Centreon Reviews

We are an IT company. We are using Centreon to deliver services to some of our customers. The main use is for IT monitoring of their infrastructures, especially right now in the media and telecom sectors. In the last month, we have also been approaching the public media sector in Italy.

We are using Centreon for our customers. During the COVID-19 emergency, we were able to do all the tasks required from our customers because you have unlimited access to information remotely. It is very powerful from this point of view because you can see real-time information about how the customers' businesses are going. If you need to make some emergency actions, you can put in place all of them effectively and in the right position on time.

You can combine step-by-step the URL services or review services that you are invested in. You can operate at a higher/different level of critical alarms or at a different level. You can review whether a service has been met.

You can concentrate and orchestrate several other solutions from other vendors. You can consolidate those solutions all in one place, then maintain and monitor from that single point. This creates ease of use. It is a very powerful solution from this point of view.

Centreon has some additional modules. Through these modules you can have all kinds of reporting and dashboarding, which are fully customizable, not only from the content point of view, but also from the graphical point of view. You can design, implement, and deploy real maps representing your services from a geographical and service point of view. So, executives can view their services, e.g., if there is an impact and which are the services impacted. In this way, you can strictly separate the dashboard for the technical stuff and create a separate dashboard for executives to see business information. These are the specific capabilities of Centreon. 

You can do some predictive metrics using the tools of Centreon. Therefore, you can have an alarm of sorts before some events can occur.

Connecting to any system, such as traditional on-prem, cloud, virtualized, or edge devices, is very simple. There are hundreds of plugins ready to be deployed with several key monitoring indicators that take place. This is very powerful because you can simply pick up the connectors made available by the plugin's package. 

You can use the API to develop any type of integration. The plugins for users are capable of covering the major vendors and other kinds of software, e.g., the major types of ticketing software that are widely available. 

Centreon is missing an easy way to create a trendline for the metrics. Actually it is possible to create it, but you need a good knowledge of math, Centreon, and RRD.

More than 12 years.

It is very stable. It is rare to receive complaints from customers, though sometimes it happens.

It is scalable. We have tens of thousands of homegrown devices.

We have five users, including our CTO and systems engineers. They can design, implement, and train people on the solution.

Our people get a quick response in the proper time.

We primarily switched to Centreon because of compatibility, cost, difficulty in finding expertise, and support with our previous solution. 

Centreon has been more flexible with customers' requests. We also saw at the same that Centreon would be able to grow with customer needs, not investor needs. They have developed their technology to solve customers' problems in the last two years, doing an excellent job with reporting and predictive analysis.

The initial setup is not complex for skilled Centreon users, even in cases of customers with very heterogeneous infrastructure. In fact Centreon has the ability to grow horizontally when needed, using the ready to use plugins. Usually, for customers from 500 up to 1000 hosts to be monitored, the implementation process may require from two up to four weeks for a basic-standard deployment.

We can do the implementation by ourselves.

We take a step-by-step implementation process for customers. We adjust the solution based on each customer's needs.

We have seen ROI with Centreon.

The solution has reduced our mean time to resolution.

One of the main characteristics that help customers to reduce costs is the solution's capacity to consolidate. This causes the solution to be more efficient. It immediately gives you the big picture about what is happening. Staff can immediately identify a problem and how to solve it. Centreon provides one single point for information so you don't have to use other solutions.

The solution is affordable. The price isn't so high compared to other solutions. The price is negotiable, e.g., you can get a very good price at 20,000 devices if you can commit for several years.

Centreon is always available to develop new plugins when needed. The most important thing is that their maintenance account yearly subscription fee includes the fact that they will maintain the new plugins that you requested them to deliver.

We do a competitor evaluation every year of the market to determine if there is a better competitor. While there are other solutions, I don't think there is a better solution than Centreon.

