of Geneos is the fact that we can clearly see, if we have an alert, where that alert has come from. We can see the data around that alert and anything that might be relevant is also shown. We can very easily right-click and see why we've received that alert. That's the best part about it, that you've got all the data there with the alerting. It's the usability that it provides. It's not really the real-time data, you can get that everywhere, but rather the fact that it pulls all of those other pieces together.

Also, the Netprobe that is deployed on each of the application servers is very lightweight. That is another of the great benefits of Geneos.

One area where there is room for improvement is the log file. I would like to be able to do a pre-run on the log files. When you are testing log files for regular expressions, it would be good to be able to do a quick check up front on that side of things before you release that into production.

And more generally, there is room for improvement with the Netprobe agent performance and understanding when you need to deploy a second Netprobe versus a single Netprobe.

I've been using ITRS Geneos for two and a half years. We're on version 4.12 but we're moving up to 5.3.

The stability is very good. Very rarely do we have an outage with Geneos. We do sometimes have outages with the agents, the Netprobes, usually due to the loads that we are trying to get them to do.

Scalability is probably a weak spot. We find that once we get up to about 120 Netprobes we have to then run another gateway, but we can have multiple gateways running on the same server. So even though we can monitor, and we are monitoring, thousands of servers, we have thousands of gateways. One of the difficulties is tying all of that data together if you want to create some sort of summary reporting across all of that.

Our environment runs into the hundreds of applications, which is then multiple thousands of Netprobes, on the order of about 8,000 servers.

Technical support for Geneos is awesome. Absolutely awesome. They are top-rank. They have an immediate chat facility off of their website. There's always someone there; really helpful, great guys.

Prior to Geneos we used a few solutions, but they were very restrictive in what we could do. We could only do process up/down and log file monitoring, whereas Geneos has a huge range of other things that we can monitor.

We're very thankful for that, in terms of the deployment process, we got some advice to get some understanding about how we would like to configure Geneos. You have to do some background work and upfront work before you start your deployment. Once you've done that, you can create some standard configurations. Then we deployed to all of our applications, created a standard package for how to deploy the Netprobes internally, and then we deployed the gateways onto virtual servers. 

We've gone for a federated model where we have a group of individuals that are monitoring the monitor. They're monitoring Geneos and doing all the server-side configuration that is required. We then have the application support teams that have slightly less Geneos knowledge, but they set up the configuration for their individual applications.

We deployed it to over 120 applications. The initial deployment took us about six months, and then we spent another six months to a year refining that. It's a constant process thereafter of continual improving of the monitoring. Whenever we find something new, we will add in a new configuration.

The core team involved in the deployment included four people, and the extended team ran to 20 to 25 people because it's such a large deployment. When it comes to users of Geneos, front-end, it would be around 350. 

It's very difficult to put a number on it, but I'm sure that the product has paid for itself.

It is expensive. They have to look at the model around when we move to cloud and how that's going to work. The licensing cost does pay off because of the improvements in support to our business.

Our previous solutions and this one take roughly the same amount of time to alert. Both do so within a couple of minutes.

We had a few choices to evaluate, including using an OpenStack or open source solutions, but when we evaluated those we felt that, given the time and effort to stitch them together, it was more beneficial for us to use Geneos. The time and effort needed to get those open source systems up and running and combined—you have to use multiple open source products to get the same functionality—and the fact that there's no support and nobody to help, led us to conclude that it's much easier to use the ITRS solution.

The configuration can be very flexible, which is great when you're trying to do something, but it means that if you're just starting out, there is more than one way to do something. Take professional advice, use the ITRS website, understand how everything fits together first, and then proceed. Try to get a consistent configuration design across all of your applications.

A lesson learned from using Geneos would be to get buy-in from the people who are the users of Geneos. Get them onboard nice and early. Get them familiar with the tool. It does take time to understand how the tool works, so invest in training.

ITRS offers multiple products, including upgrades for synthetic monitoring and a SaaS platform. Geneos is used for infrastructure monitoring, covering KPIs such as CPU, memory, processes, network latency, and custom scripts.

