Centreon Reviews

We use Centreon primarily for network monitoring. We monitor our customers' networks, including the internet connection and the switches, for temperature and general hardware status. For some of our larger customers, we use it to monitor servers as well, using the simple network management protocol (SNMP).

We see benefit from using this product all the time. For example, if there is a hard drive that's failed in a system then we get notified via Centreon. If there is some kind of environmental deviation, such as an air conditioning unit or something else that doesn't work, then we get environmental information like the temperature has changed.

We also get notifications if the internet goes down. Prior to COVID, there were lots of people in various offices and we need to know if they're all working and productive. 

This monitoring and notification system is something that happens constantly.

Centreon increases the accuracy of our monitoring, although accuracy is something that we consider to be a core feature. If the product generated alerts that you couldn't trust then it would be a cry-wolf scenario, effectively making it unusable. We would not use a product that was not accurate or didn't perform as expected, because that makes the whole product useless. Basically, if the monitor isn't accurate then there's zero value in the software.

The reports are definitely good, although, to us, the most important thing is that action is taken. When events and things happen, it's important that they're acted upon and dealt with, and that we're notified. Reporting is one of those things that can be used to show a customer that you're doing your job, but the most important thing for us is using it to do our job.

The single-pane view provides us a view of all of our network infrastructure, and it is one of the most important tools that we use to see the status of our customers' networks. Being the monitoring environment, it doesn't really do remediation, so it is not our only tool. We have three core applications that we use, and Centreon is one of those very important applications. If you're a carpenter you need a hammer, or if you're a doctor, you need a stethoscope. It's one of those core tools that, if you don't have it, it's hard to do your job.

The most important thing in any kind of monitoring system is that it's set up correctly. If this is the case, where all of the correct relationships and workflow are mapped out such that you will see only the most important details, then the single-pane view is very useful and it can save a massive amount of time.

It provides a nice benefit when it comes to helping align IT operations with business objectives. The top-down views, dashboards, and business context reporting are things that are nice to have because you want to be able to show the customer that everything is working, that problems have been addressed, and that you're providing value. The customer is the most happy when there are issues that you uncover and they're quickly addressed.

It has certainly reduced our mean time to resolution. This is because it is set up properly so that we can figure out what the issue is as quickly as possible. Reducing noise is very important and it also helps increase the accuracy of the alerts that we're receiving.

Improvements are needed in the area of cloud monitoring, as that's a newer feature.

We have been using Centreon for approximately 10 years.

At the core, the systems are very stable. The only issues that we have run into are around updates. This is true with anything, including Microsoft updates. As this is an enterprise-grade solution, you probably don't want to be the first ones to apply the updates.

My advice is that you should have a conservative approach to when to apply updates. That said, we have active support, so we are always upgraded to the latest version.

This solution is almost infinitely scalable. Almost everyone in the company works with it at some level. We have approximately 20 people in technical roles who use it, and the environment contains between 3,000 and 5,000 devices. This could be monitoring a single internet connection, up to monitoring thousands of systems.

In terms of versatility, Centreon came from a traditional monitoring system, so it is better with traditional infrastructure. However, they're building more cloud monitoring and it's something that they're working on. But its current strength is on the core network infrastructure components, as I see it.

Versatility is not something that is critical to our monitoring operation. For some of the cloud services, we can spin up instances and we can monitor that way. But, some of the cloud instances, depending on what it is, need to be dealt with in a different way. Often, the provider has solutions for that.

We work with a dedicated technical support person who is fantastic, so our overall experience with them has been very good.

We had a solution in place previously that didn't have a single-pane view. It's hard to quantify, but having Centreon certainly makes it much more efficient, as you're able to go in and see the status of all your customers in one place immediately, in real-time, rather than having to log into a separate portal.

One of the things that we did previously was to develop plugins and tools in-house. This was something that was time-consuming and is no longer necessary. We switched because we didn't have to spend time on training, and it allowed us to focus more on our core mission.

With any enterprise-grade monitoring system, the key thing is that you take the implementation seriously. You need to look at and understand what kind of architecture you want to set up and how you want it to be laid out for your customers. The initial process, like the initial setup process for any tool of this magnitude, will take some time if you want it to work really well. That initial time investment, however, is well worth it later on when you have the correct relationships set up and you have a reduction in false alerts, ultimately leading to a higher accuracy level for alerts.

