Geneos' application monitoring could be improved a lot. Products like AppDynamics and Dynatrace provide the process of thread-level monitoring, but Geneos lacks these capabilities. I rate Geneos six out of 10 for data collection because it isn't lightweight compared to AppDynamics and Dynatrace.

The solution's specialty is its dashboards, and I feel like it hasn't developed this functionality much over the past nine years. The dashboard is robust and excellent, but the capabilities could be updated. 

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ITRS Geneos cloud monitoring is very weak and can use improvement. I have been exploring other monitoring tools for the cloud space," but ITRS needs to look into it because the way it is being implemented or it is available at this moment is too complex to use. I'm able to manage my stakeholder expectations until the cloud introduction. After the cloud introduction, I see there is a gap that ITRS cannot fit into, and I'm looking for some custom stories. ITRS needs to focus on the cloud space.

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Currently, the most valuable thing for an individual is a mobile device. Since that is where people are currently tracking everything, we have multiple applications or apps that are for various products. I would like ITRS Geneos to develop an app, where instead of going to specific login terminals or logging into laptops or desktops to check alerts, we can have visibility in the app itself. Using the ITRS Geneos app, we could see the error message during our travels or wherever we are. 

I would like to see the capacity of messages for forecasting increased. Since the NSE is the number one derivative stock exchange in the work for three consecutive years, the number of messages is important. We use the capacity planner in ITRS to forecast our data needs for the next two months. The planner is important because the volume of data we produce is becoming more and more volatile compared to when we first started using ITRS Geneos in 2014.

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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.

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For the last year or two, I've been asking the vendor about the mobile app. This is something that probably everyone asks when they see the tool and they see how powerful it is. If there is any mobile app for this or if there is any way this tool can be more easily accessible other than having a big client installed, it would be great. I know you can build dashboards, et cetera, but there is no quick and easy way. I should be able to download an app, log in, and see my status. That will put this product above everything else out there. I believe it's on their roadmap.

Other than that, we are not looking for any features. Initially, when we started, they were just, for example, Windows compatible from a front-end console perspective, but that has evolved over time. Now, they can run on Linux, Mac, etc. So, that's great. There was a bit of pushback initially, but after that has been sorted, the next question everyone is asking is obviously being mobile. What can I do remotely? Do I have to physically log in? Do I have to open up my laptop? That's the next big thing everywhere. People sometimes just want to glance at something or have the mobile opportunity to do things.

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There is one drawback to using lightweight data collection: we lack the feature of observability based on time series, such as historical model data. This makes it difficult to view data in ITRS. ITRS needs to improve this feature.

The dashboarding needs a lot of improvement. It takes a lot of manual work to get it up and running. The dashboarding also doesn't render automatically according to the screen size. For example, if we create a dashboard on a 14-inch screen and want to put it on a 55-inch TV, the dashboard doesn't automatically render. There is some misalignment. 

Another major feature ITRS lacks is that they don't provide a mobile app to monitor the dashboard. We have to always log in to the laptop to check the necessary details. If these two features improve, I would give the solution a ten out of ten for its ability to prevent failure.

Currently, the ITRS tool is available as a binary. We do not have this particular tool as a containerized module, such as a Docker image. This makes it difficult to set up on the Kubernetes platform. 

I would like to have a feature for tracing on the application side added to the solution. The end user requests data from the application and we need to identify where any delays occur in order to improve application performance. Visualizing the tracing information is helpful in identifying the source of any delays.

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A lot of solutions now use AI to predict and prevent failure. ITRS Geneos needs to evolve its prediction and prevention capabilities, as AI-based monitoring is becoming more important. Earlier, it was just alert-based. Most organizations look towards artificial intelligence-based monitoring solutions. Products such as Dynatrace rely more on artificial intelligence using algorithms to predict future failures, which is a plus point compared to ITRS Geneos. If the solution can use AI to monitor trends and provide analysis without having to wait for the threshold to be reached it would be very helpful.

Recently, the infrastructure has been moving from bare metal or a physical server to more cloud-based infrastructure. Being an older solution, the architecture is still perfect for physical machine monitoring. However, ITRS Geneos is improving and evolving in cloud-based monitoring. But there are some specific tools that are better than ITRS Geneos in cloud-based monitoring, which are strictly cloud-based. For the solution to stay relevant in the cloud-based monitoring environment Geneos needs more plug-ins with more features. Instead of offering clients workarounds, the solution should have a cloud-based out-of-the-box version.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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Some aspects of dashboarding are very proprietary and it makes it difficult, at times, to replicate your work easily. That is one area where it could really be improved.

Other suggestions we have made to ITRS include:

• Breadcrumb navigation within web dashboards
• The addition of a nickname feature: Allow us to easily nickname any metric and then use that nickname anywhere that metric appears
• Add a ticker control: Define a region of the dashboard which scrolls or flashes between a designer-determined list of metrics
• Carousel and index navigation options for web dashboards
• Geneos dashboard frame: We would like to see capability to add a frame of Geneos dashboard content to a web page-based dash. This would allow construction of “mixed-source” dashboards
• Non-Geneos dashboard frame: We would like the capability to add a frame to a Geneos web dashboard that gets fed from a different source.

