ITRS Geneos Reviews

I have implemented Geneos to improve business, management, engineering and support operations.

• We use Geneos to provide a business view of the IT infrastructure using its data to produce reports and dashboards that are ready for business management to view
• Management use Geneos to measure various stats on operations performance to ensure business and technical targets are being met.
• Engineering teams use Geneos for capacity and performance management
• The Ops teams use Geneos for process, log file, middleware, database, and custom application monitoring.

The Geneos monitoring solution is a mature industry standard monitoring solution, and is present in over 90% of the invest banks in the city. There are many reasons why it is the professional's tool of choice.

• The NetProbe carries over 100 samplers which are capable of monitoring hardware, OS, and the application layer.
• The NetProbe is a very light weight process typically uses around 0.3%CPU as it is written in C/C++ so no fear of it hogging your low latency machine resources.
• When it comes to custom monitoring the probe offers an easy to use open interface known as a toolkit sampler which is very simple to use or for more sophistication and control there is also an API.
• It is cross platform and will work on many different types of architecture such as Solaris, Linux, HPUX, AIX, and Windows.

I would like better access to the data that is being collected. ITRS are addressing this by using a KAFKA API interface to the gateway. Access to the data provides the ability to summarize, aggregate and correlate events and in many cases predict outages.

We had no issues with the performance.

It's been able to scale for our needs.

Customer Service:

10-10

Technical Support:

It's excellent, and by far the best third party support we get.

No

I have implemented Geneos for several banks and each implementation is different. The customers' requirements determine how the implementation is done.

In house

Pricing and licensing is based on the requirements.

I have looked at other products but they fail right at the start – these other products use Java or Pearl and this is not what I want running on my machines. As this product was written in C/C++ it does need many files to run or a complex environment to setup.

Keep the implementation as simple as possible.

ITRS helps us to identify a lot of production issues proactively. E.g., ITRS alerts for a critical process memory that grows beyond the configured threshold limits. The limits are set to alert before the process crashes. This allows support teams to recover the process in a controlled manner (usually a planned restart before the process crashes).

A State of the World dashboard that we built gives a bird’s eye view of the entire production environment. These dashboards are displayed on big screens that are monitored by support teams in multiple locations. This helps us to monitor mission-critical components more effectively. FKM plugins can monitor huge logs in real-time for errors/exceptions and other keywords. Alerts are triggered immediately when an exception is logged.

As far as I know, ITRS does not have integration with any version control system. ITRS monitoring configuration is defined in a setup xml which gateway reads on start up (setup.xml). When you are working on a major monitoring set up, you will have to make a lot of changes in the xml. ITRS keeps only last 10 versions of the changes. If I want to restore an older version then it will not be possible unless you are taking regular backup of the set-up xml. Integration with a SVN will allow every major change in ITRS setup xml to be checked-in. If i want to restore any version of the xml (a month old), I can do that from the SVN.

I came across an incident when the setup xml was mysteriously wipe off from the disk. So we had to restore last working xml from a SVN that was manually maintained outside ITRS setup. If ITRS can include an optional SVN configuration (like DB logging), it will be very useful.

ITRS can define rules to alert when certain parameters that you monitor breach a threshold. Rules can be configured to fire recovery actions automatically to clear the alert. However, if the alert persists for an extended period, then it has the capability to fire multiple levels of escalation email or actions.

It also has powerful visualization features to develop dashboards to display in big screens and share it via Webslinger (a web server that allows dashboards to be accessed via web browsers). It can log metrics (values) into a reporting database and generate historical charts for trend analysis. The Toolkit plugin can run scripts for custom monitoring requirements that cannot be implemented using standard plugins. There are features to suppress alerts for time-period - Snooze, as ITRS call it - or change the value/severity of the parameter.

There are a number of things that you can do directly from ITRS active console without logging into the server. Processes can be restarted and you can open log files directly from active console. It also has a built-in scheduler that can run tasks (commands that you configure) on multiple targets. The active time feature enables you to apply different rules at different times. It also helps to disable alerts during non-business hours (eliminates noise).