You write a script and upload it to your server. You can upload it either from the UI or the server itself, and then you can monitor it. It's a stable product for infrastructure monitoring. There's a slight lag in the UI, which is old-fashioned: most banks and financial institutions like ITRS. Finance is a separate domain, like banks or specific financial service organizations. They've developed the product to completely meet the requirements and KPIs of banks at that level. Its products are used by banks such as JP Morgan and Standard Chartered. Most users are from the old legacy system, so they don't have any AI or similar technologies.

Geneos is a stable product. Compared to many open-source products like Prometheus and others, Geneos is more stable. Additionally, they offer an on-prem solution, which benefits banks with data security concerns, as they cannot send their data to the cloud. The agent will never go down once everything is configured correctly. 

There are many native features, and they are continuously developing and reviewing their APIs, allowing for automation and configuration. You can create a package with the agent and deploy it centrally. If one server fails, the agent will automatically be reinstalled. For Windows, you can create a package check and install it. They provide templates for different OS versions that can be hosted on their central platform. Once the agent is installed, it will automatically add KPIs and eliminate the need for manual work. This level of automation is achievable. If you need custom monitoring, you'll need to write a script based on your use case and upload it, and then it will work accordingly.

ITRS Geneos offers features such as auto-scaling and auto-healing.

ITRS Geneos is a legacy system. It predicts or provides proactive measures once an issue is resolved. It doesn't offer any predictive capabilities or root cause analysis. They throw a lot of data if there's a 90% error. You need to check which process is consuming more CPU and determine the root cause for yourself. You need to troubleshoot it manually.

This legacy system could introduce predictive analysis and root cause identification. They are reluctant to switch to newer solutions, which may require writing queries to fetch data. Manually logging into servers, checking CPU usage, identifying processes, and determining root causes is time-consuming. Once the root cause is identified, the issue can be resolved efficiently. The manual troubleshooting process is time-consuming.

The content is not openly available in the market. If you search for it somewhere, it is not readily accessible. If you want to try it out, no trial version is available. Therefore, it will be challenging to learn. Loading ITRS is difficult, as you need to purchase it first. Secondly, only a few people are knowledgeable about ITRS in the market, making it challenging to find resources. Thirdly, the documentation must be well-documented, making finding content or training material hard. The UI also needs to be updated, which adds to the difficulty.

I have been using ITRS Geneos for five or six years.

More than five users are using this solution, including admin and users.

The initial setup is complex. The documentation is not proper. You need to ensure that the configuration is well-documented so that it can be useful. The engineers are coming up with a new platform. They aim to include everything and integrate numerous data sources, making it a versatile platform. They are still in the development phase.

The pricing is high. Licensing fees might be around 500$ per server monthly.

Overall, I rate the solution a five out of ten.

We are using Geneos for basic monitoring, like process, logs, database monitoring, etc.

In terms of the applications we monitor with Geneos, they are the basics, like load processes for getting the data, parsing it, and loading into the database. We have a processor running 12 to 14 hours a day and we have to monitor the data we are getting, the FIX (financial information exchange) messages. We are parsing to see whether everything went fine or not. Then, if we are loading it into a database, we are checking the counts to confirm that whatever is in the FIX messages is getting loaded.

The solution’s web-based UI is a really helpful tool because sometimes what happens is that we are not on our machines but we can utilize those links over our mobile phones. We can access things from pretty much anywhere. If we are traveling, we can check the status of my application through the web-based UI and see if something is failing.

Previously, we did not have much in the way of monitoring. Geneos offers various kinds of samplers and it keeps adding integrations as well. For example, we are using Control-M scheduler for our batch. We integrated ITRS with Control-M and now we are getting all the alerts from there into our ITRS monitoring, and we can publish that in the dashboard. In one view we can see how our hardware is, how our logs and processes are, and how our batch is. And we are using Symphony and there is integration from ITRS for that. That's also something that we are utilizing here.

In addition, the fact that I check anything from anywhere, is a time saver for us. I would say that, overall, the solution is saving between two to three hours per day, compared to having to do everything manually.