If you're going to have success, it's very important that you take the time to set up parent-child relationships. You need to take the time to set up how the processes work for each customer because otherwise, you'll have a scenario like in Three Mile Island that had that nuclear disaster, where you get hundreds of alerts in a matter of one minute.

If it's set up correctly then it's super-useful. If a certain condition happens, you want to get an alert for the correct condition and not underlying alerts that are not useful. That's the most important thing. If it's set up correctly and you have the correct relationships and workflow all mapped out, then it's very valuable and it can save a massive amount of time. With Centreon, it's very important that you take that time to set up the parent-child relationships.

For us, it took several months to get it set up to be the way we wanted it. But, once it is in place, it is a solution that you can possibly use for decades to come.

We used a collaborative approach between our in-house team and the vendor. We had certain requirements that were important to us and we discussed those with the Centreon team. At that point, we worked together on implementation and deployment.

Using Centreon has helped us to reduce costs, although it's hard for me to quantify. For example, we have saved time in that our in-house developers no longer have to create plugins and other tools that we used before implementing Centreon. Also, because of the faster resolution times and reduced noise for the alerts, it drives up productivity because we don't have engineers looking at alerts that aren't real.

Finally, Centreon is one of our core tools and if we didn't have it, we couldn't do our job effectively.

Looking at this product from a pricing perspective, you need to consider the differences between developing your own solution in-house and buying one. There is always going to be a certain amount of time that you have to spend to customize and get to know a tool, but the fact that you have access to the support is a really big plus because it makes it so that things are done in a more uniform way.

The pricing works out well for us, given our environment and where we are.

We evaluated other options, but one of the reasons that we chose Centreon is because it came out of an open-source environment, and that is something that we really liked. We do have open-source capabilities in our organization, which helped with the transition, making it easier and smoother for us.

On the network side, it's one of the most important tools that we use to see the status of our customers' network infrastructure. With that in mind, if you don't set it up correctly then you don't get any of the benefits. My advice for anybody who is implementing this product is that they need to be ready to think through the architecture properly, then be willing to devote the proper internal resources to the implementation. This is true especially for the dependencies of hosts and services and setting them up correctly because that is absolutely critical in reducing false positives.

We look at Centreon as a partner and we work in partnership with their support because to create the most successful implementation, it's important that it's a two-way street. It takes input from you as the customer, and input and help from Centreon. To have it work in the most efficient and best way, parties need to be able to devote time and resources to set it up correctly. But then once you've done that, you are able to get the rewards, with faster resolution times, reduced noise for the alerts, and that drives up productivity because then you don't have engineers looking at alerts that aren't real.

I would rate this solution a nine out of ten.

We use it for monitoring our software for illegal components. We look to Centreon to provide a visual representation of the availability of a service.

We use the soluton's dashboard for L1, L2, and L3 IT support. We set alarms and then support can look at the interface to see which element is causing an alarm. It is useful for monitoring and seeing, in a graphical way, what the cause is.

The software shows the data structure with other elements that represent the state of the software. With Centreon, we have automated the way we check for the check file and it automatically creates alarms in our ITSM system.

The most valuable feature is the ability to build an abstraction of service visualization. You can add services to an entity called Business Activities and you can see the state of these activities.

It also provides a nice dashboard, or what's called the Centreon MAP, and you can extract information very well from that for building reports for customers. It gives you a representation of service and business activities. You can access all the information in one place.

We also use Centreon Plugin Packs. They help us support Linux servers' operating systems. When it comes to monitoring things, you can set an agent on the client's operating system or you can have agentless access. For the agent-based monitoring, you need to install it directly on each OS that you want to monitor. For agentless monitoring, you can simply click through the interface to provide a Plugin Pack, and you can run it directly.

It can also help you look at KPIs because calculations can be done directly in Centreon.

Centreon is very bad with auto-scanning. It's very monolithic software. It doesn't have microservices and it only has basic clustering. You cannot, for example, have six or seven nodes for Centreon's cloud processes.

Another area for improvement is auto-remediation.

I have been using Centreon for three years.

The stability depends... For example, on Amazon, we have some problems with processes that fall and we need to restart them. And the software that provides the dashboard is very bad. 

The core service is not fantastic but it's okay.

The scalability of Centreon is very bad because of the nature of the software. It creates a bottleneck at some point and that drives everything else related to the software. 