The solution increases the accuracy of our monitoring. The reaction that I have had from some customers, or even prospects, when we do a live demonstration involving how Centreon is working is that their experience with other solutions is bad. Centreon is a really capable tool that increases efficiency and gives you more information.

We have been a partner of other brands in the past, and comparatively, Centreon is much more stable.

If you are large customer who spends more on the solution, you receive more services versus other market competitors. Centreon offers value for its cost.

It is a complete solution. Our customers are happy. If you want to improve your active monitoring activity, you should use Centreon. I would rate the solution as a 10 out of 10.

Centreon is readily available to integrate tools from other vendors.

We use Centreon to centrally monitor our entire global IT infrastructure and to alert us about impending issues.

Centreon enables us to proactively take action on issues before they even become incidents, which significantly reduces business disruptions resulting from controllable factors.

I find the product's scalability to be one of the most valuable features since it allows us to add unlimited devices for monitoring and to set up additional polling servers without additional license cost or downtime in our monitoring.

The Home view could be improved by adding customization functions that allow users to change the size of the widgets for a more uniform layout.

No issues with stability.

No issues with scalability.

Centreon technical support is only available during Central European business hours. When it comes to critical business solutions, there should be a 24/7 hotline that customers can rely on.

We switched to Centreon from our previous solution because of the flexibility it offered as an open source solution and because it allowed us to have more control over the design of our monitoring environment.

The initial setup was straightforward, as the product is available in ISO image format, ready for deployment. Centreon also has a comprehensive guide and documentation that are simple and easy to follow.

Open source solutions can be very cost effective for an organization looking for a product that can be quickly implemented, as there is no initial cost and there are no license renewal fees. However, it is important to take into consideration some of the related costs that may come along as needed, such as training, support, and product enhancements.

We have used SolarWinds Network Performance Monitor and SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor.

Centreon is like a sandbox for monitoring your systems. It allows you to customize and automate different tasks, such as the configuration of hosts for monitoring, and actions taken during an alert.

I recommend some training and deploying a lab environment instance, where administrators can fully understand how each feature integrates with the rest of the system to help avoid early configuration mistakes and achieve an efficient production environment design.

We have multiple instances with Centreon: a central, remote, MBI, report server, and two pollers. We also have Centreon MAP. All the pollers are pulling all the endpoints, sending information to the central and remote instances. If we need to produce some reports to connect, then we connect directly to the report server. If we need to produce MAPs, then we connect to the MAP server.

We monitor bandwidths of all the links inside the data center as well as outside Internet links and MPLS links to have the connectivity, status, and bandwidth consumption. We have defined the threshold on these links to understand if they are being overused or not. This is the main feature.

We use the same for network devices to see basic information, like a device's uptime to know if it is up or down. It is also the same for all the ports and environment probes on the hardware.

For the server, we configure specific probes to check some specific services. For example, the server provides a service through a Docker container, then we can configure a specific query to check the Docker container stages. Or, if we need to have the temperature of the air conditioning system, then we configure a specific query to ask for it. So, there is basic information coming from the network devices related to hardware. There is also some specific monitoring about services that we are using in terms of the business or infrastructure on specific devices.

We have 500 hosts and 4,000 services.

The most valuable feature is that we can manually configure everything we need. After it comes inside the interface of Centreon, you can display it. Because the interface is quite user-friendly, you can manually configure the configuration very deeply, which is very pleasant and useful because you can monitor and see everything on your service list, dashboard, or MAP. The most useful feature for me is that you can create your own plugin and monitoring query.

The solution’s customizable reports and dashboards for allowing management to see performance metrics is very well done. However, it is very time-consuming. I am pretty sure we can create a very beautiful report, but I don't really have time to focus on it now. I wasn't using this feature at the start. Now that we got it, I haven't had time to work on it since it is a paid solution that is quite expensive. We also need to dedicate human resources to work on it, because it is not so simple or quick to configure.