For my application, Geneos is detecting and helping us avoid outages at least once a day. It's proactive monitoring so we get an alert and can take action before there is a major impact.

One thing we're utilizing in Geneos is the Gateway-SQL. That's really helpful for us. Using Gateway-SQL, we are able to merge two different views into one. Suppose we have to check something in the log and that we have to check something in the database and do a comparison before publishing a result. We can achieve that using Gateway-SQL.

Another valuable feature in Geneos is the FIX Analyser, because in our automation we are dealing with a lot of FIX messages.

On top of that we use the dashboards which are very good for presenting everything in one place, and we can send it to our higher management. We have different kinds of dashboards. For our application team, we have a full-view dashboard where we have set up the status of the processes, the hardware, and everything. Then we have a management dashboard for looking at applications. It tells us if the whole of application XYZ is green or not. We can design different kinds of dashboard per our needs.

Alerting happens in real time, and we can set up the sampling interval. If we want something to be checked every five seconds, we can do that in Geneos. We have different intervals set up. Some things are not really important and have been set up with sampling every one minute. We also have things we sample every 20 second and things we sample every five seconds.

We explored the database logging feature of Geneos ITRS and we are not using that much as of now. We are using it for a reporting type of function. We collect the trends — how many alerts we are getting — and we probably review it once in a month. But I would really like to see something from the Geneos side to set up automated reporting from ITRS. We have to send reporting to management every day. To do that we have to check the dashboard and then we have to report whether everything is fine or not. In the future, I want something, some reporting kind of feature in ITRS, where it can collect all the data and mention what is green, what is amber, and what is red in a report. That is the most important thing that I would like to see.

The other area where something could be done is the scheduling part. Instead of relying on any other scheduler, it would be good if we could use an ITRS tool for scheduling our batches.

I started using ITRS Geneos in 2012, so it has been almost nine years.

The stability has improved, as we purchased an upgrade. Now it's pretty stable.

We have all the processes defined, but if we are deploying a new process on our side, we can simply tell the ITRS team that we have here, "Okay, we are deploying a new code base and these are our requirements," and they can set up monitoring quickly. It doesn't take more than five to 10 minutes from their side.

Technical support is really helpful. Whenever we have a use case, we can simply send out one email and we get a response the same day, often within an hour. That's really helpful and pretty impressive. And the guys know what they are doing. They're always responsive and knowledgeable.

We did not have a previous solution.

The initial setup was pretty much straightforward. We had two Geneos people come to our place. They sat with us and set up the process; how to define everything and we then had all the XMLs identified. If there is anything new to set up, we can simply follow the guidelines provided. It's an easy setup. We can do it in five to 10 minutes.

The implementation strategy was a form that we had to fill out where we indicated, "You have to monitor this process. This is the log part," etc. ITRS then took care of everything else.

The initial deployment process took about a year. In addition to the Geneos people, there was one person from each of the application teams involved from our side. We have a team of three people who are dedicated to ITRS itself. They deploy the probes, set up the monitoring, and manage the gateway. They work full-time on ITRS. Altogether, across our organization, about 500 people are using ITRS.

We have definitely seen return on investment, although I can't share specifics.

We have an enterprise license so it's easier to scale up. The other license option is per-user, in terms of how many servers you're monitoring.

We haven't evaluated anything else so far, although that would be a higher-management discussion. But I think everyone is happy, as we have been using the same thing for many years.

We are not the team that's monitoring the real-time data. We have a different team that set up the Geneos for that.

We are really relying on Geneos for everyday tasks. All the monitoring is in Geneos and we are going to continue using it. We are pretty happy with Geneos and I would rate it at the higher end, a nine out of 10.

We use it to monitor all our production servers, our UAT servers, as well as all the trading applications that are running on them. Additionally, we use some of the other features to monitor some of the network equipment via SNMP. Our NOC is watching the screens I created for them using the Geneos dashboards and the Event Ticker. They open cases for specific teams, depending on where the alert is coming from. It gets routed to the correct group and they resolve the issue.