I believe Centreon is working on a SaaS version of the service, but currently, you cannot have many hosts because of the cost of only one computer or virtual machines. Amazon permits 128 processors and, for VMware, I think it's 28. If you already have 28 CPUs and you add one more, the monitor is dead.

We don't have plans to increase our usage. We have bought Dynatrace and we will be removing Centreon in the next six months.

We have about 150 users of Centreon. Some are managers but they are generally technical people such as project managers and support. I'm the only one involved in deployment and maintenance of the solution.

Centreon's L3 support is great but the L1 and L2 support are bad. The response times depend on the person who responds to the call, but it's not great.

Neutral

We used to use Nagios. The switch to Centreon was not my personal choice, but it was done because we needed access to abstractions, and that is something Nagios cannot do. Nagios doesn't have the same features. You cannot represent things on dashboards like in Centreon.

Personally, I don't have a preference for one over the other. Management made the final choice, but in my opinion, it was for the cosmetic aspects of the product.

It's very simple to set up. A very basic installation takes, perhaps, 50 minutes. You download a package and install it, and then do some configuration. There's nothing special about it.

After, you need IT to structure your business activities with the service. There are some post-configuration operations that need to be done.

We did it by ourselves.

We have seen ROI using Centreon. When you can monitor your whole system there is a gain.

The price is not too high. Licensing is driven by how many hosts you monitor, but because you can run the agentless version, you don't have to declare every host to Centreon, one at a time. That means you can drive your infrastructure supervision with a very low number of declared hosts.

It's very simple to use Centreon's licensing model. When you know the number of hosts, you know the cost of your license. The price includes everything, there are no additional costs.

By comparison, Dynatrace is priced by the number of user agents in the infrastructure being monitored. It's a strict usage calculation for SaaS software like Dynatrace.

Centreon is a nice product that improves on Nagios at times but it's not a very big step forward. Centreon is very much like Nagios.

I would only recommend Centreon for a customer that is not an IT client. It's not great for tuning software and you cannot have more than, say, 5,000 hosts. You can only monitor a small or mid-sized environment. If you need to monitor AWS, you cannot use Centreon, and that's true in general if you need a very large number of instances of Centreon.

Centreon can help to improve the availability of service but that's all. It does enable, for example, fine-tuning of transactions between two applications. It provides a very binary vision. It helps, but it only helps IT support.

Centreon is a great product but it needs to mature. It's a very young company and they need to improve the solution, but the product itself is great.

Firstly, it was used to start monitoring the desktop computers of the company and all of the servers, systems, and desktop applications. Secondly, it was used for monitoring the company's network. Lastly, it was used to monitor the company's applications.

Most of the time we solicit engineers and other experts in IT when something doesn't work. When everything works, everyone considers that normal. It is a critical app and a critical piece of equipment in our organization. Being able to anticipate and act before there is big trouble is better for our business and for the image of the company. There's no point to wait until there is a problem in the company, if you can avoid it. In many French companies, many people don't understand that part.

For servers and applications, it was very, very efficient.

The flexibility and customizability of Centreon's reports, analytics, and dashboards are good. It is of very great value that we can create a graphic map. It gives a good understanding to managers and directors about the importance of monitoring within the company and, as a system engineer, to have a very efficient vision of what is happening when your app is not working. You can be informed before your customers. Afterward as well, you can better communicate with your customers and can let them know that you are resolving the problem. It's the best tool on the market for that at the moment.

It's not sufficient to have only this tool if you would like to anticipate a lot of problems. You can add other tools. However, it’s really useful in particular to keep this tool and to understand where the problem is, and who’s working on it. It's important that the company invests money in monitoring tools and the business.

Centreon's dashboards help you see all of your customers in one place. We use only one dashboard for some applications. For example, we made a dashboard for a critical app with all of the equipment of the app as the server. We put everything on the map. I work only with IT teams with interns. I don't work in an IT department or work with professional customers, so it’s hard to assess dashboards fully.

We use Centreon Plugin Packs Connectors, for the database with our SQL. It was very comfortable to use the plugin directly and it was very simple to implement.

Certain devices and equipment have plugin packs that helped our organization support and/or integrate. For example, a Windows Server component, and a Linux component. We have some tools in which we know what we need to supervise on a server for the database. We have some metrics that we are using, however, it’s easier with the pack.