I would like them to improve their documentation. When I faced some issues, I was looking for more documentation on the Internet. There is official documentation on Centreon's website, which sometimes is useful. Sometimes it is not very useful, as you cannot find the information or enough examples of configuration. The answer for me was to contact the support, who helped me, but I was not able to find all the information by myself on Centreon's website. A Centreon community or blog would be helpful.

I have been using this solution for eight years: four years at my first company, three years at my second company, and a year at this company.

It is very stable. In fact, I thought it has improved a lot over eight years. When I started working on the network, we had to restart Centreon Engine quite often. There were some bugs, mistakes, or errors in the configuration. Therefore, we needed to restart Centreon Engine and some other services inside the server. Since I have been at my current company, we have not done that. We have 4,000 services that we monitor, and it is very stable now.

It is quite a good tool. It is scalable in the sense that we can use it for more hosts and services that we want to monitor. If we monitor different kinds of devices, we can still find plugins and plugin packs directly from Centreon's support and website. They are still developing new plugins and updating them. So, it adapts to your infrastructure. They have also developed some patches. So, it has good scalability.

The support was great. They answered me very quickly for our two first concerns. For the last one, it was quite long. However, after one escalation, we did solve the problem after a day. I am pretty satisfied with them.

They could talk in English with my colleague as well as French for me, as I am French. The people, with whom I talked, were very skillful. So, I was impressed. They could easily help me.

Positive

I was using Splunk at my previous company. Splunk is much more expensive, but it has some capabilities in terms of getting logs. On Centreon, you only get SNMP metrics. However, if you want to get syslogs with a monitoring solution, you can use Splunk, a regexp query, and a specific SQL query to construct a proper output. For this, Centreon is not helpful, but Splunk is.

I was not involved with the initial setup at my current company.

Centreon has helped reduce our mean time to resolution. Because we have well-configured monitoring, we can decrease the time to answer any problem. We are informed quite quickly about an issue, so we can say, "Yes." Compared to no monitoring and waiting for a user complaint, it can save us 30 minutes a month between the first user's complaint and the monitoring alert.

We buy the Centreon solution and licenses for many projects and monitoring hosts. 

It is perfect and very cheap if you are a little company or startup. After that, it is quite expensive for a big company. 

It is a business choice from Centreon to fix the price, so a big company can afford this license or policy. What I am facing right now is that we are short licenses, and they only sell packages of 500 hosts, which is quite a lot. We have a 500 limit for now, and we want to have a quotation for 100 or 200 more. They told us, "No, the next step is only 1,000." So, they could maybe try to sell a smaller package of licenses.

I tried a few other solutions in terms of monitoring, e.g., PRTG, LibreNMS, Nagios and Cacti. All these solutions, except LibreNMS, are very poor in terms of design. The user experience in Centreon is much better. However, in the end, you just configure some SNMP work on the solution to get your answer. The difference with Centreon is that you can easily define, in the configuration, to have the templates for each host, services, notification, etc. So, Centreon is much better than all these other solutions.

All the SNMP data is available on the devices. If you know what you want to monitor, you can do it with or without Centreon. So, it does not increase the accuracy. It provides a very user-friendly way to display it, but it's not more accurate. To be more accurate, we did use another tool, Splunk, which provides some artificial intelligence or behavioral monitoring.

In terms of pure SNMP metrics monitoring, Centreon is very good. However, if you want to diversify your monitoring with other inputs than SNMP, e.g., syslogs. Other tools can be very useful, like Splunk or ELK, for diversification.

Take time to configure it well, as it is very useful. Don't leave it until later. It should be implemented at the start, not after all the infrastructure is in place and in production. It should be done from the beginning, before the application server.

Get the vendor training to understand as much as possible about the solution. While it is quite user-friendly, it is not so easy to understand how the plugins and plugin packs work.

Invest time at the beginning, as it will save you time later. This will help you a lot. So, my advice is to start as soon as possible to work with a monitoring solution when you have an infrastructure, especially on Centreon.