For the most part, our applications are fixed protocol trading applications. We have a host of products and they're all unique. They range from process monitoring to log file monitoring to API. For example, the trading application has an API which sends data into the ITRS gateway and that displays information. We have rules written around that.

We use the Web Dashboard and it's great. You have to take the time to create the dashboards. I'm the only person administering ITRS at this point, and with over 500 servers and a lot of applications I don't have a lot of time to create dashboards.

When I first started, they were having outages daily. A lot of times it was the customer that was calling saying, "Hey, we're having a problem. Can you please look into this?" The alerts weren't even there. Our company didn't have an ITRS administrator. Someone from the New York ITRS office would come out once a week and do whatever he could, but he wasn't full-time. Once I became full-time, I was able to clean everything up, make sure only the required alerts were being generated, and that allowed the production team to actually see, "Oh, okay, this is broken right now," and enabled them to fix it. 

It has allowed us to be less reactive and more proactive when it comes to issues. The consolidation of all the other monitoring applications into one allows the NOC to see everything more clearly as well. It definitely improved the overall functionality of the trading applications because we are able to see stuff alerting much more easily.

In terms of the number of issues we have detected and outages avoided, I wouldn't even know where to begin with that. It's a large environment, so we have issues every day. I don't know that I can quantify them.

The log file monitoring is probably what we use most extensively, especially the FKM sampler. That would be the one we utilize the most for scraping log files and looking for our messages.

In terms of the solution's real-time data, it's great. I can't say enough about it. I've evaluated many other products, including Nagios, because everyone wants to use stuff that's cheap — ITRS is very expensive — as well as Check_MK and some stuff from HPE, and nothing provides a solution like ITRS does. It's definitely the best solution that I've used, as far as real-time monitoring goes. You immediately get a pop up if something is broken. It's easy to see what's broken and what's not. 

The filtering in the Active Console is exceptional. Depending on the user base, some people don't want to see server-level errors, so we have filters set up in the Managed Entities view, which allow us to filter out things that certain groups don't want to see, while allowing them to see other things. It's a great real-time monitoring solution. And you can draw graphs immediately, right from the Active Console, whether they're current graphs or historical graphs.

It also provides lightweight data collection. We have numerous metrics being logged to the database. As an example, in Europe we have the MiFID requirements where time-tracking on all the servers has to be logged to a database. At any point, regulators can come in and say that they want to see that data. We use ITRS for tracking that. We do the same in the US for a FINRA requirement where we're tracking NTP. We log all the NTP data, the offset drift to say, "Okay, you're off from this stratum." That gets dumped into the database. We then have a weekly report that runs and which is put into long-term storage for seven years. It definitely is good for doing that.

They have the Webslinger solution where you can see when something is alerting. It's a little bit cumbersome.

I've been using Geneos for over 12 years.

It's absolutely stable. I've never had a problem with the actual ITRS gateway software.

I definitely found bugs early on and they would correct them pretty quickly. But in the last five years I haven't found any bugs, and if we ever have an outage it's because of either the network or the server that the gateway is running on. But the software is absolutely stable. It's probably the most stable software that I'm responsible for at this point.

It's absolutely scalable. 

The only place that we have a problem with scalability is with what is called the UL Bridge dashboard. That is an API stream that goes to the net probe. We're just sending so much data that sometimes the net probe suspends, so we're not seeing the data. That's the only place where we really have an issue. But I don't think it's the ITRS functionality that is responsible. I think it's our software just sending too much data.

In terms of the possibility of increasing usage, everything is pretty stable. The servers that we have them on are all Linux servers with more than enough CPU and memory. I've never really run into a utilization problem on any of the servers where ITRS is running.

I don't only administer this application, I'm also responsible for other applications. As an example, I have another application that has been broken for over a month now and I've had to open three separate cases with the company and the issue still isn't resolved. They keep telling me, "Well, it's a different issue. You have to open up another case." But with ITRS support, I can go off on a tangent: "No, I found this and this and this and this," and it all goes under one case and it all gets solved within a day or two.