We can implement a project very fast and we don't have many things to think about. There's no fear of forgetting something important. It was very comfortable and to use with all the free components it has.

It’s important that we have ready-to-use connectors and integrations for helping to provide a clear, comprehensive view of our organization. It's very easy, and it's not very complicated to implement. It's very well developed, and you can be confident using it.

We did use Anomaly Detection to help alert unusual dysfunctional behavior. It was a project, however, we don't use it every day. It was a project that we developed for the ability to anticipate some problems in the IT system. For example, a server that will be crushed or a problem with the CPU. There are some tools that can alert us about future issues. However, I haven’t fully implemented anything due to a lack of time.

Centreon is great for helping to monitor our IT infrastructure and cloud-to-edge and providing holistic visibility. It's very efficient. It's graphically very simple to find task user information. 

Another thing that we love about it, is when we work for example, with the Army, they prefer to work with French projects yet take, for example, a US solution. It's great in France to use a French project.

For more than ten years they’ve developed new things every year. They like to always be on the top of the market with their project, and the progress they make year after year is incredible. Three years ago, I discovered that if we have money to spend with them, they have some teams of developers and we can share with them our budget and they can then develop something directly for our company. Afterward, they’ll use part of the work to improve themselves. I found this a very smart way of working.

Centreon helped measure service performance by modeling IT service maps for business-critical IT workflows. It was more informative according to my use case. We can make some weekly reports, daily reports, or monthly reports.

Centreon is great for helping to drive business performance and excellence and aligning IT operations with business objectives. It improved performance in terms of understanding the past. If it's very well configured, someone can fix a problem quickly. There is some progress that can be made in anticipating the future and trying to improve the performance of the future as a company to avoid problems and prevent incidents before they arise.

The product is helping to consolidate all alerts, KPIs, and business maps, as well as managing metrics across domains. For example, if we have a team who doesn't know how to contribute, or how to implement these parts, it's possible to solicit consulting assistance. They can help us remotely, or they come to our company to help us to configure items. If someone works with a big company, for example, they can get help from someone to come in for a few days or a week and assist them.

The problem with the reporting is that you have to configure the report, and after that, you will have the same report every month, every week, and every day. You have to sync it in order to have a great report. For me, the reporting tool is not a strong aspect of the product.

I've been using the solution for three years.

In terms of stability, it always works according to what I implemented. For me, the product has always been reliable.

The company can help you scale. For example, on the website, they mention that if you would like to develop your infrastructure, they will let you do it for free and give some recommendations about what you need.

In our case, for each new project, we start with an all-new infrastructure. I don't take existing infrastructure and evolve it, I start from scratch. Therefore, it's hard to discuss the scaling over time. 

We had near the maximum amount of users, at about 200.

Technical support is very professional. They can understand your issue very fast. For example, if you solicit a report, they propose a very fast solution. It is a commercial relationship. They will not help you if you don't pay for the support. However, they also offer a community that is very big and very active, so you can get some answers free as well.

The support responses are very fast compared to other projects. For example, an engineer will quickly help you remotely. It's 800 Euros per day in France. If they come into the company, it's 1500 Euros per day. Sometimes it takes a few days for the company to develop the solution, however, you will always get a solution from them.

They're very kind, very professional, and so fast, but you have to pay them. That said, they will make it work.

Positive

It's simple to implement. We needed samples to copy and there are many tools on the market that required us to learn their methods, however, there are many forums that helped. Having a community around the product is great. While it may not be able to help answer brand questions, if we have a basic or specific query, we will always have someone that can answer them.

The deployment takes between three weeks to four months. It depends on the size of the IT infrastructure. If the infrastructure is big, it can take months. However, most of the time, it's not that long. It will take a while if the company and the managers don’t share a common vision. Most of the time it’s coming to agreements that take up a large portion of the setup.

While you only need one person for deployment and maintenance, the more people you have the faster you can move. In reality, one person can develop the solution for a team or a department. It's really possible.

My organization likely hired someone. I know the consultants are great.

We have seen an ROI. It anticipates critical problems. For example, if expensive critical equipment shuts down or doesn't work, we can lose one million Euros per hour. A great monitoring tool like this helps to avoid a full shutdown and for me, that means we have seen a great ROI.

However, most of the time, the director of the company never understands that.