ITRS has setup XML that holds the entire monitoring configuration. Only the last 10 versions of the setup XML is saved locally on the gateway server. These 10 versions get overwritten quite easily when you are working with a big configuration change. I would like to see ITRS integrate its setup editor with a SVN to check-in setup XML after major changes.

I have not observed any stability issues so far. ITRS has a transparent failover mechanism. If the primary gateway fails, the secondary gateway takes over. I have seen the active console freeze while it’s failing over, but everything recovers within a few minutes.

I have not observed any scalability issues in an environment with 60+ servers, 1000+ processes, 5000+ logs to monitor.

I am very satisfied with the level of technical support I get from ITRS. All the queries that I raised around monitoring setup and configuration issues were closed in a timely manner. We also have a ITRS technical support specialist visiting our office twice a week. This is very helpful to discuss some of the complicated monitoring solutions that we wanted to implement in person.

I have used Wily Introscope and Nagios, but they are not as comprehensive as ITRS.

Initial setup complexity depends what you want to implement (e.g., building a dashboard is complicated). You will need a basic training session to start working with the initial setup. Depending on what you want to achieve, the rules and actions can become a bit complicated.

We have 20+ applications monitored in ITRS and the implementation was done in-house. ITRS has features to import template setup. This will save a lot of effort on the initial setup. If you are starting from scratch, create a setup template which can be re-used on the new gateways that you create. (E.g., default rules/samplers, etc. can be defined in a template and imported.)

I don’t have much visibility to the pricing, as this is negotiated at enterprise level. I heard that enterprise-level licensing is quite expensive.

I would definitely recommend this product for monitoring mission-critical applications.

ITRS is the best monitoring tool I have used so far. It comes loaded with a lot of built-in plugins to monitor almost all of the parameters that you want to monitor in a production environment – i.e., processes, memory, disk space, CPU, keywords in log files, daily feed file generation, web service monitoring, MQ, Database, FIX Sessions, etc.

ITRS ActiveConsole provides a powerful interface for monitoring the environment. The gateway setup editor makes it easy to work with the monitoring configuration.

When I was a tech support lead, four of our evening pre-batch checks involved stats on our server estate. It took roughly 15 minutes each evening to log into each server, check server disk space, check for particular errors related to market data. Switching over to using a Geneos dashboard, we completely eliminated all manual effort and it was a huge time saver.

The following features of the product are the most valuable to me:

• Ability to see in real time the state of our server estate.
• Ability to monitor logs for potential issues to prevent app outages before problems get a chance to arise. That's invaluable for our teams in a fast-paced trading environment.

I think there's a very steep learning curve with the product. It's very easy to view and use the dashboards, but difficult to initially set up. I think setting up the dashboards could be more intuitive. I think I (and the rest of my team) could benefit from improved online tutorials.

I think it could provide more out of the box - I know many teams here use it to monitor windows infrastructure. We all look at the same things - CPU, disk space, paging stats, service status with RAG status on each. That could be provided straight out, saving significant time.

It is very useful in terms of production support. It automatically monitors all scheduled jobs, database consumption, server utilization, and so on.

Geneos automatically sends email notifications when any batch job fails, the database is down or the website is down. It is automatically monitoring everything and reduces manual effort.

Currently, it is difficult to monitor secure websites using SSL or with SSO enabled.

Setup is bit complex, especially on Linux servers. You have to configure Netprobe on your system and then configure the path/workspace/profile and so on.

The dashboard is not that impressive.

Three different colors indicating different level of severity makes monitoring easy. With different level of access we can assign controls to different user and most of the things are taken care by our support teams.

The clean and colorful UI and easy to use options like snooze and active times. Previously, we had monitoring tools which had complicated UI's and the screen looked very dull. Also as an end user, we hardly had control over alerts triggering from the tool that had to reach to our Dev, or so called CATE teams to snooze an alert. But now with different level of user controls we can do it from the tool itself.