I've been working with ITRS support for 12 years and I have a very good relationship with the New York office. There have been plenty of things that I've recommended that came out within one or two releases of the next versions of the software.

When I started, they had one of the original versions of ITRS Gateway. Now, everything is Gateway 2, but this was the original Gateway. As time went on, we were bought out and another company came in and they were using Nagios. I converted all of their monitoring from Nagios to ITRS. Our current company was using Check_MK, and I took all the servers that they had in Check_MK and brought them into ITRS as well. We wanted our NOC to have a single pane of glass to look at the entire environment. Having them look at an ITRS console, a Nagios console, and a Check_MK console was just too much. So I consolidated everything into one.

Through the migrations, I've learned how to use those other solutions. I even did a proof of concept with Nagios, because when one of the companies saw how expensive ITRS was, they asked me if we could do everything in Nagios that we're doing in ITRS. I attempted to do it, but one of the big problems was our extensive log file monitoring. Right now we have six ITRS Gateway servers, although it's really only three because the other three are just the backups. To create that same solution with Nagios, I would have needed over 20 servers. It wasn't feasible.

I also eventually looked at Check_MK, but the problem was that it's really just for system-level monitoring. It doesn't really get too extensive with application monitoring, and with the amount of application monitoring that we have deployed, I don't think it would have been possible to do with Check_MK.

ITRS is expensive but their service is second to none. And if you have any problems, they usually resolve them within a day or two. 

There is no comparison when it comes to the visual presentation, between ITRS and Nagios. The Nagios front-end is horrible. It's very difficult to figure out what's alerting and what's broken. With the ITRS console, it's immediate. If you have your filters set correctly you can see exactly which servers and which managed entities are having an issue. 

The time it takes to get an alert is about the same in ITRS and Nagios. It really depends on how things are configured. We have checks in ITRS that are configured for every 20 seconds. Some of them are every five seconds. You can do the same in Nagios. But the actual viewing of the events is much easier in the ITRS console than it is in the Nagios console.

The ITRS gateway is also easier to deploy than Nagios.

Nagios and Check_MK are both cheaper solutions but you get what you pay for. The amount of money that you can save with those solutions would be needed for someone in the background, doing a lot of development work to replicate what we're doing in ITRS. You could get cost savings upfront, but you're going to pay for it in the end with the development work.

We have absolutely seen return on our investment with ITRS. The stability of the trading applications with Geneos means it pays for itself.

Pricing is the touchy subject, even here. Upper management always wants us to find a cheaper solution. But we have so much integrated with ITRS. For example, in one of our environments we have extensive client notifications, so if a client session goes down, they immediately get an email. It's automated. We don't have to do anything. That's a feature that our clients really like. It's expensive, but it does its job very well. And you set it and go.

Follow the standards that ITRS provides. Their support is second to none and they will always guide you in the right direction.

At any given time we have at least 20 users connected to all the gateways, and that's not everybody because we're a global company. It's when the offices are open that people connect to it. They are the NOC users. They're all in Manila and they watch the screens and make sure if anything is alarming that a ticket is opened for the correct group. We have some of our system engineers who are looking at it for server-level errors. We also have production engineers who are responsible for the trading applications. They are also looking at the consoles to see if anything's alerting.

We use it for one purpose since we are in the banking sector, so we have the infrastructure, log monitoring, and all. We are doing all of these with ITRS Geneos.

ITRS Geneos has different plug-ins, or, like, we have log monitoring plug-ins like file monitoring. Also, ITRS Geneos' dashboard feature is good.

Speaking about room for improvement, ITRS Geneos is not on the cloud at a time when everyone is moving to the cloud. I definitely know that they have some monitoring extensions or plug-ins for the cloud, but it needs to be explored more, especially for the different features and whatever we have in different cloud areas. So we need more things available for the cloud as well.

Cloud already has features that make it stable. So, if they make the solution available on the cloud, then it will be stable.

I have experience with ITRS Geneos. I am a customer of the solution who is using it at my current workplace, which is a bank.