The solution was used at its maximum capacity. The solution has a free part and after that threshold, you will need to pay. For example, if you believe you can create an interesting map, most of the time, you will have to pay 10,000 Euros per year for having access to these components.

In terms of cost, it's very cheap for the value that it brings to big or small companies.

I foresee the company being in the top five to ten of this type of product in the next few years as the licensing is quite good. It's specific and when you understand the logic, it's great. It's easy, however, each monitoring tool has its own logic and its own method. If you understand one, you will find others to be a bit different. 

I did evaluate other options, however, this one was the most compelling. 

This was easier to implement and had the most potential compared to other products. There were some other products that had potential. However, they were really expensive.

This product can be implemented with both small and big infrastructure. It's also a free solution up to a certain point, which works well for smaller projects.

There is a similar solution called Shinken. It has fewer functionalities and is more complicated to maintain and install. 

We have not used Centreon to help replace and reduce our legacy monitoring tools.

If a company would like to have a great overview of its infrastructure, for example, this solution is very interesting. I don't know all of its functionality, however, it's really enough in terms of having an overview of our company in our IT system. A person can be technical or non-technical and still get a lot out of it as it's so visual. It will help a lot of people.

I'd advise others to try it. I would rate the solution nine out of ten.

We use it primarily for monitoring our devices. We also use it for discovery. For example, if a server is down, the first step to take is just go to Centreon and have a look.

I installed this solution on my company's local server. It is on the LAN network. There is a plugin for Centreon for connecting and providing visibility to the host.

It provides visibility into the network. Without visibility, it is difficult to know what the first step to take is when there is a problem. With Centreon, I can just go to their website if the server is down and it gives me visibility.

We have seen increased usage. That has expanded.

Centreon helps align IT operations with business objectives. It helps our guys in support monitor all our services. It gives you visibility for all services on the host via a link.

You have one single view, which is good. As the administrator, the permissions are the same for every account in the Active Directory. 

We use the solution’s Anomaly Detection feature. It helps our teams to predict potential issues. I like this option for its graph. The graph is very good for when you want to look at evaluating your system over time. It also automates the alerting process. 

It is very easy to manage because the visibility is good.

In the next year or two, I need to implement a load balancing system because I am using Veeam Backup, which I don't like. 

We have been using Centreon for the last couple of months.

The stability is good because the operating system is Linux, and we are using the latest version.

We use it with vBackup, and the server backs up to vBackup every two to three days.

The solution is monitoring 6,000 services.

35 percent of the technical support use the solution.

The support is good when I contact them directly. Opening a ticket on the website of Centreon can be difficult for my colleague, but not for me because my English is good. However, my colleague doesn't speak English well, as our company is in Quebec and our first language is French. We do have someone there, who helps us with French when needed.

The support checks the command line of our Linux system, which is good. 

You can go to their website to investigate problems. This provides us flexibility.

At my last company, I used Nagios XI.

We brought on Centreon because we didn't have a monitoring solution.

The initial setup is very easy. On the website, if you want to create an account, you go to the website for the cloud. There, you have the possibility to run a test of the system, before you want to implement it.

The implementation process was the same as the last system that I used. This made it easier to use.

My company implemented the system. Then, we implemented a hub with the services, and this took five to six months. It takes time to implement all the services of a company because of all the firewalls. 

Only six to 12 people can currently configure Centreon.

Centreon helps me detect where the problem is quickly. When we resolve a problem quickly, this lowers our overall costs.

I recommend looking at the trial version.

Centreon is better than Nagios XI in regards to cost and support response times, when you have a problem. If you have a problem, it costs money to contact the Nagios XI support.

The solution is very good. I would rate it as a nine (out of 10). 

I use the solution in my company for our supervision purposes. In my company, we supervise all of the infrastructure with the tool. It is a monitoring tool.

The most valuable feature of the solution is that most of its plug-ins are free.

The issue my company has with the tool stems from the fact that it didn't give an on-time response to us. The product collects the information, but it fails to send them via SMS, WhatsApp or Telegram. The solution can be used if you want to get email notifications, which is not good for our company because if someone is not in front of their desktop, you can't receive information about an equipment or LAN that is down.

I have been using Centreon for twelve or thirteen years. I am just a user of the tool.

The tool is not stable, and it may be because we are not using its latest version. Sometimes, there are breakdowns in the tool.