I would rate Centreon as eight out of 10 because I really like it.

The primary use case is for a central monitoring system for all our IT equipment. We can predict problems and react before we have an issue on our infrastructure. We managed to merge all our technical monitoring into a single console, therefore building good availability reporting all around.

We have early alerting of problems within our IT infrastructure.

The most valuable feature is the monitoring of servers and networks, because we have a lot of them and need to maintain control.

Release management and quality of testing need improvement, because with each major upgrade we have many issues coming in. Then, it takes several minor upgrades to get rid of them.

There have been stability issues. After each major release, it takes several minor releases to get rid of bugs.

No scalability issues.

Technical support is working fine. They react quickly and are able to solve issues over a remote connection. For more complex tasks, we use prepaid support days and ask Centreon to come onsite.

We did not previously have another solution.

Each major upgrade is complex due to bugs.

Centreon is an open source product. Thus, there is no need for licensing.

Buy some support days from Centreon and work together with them.

We evaluate other possibilities from time to time. Mostly, they are overpriced for what they do.

We're a telecom group and we use Centreon to monitor all our services.

Centreon's dashboard is good. Centreon's dashboard provides a single view of all our customers. When there is a problem, Centreon notifies us and works with us to resolve it quickly.

Centreo's dashboards help to improve our visibility and ability to proactively ensure the right data is available at the right time which is important.

We use Centreon's plugin packs to communicate with our telecom locations in Brazil when the host does not have Centreon integrated.

Centreon's ready-to-use connectors and integrations are essential because they provide a comprehensive overview of our organization, which allows us to quickly resolve client issues.

Centreon helps me organize our hosts by stage and monitor our clients.

Centreon is the best for helping monitor our IT infrastructure from cloud to edge and providing holistic visibility.

Centreon helps us align our IT operations with business objectives by identifying problems and resolving them quickly and permanently.

Centreon helps us measure service performance by modeling IT service maps for business-critical IT workflows and metrics. This allows us to see the hierarchy and discover problems. Centreon is a valuable and important tool for addressing these issues.

Centreon helps to consolidate all alerts, KPIs, and business maps as well as manage metrics across domains. We can seamlessly integrate with the client's network.

Centreon's most valuable feature is Opsgenie.

The reporting has room for improvement. The reports could be improved by providing more data and more detailed charts.

I would like Centreon to offer support in Portuguese.

Centreon should have better integration with WhatsApp.

I have been using Centreon for four years.

We use Centreon for every stage in Brazil and the solution is stable.

The scalability is acceptable, but there is room for improvement.

We do not have local support in Brazil, which is challenging due to the language barrier.

Neutral

Our organization previously used Zabbix before switching to Centreon.

The initial setup is complicated because consolidating and configuring the database is a complex process.

We have seen a return on investment and that is why our organization has been using Centreon for over four years.

I give Centreon an eight out of ten.

I recommend Centreon because it is a good solution that configures well.

Centreon is a client application. We use the solution to monitor network infrastructure. In case of an incident, We can fix the issue.

Centreon makes me reactive. It allows the use of signal application over monitoring infrastructure to use signal.

The solution allows us to study more analysis to reduce.

Centreon offers infrastructure monitoring.

Prometheus provides the ability to automate the backup of my infrastructure. This automatic backup capability allows me to integrate it into GitLab for versioning, among other functionalities. Thus, it serves as an additional application that simplifies the work of network engineers.

The solution could have backup automation. It can automatically detect all the applications and infrastructure components, including dynamic protocols, which can be highly beneficial. Automatic detection enables proactive measures, such as triggering remediation processes via API as soon as alerts occur.

I have been using Centreon for one year.

We are trying to study proactive management monitoring because of the working cloud infrastructure. Our team is trying to get a volume of remaining work, and these new proactive tools can benefit us.

The solution is 80% stable.