Stability-wise, I rate the solution an eight out of ten.

Scalability and stability are both parallel things. Hence, I rate it an eight out of ten for both.

More than 5,000 people in my organization use the solution.

Whenever we have new issues that we are facing, we contact ITRS Geneos. So we just need to get them, and they support us. I had a good experience with the support.

Regarding the initial setup's ease and difficulty, I would say it was moderate.

I can say it's not that cheap because the licensing is a little bit costly. So, definitely, we had to pay a certain amount to use it.

To those planning to use the solution, I would say that it is an easy-to-use monitoring tool. Amongst the available monitoring tools, it is a really good option.

I rate the overall tool an eight out of ten.

We are monitoring uptime, availability, and performance of the trading systems through the ITRS dashboards. We have five segments and we have created all the applications and dashboards for these segments. 

We are monitoring online and have created a separate, integrated monitoring room where we have installed all the Geneos dashboard screens and we have a separate group of people monitoring these tools. In case of any alerts, there are mechanisms for escalation.

Currently, we have not only provided dashboards to IT operations, but we have provided them to other departments as well. For example, the hardware team has its own dashboard, and the network team has its own dashboards. The business team also recently started using dashboards.

The types of applications we monitor start with trading applications. We have a cash market, futures and options, and through the ITRS dashboards we monitor all the back-end servers. The only thing that is not covered by the dashboards is the front-end, which is used by the members. But all the in-house application servers are covered, as are all the networks switches, all the hardware details, and the software applications for the trading servers. Apart from that, there is a separate interface team that is also monitoring its own dashboards.

Essentially, we are trying to include all the business parameters in the monitoring, those which are used most by the business users. Those parameters are being tracked in the ITRS dashboards. We have divided our dashboards into application processes, logs, hardware, and network. All these dashboards are combined and are visible in an Exchange one-view dashboard which is visible at the executive level.

On a yearly basis, we identify around 50 to 60 incidents through ITRS. Typically, we don't have outages to our critical systems. We haven't had any in the last three to four years. So while ITRS has not been involved in avoiding outages, there have been one or two critical issues which it detects each year. Those have not resulted in outages, but there would have been major business impact from them. We detected them due to ITRS.

It enables us to monitor application processes, to do log-monitoring on a 24/7 basis, to do server-level monitoring - all the hardware parameters - as well as monitor connectivity across applications to the interfaces.

The ITRS dashboards monitor real-time data. There are two processes. One is that it reads from files via netprobes that are installed on all the servers. They read the respective online files which are updated every two seconds and then display the online data. The second process is that the dashboards are updated through scripts. ITRS servers run scripts and collect all the data. That is how real-time monitoring is done.

It also provides integration with ticketing tools. Whenever there is an alert, ITRS can directly open a ticket in a particular ticketing tool.

We can also view the logs from the time of an alert and back, or at ten minutes before the alerts, or two hours or one day before the alert.

We are also able to shift all the rules from one server to another.

And recently, we have started using automated actions when there are critical alerts.

We have introduced many of the monitoring processes in the past five to six months, for the trading dashboards and the business team. We have segmented gateway servers doing the monitoring. Sometimes, if there is a lot of data coming onto the servers, we have observed a little bit of slowness on the gateway servers which are doing the ITRS dashboard monitoring.

I believe the plan is that the tooling team will divide the gateway servers into two, with half of the application trading servers monitored by one gateway server and the other half monitored by another gateway server.

In our organization, every department is very much dependent on ITRS. For me, the basic concern is the contingency planning for ITRS. For example, if a dashboard server stops working tomorrow there is a concern. Contingency is a concern; something needs to be planned. We have not observed any failures in the ITRS dashboards. But because of the dependency of every department on the ITRS dashboards, this is a major concern. The trading server availability is dependent upon the server availability of the dashboards.

Up until now, there has been no failure in ITRS. Currently, it's stable. Because the number of servers, the monitoring alerts, rules, and categories is increasing, we have to increase the number of data servers. But it's currently stable. There is no problem with the stability of ITRS.