Around seven or eight people use the tool.

I have provided technical support for the solution to deal with the product issues. Sometimes, the solution's technical support says that they will post some updates and make corrections in the stability area of the program. Sometimes, the corrections in the stability area made by the tool's support team do work, and at times, it doesn't work. I rate the technical support a five out of ten.

Neutral

The product's initial setup phase is really easy, even for a beginner.

The solution is deployed on an on-premises model.

The tool is cheaply priced.

Before people try to use Centreon, I suggest using Zabbix or SolarWinds. One should try to use Zabbix first and SolarWinds in the second position. If you use Zabbix or SolarWinds and you find that they are not okay with you, then you can use Centreon.

The tool does not meet our company's needs. Even though the tool can collect the information, its metrics are not really easy to be explored or used.

I rate the tool a six out of ten.

We use it for monitoring infrastructure and custom applications. We customize the monitoring and dashboards. We have a NOC here, where we monitor our clients' environments 24/7. It is integrated with our ticketing system and SMS and email for communication. We also have a Knowledge Base system integrated with Centreon.

We use it on-premises for ourselves and we provide SaaS with it for our customers. We have more than 20 installations of Centreon.

Centreon makes it easier and quicker to get the information needed to analyze. It uses different colors when there is a problem that passes a threshold. It gives you information and you just have to analyze the machines on the report. It's easier to find the ones we need to comment on to our clients, so they can look more deeply into them.

The solution also increases the accuracy of our monitoring because the plugins enable us to monitor things that we wouldn't normally monitor. There are built-in plugins that pick points that we wouldn't usually monitor if we had to create that monitoring by ourselves. When monitoring something, we might not consider one of those points, because it's not a main point. But it is being monitored. And when we troubleshoot, sometimes we use one of those monitoring options that gives us more information. That makes us more accurate. Our accuracy could always increase, of course, but there is no limit on that.

With the automated configuration for monitoring items using plugins, we optimize our time. And with integration, if we have something happening, we can automatically open a ticket and send communication through SMS or email. Both are very good options. During the day it probably saves us 50 percent of our time, and during the night it's even more. 

We usually do a mapping of our client's business and present that on a dashboard. We don't generally use the reports for that because the dashboards are more real-time. That way, the client knows in real-time what's happening. That helps align IT operations with business objectives a lot. Monitoring and presenting in that way is the whole point.

In terms of mean time to resolution, when we introduced Centreon into operations that didn't have it, it reduced the time to resolution because we located the source of problems quicker. The amount of time really depends on the stuff involved. There are a lot of links that take many hours. The time that is really reduced is the time for detection of the problem. The total resolution time, which contains the detection time, is reduced because of the detection phase. But the resolution phase is basically the same. The overall time varies a lot. It's hard to say how much it reduces the MTTR. But it can be very significant in cases where detection is difficult.

We use almost everything in the product. What is most important are the monitoring, alerting, and the dashboards. If we don't have basic monitoring, we don't have a NOC. It's the basis of the functionality of the system. 

The dashboards are valuable because they ease troubleshooting and viewing. It becomes easier to locate the source of a problem. We can use BAM for that as well, but we only have it in one of the installations, one that has the Centreon Business edition; the others are using the free version. The dashboards make it easier to communicate with our clients. They don't want to see the alert console, they want to see a beautiful dashboard representing their network and their business and to watch it in case something is wrong in their environment.

We use the reports, but not that much, although the reporting is very good. We use it for creating books, monthly reports for our clients. We use the reports for analysis and to say, "These ones require growing," or "This is too big. You can lower the memory and save some money on your cloud." That is a monthly service we provide to our clients. 

Centreon is also very versatile. There are a lot of built-in plugins that ease the work. But if we need to connect to some device that doesn't have a plugin ready, we can customize a plugin and create monitoring for the device ourselves. It's quite easy. When there is a plugin, it speeds the implementation of new devices. If there isn't one, it takes a little longer, but we are not unable to monitor the device. We are always able to monitor.

I would like to see more plugins. That is something it needs. 

There is also room for improvement through dynamic thresholds, or self-discover thresholds. 

I would also like to see a discovery feature that could map the whole network environment and automatically suggest things. 

Finally, NetFlow would be helpful. We have a lot of clients that ask for NetFlow.