• The dashboard feature is full of bugs. Grouping items results in a distorted dashboard.
• The file monitoring fails when we need to monitor the same file twice a day but we do have a workaround which is tedious.
• The email alerting mechanism which is based on Pearl is limited. We cannot export a dataview in the email, and moreover the email format is a fixed one, and no user defined email can be sent.
• There are too many features clubbed in for the ease of setting up an alert which makes it more complicated. For setting up a single alert you will need to navigate through at least four places.

We had no issues with the performance.

It's been able to scale for our needs.

10/10 - excellent service and tech support provided.

It was pretty straightforward. We just need to acquire a gateway which once done, is followed by probe deployment on hosts and you are done with it.

We used a vendor team. I really cannot comment much here as we were not really involved in the implementation.

We did evaluate other solutions, and as mentioned earlier this product has many good features which are really easy to use. The UI is clean and since you have color defined with each level of severity its more easy to take up an action. The reason i'm focusing on this is because, Monitoring teams have to monitor for long hours and when the UI is dark and clumsy it really effects the monitoring.

This tool should be given a try where you have lot to depend on monitoring.

The ability to monitor our different Windows and Linux servers in real time, simultaneously, as well as the ability to provide some configurations and event viewing. Being able to monitor what was happening, what errors and what warnings were appearing in real time was hugely beneficial. I worked on a trading floor, and these servers were crucial to business continuity.

It allowed us to deal with incidents in real time, reducing the impact on the business by allowing them to keep trading, therefore not losing money. Investment banking relies on 100% uptime, and this application contributed to us achieving this.

The interface can sometimes be a little complicated. To access some useful parts, it can be a chore to navigate through. I cannot remember exactly off of the top of my head, as it is almost a year since I last used it.

There were no issues with the deployment.

We had no issues with the performance.

It's been able to scale for our needs.

I rated this product an 8 due to how much I used it and how useful it was to us. It allowed us to provide immediate support where needed, reducing business impact.

• Scalable
• Fast
• Extremely customizable
• Reliable and powerful
• Tons of default modules which are available out of the box

The main feature that needs work is the Dashboard designer. Although it has lots of features included we would like these visualization capabilities to be improved. Currently we have to export metrics data in real-time into some other visualization tools in order to get better picture and have a bit more functional dashboard.

We have had no issues with the performance.

Adding new monitoring nodes is quite straightforward.

The ITRS central Help Desk is absolutely awesome. You can receive a reply within a few minutes even if your query is not urgent or critical. Specifically with ITRS, if you need to configure basic monitoring - it is simple and straightforward too. If you require complex systems monitoring, tickets workflow, alerts, etc. it will require certain skills and experience.

Every popular monitoring tool has a pretty straightforward installation workflow. Configuration might be more complex though.

All ITRS installations we implemented by local TR Solutions team here in Moscow. There is no particular implementation advice, you have free training materials, a very detailed Active Console, Gateway and particular modules documentation, and the Help Desk are always ready to help.

We’ve used some popular and well known open source tools for some research purposes. There are the same pros and cons comparing to other open source and proprietary tools. We had to get ITRS usage skills and experience as we use it internally as well as our customers.

We're able to highly customize the integration of custom developed monitoring samplers.

After developing of a lot of custom samplers integrated with our software, it gave us the opportunity to act proactively to identify malfunctioning applications and services. This allowed us to minimize the business impact when we had network issues.

There is a lot of functionality within the product that can be implemented in many different ways. It would be useful to restrict the way to apply some conditions and for it to have more out of the box rules. It would also be nice if it offered more flexibility and the possibility to aggregate data.

I've used 2011.2.1 (Gateway version) and ga-3.0.22 (NetProbe version) for about three years.

There were no issues with the deployment.

We had no issues with the performance.

It's been able to scale for our needs.

They're very good and are always available to help us with the implementation of new solutions.

Not at the customer where I’m working at the moment.

I didn’t configure it myself during the initial setup. However, I did try it on my own in a virtual environment and I can say it was very simple to install.

It was implemented in-house.

It’s very easy to install and setup, offers high scalability, and has a low resource use.