Because we have an enterprise license there is no issue with scalability.

If the number of servers increases, we have enough licenses to cover that. As far as the dashboards are concerned, the number being used by the various departments is fixed.

We have received very good support from technical support. All our tickets, all the changes, have been done in the specified time. We received a good amount of support from them during the initial deployment. Although it was a complex architecture, the deployment went very smoothly. 

And currently, the changes which happen very frequently here, the changes in the dashboards, are done very smoothly. We have not had any issues with support.

Previously we had an HPE service for monitoring and before that we had Nagios. The flaw in them was that we only received emails. One dedicated person had to continuously monitor the mail to get action taken when there were alerts. What helped us with ITRS was the real-time monitoring, where the alerts are coming in on the GUI itself. This has resulted in faster action when there are alerts. Events are immediately captured in the ITRS dashboard.

We checked various other tools and the monitoring techniques on the market, as well as the techniques used by ITRS. We found that the ITRS monitoring techniques, whether by polling or reading the files, was capturing the data more effectively and showing it on a dashboard which is more intuitive. Here, everything is done based on the trading system that is on the one gateway server. The monitoring techniques that the internal ITRS dashboard is using are more effective than the other monitoring techniques. That's why we opted for ITRS.

The setup was not straightforward because our system is quite complex. There are multiple servers and segments and departments and, at that time, we had various OS versions. We had some challenges.

We deployed in segments. Our first deployment took around eight months. The next segment of deployment took around three to four months. The third segment took another three to four months. Everything together, all the dashboard deployments completed and all the segments, took between one-and-a-half and two years.

We also had some migrations planned for the trading department at that time, so we integrated the deployment of the dashboards with those migrations. The servers that had already been migrated, where the major architectural changes had already happened, they were where we deployed ITRS first. If we had deployed on the old servers, we would have had to re-do the deployment efforts of ITRS.

The second point in our strategy was that the critical servers were the trading servers. We did the ITRS dashboards on them first, and then, finally, on the hardware and network. And we have targeted the interface servers for later.

We also integrated this with a latency tool, Corvil.

We had a number of people involved in the deployment. There was a manager as well as someone who looked into the basic ingredients of the ITRS dashboards, the coding, etc. Another person was responsible for the user look and feel, how the GUIs would look, as well as the use-cases. There were three people at that time. Now, managed services has started to use the ITRS dashboards, and that is being handled by our separate tooling team. 

When there are any releases or changes made to the trading systems, we inform our tooling team. We create a request for them to make all the changes to the dashboards and they make the changes.

We're now into more of a maintenance process.

Overall, we have about 150 to 200 people using the solution in our organization.

Things like the capacity planning have a separate cost.

We looked at three other monitoring tools, but that was four or five years ago. BMC was one of them and there was an HPE solution as well. We looked at them based on top industry reviews.

We considered HPE open-source, but the GUI features and how fast it displays alerts on the GUI, as well as polling and integration with other third-party tools - they were lagging. We found ITRS more useful.

It's a very good tool to use and everybody is very happy with it. We are looking forward to more features.

Not all the data that is being captured is currently being stored completely in the right ITRS dashboards. There is a project in progress for collecting the data and storing it for capacity and numbers purposes. We have seen a demo related to data collection for capacity planning and it looks very useful, as do the capacity reports. But that project is still in the roll-out phase and will take a couple of months.

The next feature we are looking at rolling out is the integration with the ticketing tool. That is planned for the next four to five months.

We are now looking at integrating small things into ITRS. If any incident or issue comes up, the first thing we ask is, "Why isn't it part of ITRS? How can this be integrated into ITRS?" Any small activities, challenges, or issues which we foresee in our day-to-day operations, we look at how we can implement them in ITRS. This is a more proactive kind of approach. So it's not only for current alerts but we can also implement things for the future in ITRS.

I would rate ITRS at nine out of ten. Everything is being monitored by ITRS. The reason it's not a ten is that, because it's an integral part of all our operations, if anything fails in ITRS, we're not sure where we would go. We are almost over-dependent on ITRS.