I've been using Centreon for more than 10 years.

It's very stable. We have had Centreon here for more than 10 years, and we have had about three problems in that time.

It's very scalable. We have installations with more than 10,000 pieces of equipment. We use the free version and it works well. You just add more pollers and segregate the database.

Their technical support is very good. They answer quickly without any problems. It's a good service.

We used to use Nagios. I also used the IBM Tivoli solution, OpenView from HPE, and WhatsUp Gold. I have used many solutions.

We switched to Centreon for a number of reasons. The IBM and HPE solutions were too expensive. We then went to a free solution, Nagios. But the Nagios interface is not as complete or as good as Centreon's interface. So we switched to Centreon's free version first and moved to using the EMS solution about a year ago, to get the benefits of plugins and dashboards.

The setup is very easy. Centreon itself is an ISO that you boot. You answer some questions and it's up and running. In terms of configuration, you can put in the IP address of the host and attach the plugins and they are ready for monitoring. It's very easy. If it had a more complete discovery feature, it would be even better, but it's already very easy.

The time it takes for the initial deployment depends on how many hosts, and how deeply, you want to monitor. But in less than a week, you can have good monitoring set up for a small to medium sized company. The longer part for us is the interview with the business, the analysts and the system analysts, to understand their particular applications and services and the impact of those on their business, to create business dashboards and business monitoring.

We have had a quick return on investment because we have a lot of hosts to monitor. For new implementations it speeds up the process of deploying. That is labor-intensive work, and it reduces the amount of that work. That helps create a return on the investment quickly, by not spending on as many man-hours as we would have.

In terms of replacing other tools, it hasn't really reduced our cost, but we have reduced costs with Centreon in another way. We need fewer people to monitor more stuff. Prior to Centreon we used free tools so the cost of the tool was not the issue; it was the performance of the people working with the tools.

If you need basic monitoring without dashboards, just monitoring, the plugins are very useful and really cheap. If you want a more complete solution with dashboards and reporting, the EMS solution is great and it is not that much more expensive. It's a good value. Really good.

We use multiple views on Centreon. We don't use a single view because it's too big. We could have a single view. But in terms of alerts, when we create dashboards that provide the best point of view for the whole infrastructure, we usually segment them to see things in more detail. If we put the whole infrastructure in a single dashboard, it would be too macro, it would not be detailed enough. 

We have a lot of screens for monitoring so we create a lot of dashboards and put them on the screens. Those dashboards are not super-detailed, but they are also not a single, macro view, so that we can know where a problem is. We usually create enough dashboards to avoid having to drill down. We have drill-downs, of course, but as a NOC, we prefer to have the most information we can have on-screen. For that we have a lot of dashboards open simultaneously. All together, the way we have set things up, it provides a single view, but with a lot of dashboards, not a single one. That's how we prefer it.

In our company, for monitoring, we have 12 people using Centreon. For support, there are about 20. As for the number of users who only use our Centreon dashboards, I really don't know because our clients have a lot of people. We have three guys who implement Centreon, customize the monitoring, create the dashboards; all of them do all these functions. They maintain the solution to make sure it's working well.

I would rate Centreon a nine out of 10. It needs those features I mentioned earlier. But, for the price, it's really a 10.

We use it for standard monitoring of 300 to 400 devices, the usual Windows and Linux servers and network equipment. We are monitoring the disk usage and the network ports.

The teams within our NOC get proactive reports which are quite detailed. That saves them a lot of time on having to research or troubleshoot to find an issue. Thanks to Centreon, they are guided to what needs to be fixed.

And it's an invaluable tool for helping to drive business performance excellence and aligning IT operations with business objectives. It's been helping us to engage in smarter reviews of what's happening within our network. We get alerts popping up from time to time, and we can use them to implement permanent fixes or workarounds.

Another benefit is that Centreon has helped measure service performance by modeling IT service maps for business-critical IT workflows. We actually give detailed reports to our customers and they're all based on Centreon's reporting. That ability is very important, a top priority.

The best features that we've come across enable us to create our own monitored instances. For example, we have a SQL script that is being run by Centreon, and it gives us a specific metric on the dashboard that we utilize for monitoring the performance of a third party. We integrate with third-party companies or, in this case, government institutions, and they do not give us any guarantee of the service, and they also don't give us the ability to monitor the service. However, from our side, we can monitor the throughputs with the SQL script that we have running with Centreon.