Infrastructure scalability is smooth because it doesn't break down or have downtime.

The solution is 80% scalable.

The product is quite expensive.

If something renders infrastructure, it enables reacting and accessing meetings as necessary. It provides quick response, typically within a minute or less. The alerts provided are apparent, facilitating the identification of root causes for any issues. Moreover, Centreon offers a lot of plugins. Locating these plugins is straightforward, which eliminates the need for additional tools.

I recommend Centreon because it is user-friendly.

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

We use Centreon for monitoring resources to prevent priority-one and priority-two tickets. It is our primary monitoring tool. All our devices are being monitored using Centreon.

We have reduced the number of priority-one and priority-two tickets by about ten percent.

What I like most about Centreon is that it is very flexible and customizable, based on the user and/or business needs. Centreon is very flexible when it comes to monitoring parameters. We can use scripts found on the internet or scripts created by our infra/apps team.

Also, the data visualization features are very simple and straightforward, yet very informative.

Finally, it is very simple and user-friendly. It is easy to understand and to make your way around it.

Centreon needs to improve the granularity of the data as well as the graphical data. It would also be better to if there was improvement to the filtering/grouping system as well as the creation of views.

It would be a lot better if they improved the scalability and granularity of the data.

Technical support is great, very helpful and accommodating.

We had a previous solution. We switched because we are trying to save some money and, at the same time, looking for a solution that will support our business needs. This solution was suggested by upper management.

The initial setup was very simple and straightforward, including installation, adding of nodes, creating services, etc.

The solution is very effective, despite the low price.

Follow the best practices and the installation process in the documentation. It is very easy to understand.

In terms of the Remote Server functionality, I'm not highly familiar with it yet, but based on what I have read I think it is a great feature and I'm open to any possibility of using it in the future.

We have 300 to 400 users. Some are infrastructure engineers, VPs, application analysts, and people on the upper management team. For deployment and maintenance, we have three to five personnel: our Senior Vice President, Linux/VM engineers, and global operations engineers.

We deploy Centreon for our customers' infrastructures. They use Centreon to create alarms to be able to anticipate problems. It works for big companies and institutes. As a Centreon partner, we have different types of customers.

When we started to work with Centreon, there were about 30 people in our company and now there are 90 people, so our company has been growing and growing with Centreon. One thing that I love is that today, as a Centreon partner, we have a dedicated person who is in charge of our relationship with Centreon.

When looking at the product, for me, the best improvement is Centreon MBI. When I started with Centreon, this feature didn't exist and it's very good.

The most important feature is that it permits us to receive alarms if there is an incident within the infrastructure. 

The feature I love the most is the reporting feature, the MBI (Monitoring Business Intelligence) which permits us to send advanced reports to our customers in PDF format or in Doc format.

We also deploy Centreon Map which gives our customers intuitive views of their respective information systems.

I would like to see a better UI, one which is more responsive. This would be an improvement. Other than that, at the moment, every one of our customers is satisfied with this product.

The stability is better now. A few years ago, the product was not very stable, but it's much better now, in 2018. It has really improved. We no longer have any performance problems.

We haven't had any issues with scalability.

We have support with Centreon, so if we run into an issue, we open a ticket on the platform and they are good. We don't have any problem with them. I am satisfied. They always respond to our emails and our tickets. They are really good.

We used Nagios before Centreon. I prefer Centreon because Centreon vs Nagios provides a web interface without having to spend more on a license for it. That is why we migrated from Nagios to Centreon.

When I started with Centreon, the initial setup was very difficult because they didn't package the product. But now, setup is very easy and we are able to deploy Centreon very quickly.

As a Centreon partner, the pricing is good. We get a discount. It's a really good product so I would say the pricing is correct.

I rate Centreon at nine out of 10 because I think the user interface can be improved. That's why I don't rate it a 10. But, from my point of view, this is one of the better monitoring products.