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Their cloud monitoring solution needs to be improved. I have already given them the feedback that it's not capable of meeting the latest technology needs.

It's built like proprietary software. I can't expose the data to ITRS, and similarly, ITRS can't expose the data to the outside world. They have created a boundary. It's a bit binding solution. In the modern world, people like to be able to expose the data to do whatever they want. They can query the data, send it, or pull it. ITRS needs to provide more in terms of the API offering.

They have documentation, but they can improve the documentation and provide videos to show how to do monitoring configuration or deployment.

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The deployment method for upgrading is a bit tricky. It takes a little bit of manual effort. If that could be a bit more automated, it would help us a lot.

I'd also be interested in seeing some intelligent analysis of log files, along the lines of AI. It would be nice if it could start correlating events from all over the estate.

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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.

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

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The ITA, the post-incident analytics, could be improved. They know that. I'm sure they're working on it. That encompasses a whole facet, a whole dimension, of the product.

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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.

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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.

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It would be good if there were documentation on the ITRS website such as tutorials or plugins which are available to download.

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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.

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CJC require an enhanced level of visual reporting for our clients, specifically due to the large datasets we need to analyse and the importance CJC place on capacity and upgrade management. CJC created a new visualisation tool utilising the existing ITRS Database. This was done with the full support and assistance of ITRS for our specific requirements. I have found that ITRS are aware of their client’s requirements and work towards platform improvements to benefit individual clients and the community as a whole.

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There is a part of the rules for monitoring alerts. I want to understand more about how to choose the samples and the requirements for the rules. That is the part that I want to understand better and get better training for. 

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Like any product there is always room for improvement, and although their documentation is good, I would say better documentation is always one to aim for though, and I believe they are doing this.

Technically, I believe the dashboard functionality can be more configurable as some shapes are very limited with what they can do.

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The strengths of the product is data capture and ease of configuration. However, data visualization – real time and historical – is a weakness. This is being addressed with VALO and ITRSInsights but this is not production ready yet.

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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.

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I would like to see more integration support via use of APIs. They have released openAccess for the same but hasn’t really picked up. Also, more flexibility in creating own customized plugins (not just using toolkits) and deploying on agents. Also, more data analytics capability would be helpful.

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Backward compatibility with deprecated features and in system documentation on what configuration areas are needed to be updated: There is a bit of this in place already, but it can be improved.

I've been trying to update to version 3.5 but the gateway will not start up because my configuration contains deprecated features. The error logs are not very helpful and I've been using a tedious trial-and-error process to find out which part of my configuration is disagreeing with the new version.

I could start with a lower version and then work my way up but that would mean upgrading over 50 servers multiple times which is something I'm trying to avoid.

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A lightweight version which could host more than 100 gateways, as we can see slowness while loading all our gateways. We do support a horizontal platform and having this feature will have an impact in the MTTR.

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Better exportable reporting of historical data would greatly improve the product's usefulness. Much of the reporting outside of the user interface is very basic and requires much customization to be useful. Additionally, the product documentation could provide more detail on plug-in features by showing implementation examples.

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I believe the product has to improve on reporting. Currently it allows writing events to a database and we have to manually create reports from it. The reporting tool needs to be improved. View full review »

• Active Console
• Breach Predictor
• Documentation
• Data Storage

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Its web monitoring capability is very hard to use especially if there is authentication involved.

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A few minor incremental improvements we have asked the vendor for would be nice. The main weakness of the product is poor historical logging and reporting. The main difficulty with the product is how to identify performance issues with complex rules or samplers. This is about to change with the new Insights module.

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It needs to have better middleware integration for things such as application and Microsft SQL servers. We would like to have better dashboards with more in-depth detail, access to historical data and customisable views.

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We need more hassle free plug-ins that offer "Load and Start" with minimal manual efforts.

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At the moment Geneos is excellent and handling real time monitoring, however not great at doing historical reporting. This is required for post incident analysis and capacity planning. Various solutions have been developed by ITRS over the last few years, including major changes to the database logging features and the Open Access API. They have a new Product called Insights, based on their technology Valo, I’m keen to see this product used to bridge this gap.

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• 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.

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The Geneos configuration has greatly improved since the nascent version 1.0 days, but still requires specialist knowledge and convoluted config debugging when something’s not monitoring as expected. A hierarchical variable/component reference tree and more readily accessible examples would be welcome.

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We would like to use Geneos integrate with mainframe applications.

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Currently the dashboard does not have the capability of providing different status levels, and this needs to be updated.

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I would like to see a user community established to assist with implementing and supporting the product.

I would also like to see suggested guidelines to accomplish a monitoring task. The issue is that ITRS is so flexible that there is more than one way to complete a task, each with benefits and disadvantages.

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I would like it to have a better Dashboard viewer for report building. Having something like Crystal Reports embedded with the Active Console or active console would help to build reports.

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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.

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Real-time log monitoring with desktop alerts is valuable as it tells us immediately when there is an issue.

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None that I can think of.

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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.

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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.

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

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Snoozing/maintenance work. A third color would be brilliant to identify whether the servers are being worked on, e.g. blue for maintenance.

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I am hoping to get some good features on the IBM MQ messaging tool, as this is most frequently used in our team.

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The graphical interface is nice but could be improved.

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• Performance
• Scalability

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