In addition, the flexibility, customizability, and analytics of Centreon's dashboards are all very good. The dashboards help us see the whole network map, and that is quite valuable for us. In addition, the dashboards have helped to improve our visibility and ability to proactively ensure the right data is available at the right time. Our service desk staff spends most of their time on the dashboards, and they use the proactive monitoring to log service requests to the L2 and L3 support. They've been invaluable in that sense.

The flexibility has given us the ability to add in our own monitoring metrics and that has been quite interesting and very useful for us as well.

We've been using Centreon for close to two years.

We haven't had any stability issues with the solution since we started using it.

The scalability is also good, not that we've needed to do much so far.

We don't yet use the anomaly detection to help alert on unusual or dysfunctional behavior, but that is a feature we want to implement.

We haven't needed to use their tech support so far.

A different team within our organization was involved in the setup, but as I understand it, the guy from Centreon was quite familiar with it, so it was quite easy.

The deployment of Centreon took about two months, but that was mostly due to user adoption by the service desk and NOC teams.

Initially, when we did the setup, we just threw all of our devices into Centreon, and at one stage it became quite bogged down in the sense that there was too much reporting or alerting. But it was quite easy to filter things and to streamline the reporting, enabling us to get exactly what we needed, including the proactive monitoring that we needed. The flexibility that Centreon has given us to do that kind of analysis and streamlining has been invaluable.

I would like to see improvement in the licensing model. You can purchase X number of licenses, up to 1,000 devices or 1,000 instances. Your next batch is 2,000. But what if you only need, say, 1,200? The model could be changed a little bit.

In a different company, I was dealing with SolarWinds, which was okay for what it did, but the licensing for SolarWinds was quite expensive in comparison. In terms of navigating the licensing models, Centreon and SolarWinds are basically the same.

The other option being looked at was SolarWinds. With Centreon, there's the licensed package, but it's also an open-source platform, and that was the driving force behind the decision to go with it.

My advice would be to go ahead with Centreon. Don't waste time, go ahead.

There are still a lot of features that we don't yet use that we are looking into. But overall, so far, it's been very good.

Our primary purpose for Centreon is monitoring. We use it to view the status of all our pollers, manage them, and configure them. We manage around 30 Centreon pollers. 

Our team is operating multiple security services (digital signatures, 2FA, secure storage, etc.). We are taking care of everything (hardware, network, hypervisors, VMs, OS, applications, security patches, backup, etc.). Centreon is used to monitor the health of each component and alert us in case of failure. It gives us an overview of our infrastructure health and provides real-time feedback when doing changes.

It allows us to keep the same standard monitoring configuration on all the systems that we manage (checks, polling interval, thresholds, etc.). It also allow us to see the status of our different platforms on a single page.

We have a single GUI where we can view the status of all our infrastructure.

Sometimes, when the GUI and some of the search fields are being reset, and I return to the page, then I have to set them again. Therefore, some improvement on the UI and the filtering is needed.

There are a few bugs or annoying things on the GUI. However, the features are all here for what we need.

It has been stable, so far.

There are no issues that I know of at the moment.

We did have scalability issues with an older version, but now on the newer version, there are no problems. We even have more pollers than before and everything looks good.

They only sell four hour slots for support, so if you have just one question, then you need to pay for four hours. Or, you need to wait until you have enough questions to fill those four hours. They are not flexible in this. 

On the quality of the responses, the last error reported went something like, "We will open any issue on GitHub." However, then my colleague looked at the backlog, and there were hundreds of issues pending. Here there is room for improvement.

We did not have a previous solution. Centreon solved one of the biggest issues that we had. We have a lot of pollers for the metering. In the past, we had to log into each of them to see the status, which was really a pain because did not have a central metering before.

We just installed the standard packages, then the rest was done via the GUI. So, it was good.

I have no idea how much it costs.

I don't know the other solutions which were evaluated, but I know that there was an evaluation. As the evaluation was done before our team chose to use Centreon, I was not involved. Therefore, I can't speak much about the decision other than we knew that Centreon would be able to do what we needed it to do.

If they have the same issues that we had, which means a lot of pollers spread across the whole infrastructure and no central view to look at the entire status with the need to manage everything together, then it is a good solution. For this use case, I would highly recommend it.