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Device42 pros and cons

Vendor: Device42

4.2 out of 5

33 reviews
100% willing to recommend

Pros & Cons summary

Device42 offers powerful auto-discovery and intelligent application dependency mapping, simplifying infrastructure management without agents. It enhances asset management with continuous discovery, providing robust reporting capabilities and precise hardware tracking. Although improvements are needed in dashboard widgets, bulk asset removal, upgrade processes, script automation, and pricing strategy, Device42 remains a top choice for up-to-date inventory and efficient IT management.

Buyer's Guide

Get pricing advice, tips, use cases and valuable features from real users of this product.

Prominent pros & cons

PROS

Device42 offers powerful auto-discovery and intelligent application dependency mapping, providing significant time and cost savings.

Device42's agentless discovery simplifies infrastructure management by eliminating the need for agent installation on physical or virtual devices.

Device42 enhances asset management through continuous discovery, ensuring comprehensive and up-to-date inventory records.

Device42 provides robust reporting capabilities, including both classic and advanced reports, as well as a DOQL feature for customized queries.

Device42 excels in precise tracking of hardware devices, allowing for accurate mapping and management based on building and room details.

CONS

Device42 could improve by adding more widgets to the dashboard and ensuring accurate information.

There is a need for better support in bulk asset removal from Device42, as the current process is time-consuming.

Users experience inconvenience during Device42 upgrades, including manual processes and the need to build new virtual machines.

Device42's automatic IT asset discovery could benefit from automated scripts to streamline the initial setup and activate managed devices efficiently.

Device42's pricing strategy is perceived as costly compared to alternatives like BMC Discovery or Lanweber, prompting suggestions for a reevaluation of pricing and licensing schemes.

Device42 Pros review quotes

reviewer1292073

Manager, Endpoint Management at a retailer with 10,001+ employees

Feb 19, 2020

The asset inventory is great because previously we had devices all over the place. We have been able to do multiscans to find devices that we didn't know about, which was great.

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DP

Technical Service Engineer at Fujitsu

Feb 20, 2020

It has agentless discovery; you don't need to put agents on your servers. You can open one or two ports to discover all your infrastructure.

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YS

Systems Manager at Coventry University

Feb 24, 2020

The auto-discovery is brilliant. You can have it scheduled to run on a regular basis, and the infrastructure is always getting updated within the platform. I would rate the asset discovery very highly. It's very comprehensive. It covers quite a lot of different methods for doing discovery and it supports a lot of different types of hardware as well.

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FL

Francisco Laborda

Network Engineer at Despegar.com

Feb 23, 2020

The solution's agentless approach to asset discovery is very important for us because installing agents on physical or virtual devices is not easy in our company. We have to escalate these kinds of things to different levels of security. Not having to install agents makes it easy for us.

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reviewer1295379

DC Lead Engineer at a financial services firm with 5,001-10,000 employees

Feb 24, 2020

The continuous asset discovery is good because it means not having to manually input all the small data, such as IP addresses, leases, etc. It helps and saves us a lot of time.

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EW

Sr. Infrastructure Engineer at a tech services company with 1,001-5,000 employees

Feb 24, 2020

The most valuable part is the ease of use. There's no training involved. It's pretty simple and straightforward.

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CC

Lead DevOps Engineer at a financial services firm with 5,001-10,000 employees

Feb 24, 2020

The way the solution’s automatic IT asset discovery and inventory functionality works is you set up a discovery job, then you can schedule it to run. I schedule all of the runs daily at different times so nothing is interfering with anything else. It's nice to know that you can set up the scan, schedule it, and sit back. You can check them every day and make sure everything ran, making sure nothing had errors, then you're good to go. Anything new is going to automatically be discovered, which is nice. It takes some of the stress off because you don't have to know, "If this team opened new servers, we need make sure now it will automatically pick them up." It is one less thing to worry about. It gathers a lot of data points.

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VD

Procurement Specialist at a computer software company with 501-1,000 employees

Feb 25, 2020

Previously, our company had a lot of issues keeping track of all the data centers and the inventory, as well as the purchase orders. All of these were managed by other tools. The good thing about Device42 is that it can be used for all this together. We don't need to spend time checking many other tools and files.

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FS

Francois Sureau

Manager, Hosting Operations at a tech vendor with 10,001+ employees

Jul 27, 2020

We use the automatic IT asset discovery for different things, like VMware discovery and SNMP discovery for network devices. It helps us to keep hardware information up to date in Device42, and the VMware discovery helps us to keep virtual device inventory up to date... We are sure to have 100 percent of our devices in Device42. Not more, not less.

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IT Business Analyst at a university with 5,001-10,000 employees

Jul 27, 2020

Device42 has everything in one place and links it altogether. This helps when you need to figure out where things are going wrong, where things are happening, or how everything is linked together.

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Device42 Cons review quotes

reviewer1292073

Manager, Endpoint Management at a retailer with 10,001+ employees

Feb 19, 2020

It would be nice for the agent to have an installer versus a single file across multiple systems.

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DP

Technical Service Engineer at Fujitsu

Feb 20, 2020

For the iPhone, the device diagram cannot be downloaded. You have to go to each device and download the device diagram for that device. E.g., suppose there are a 1000 or 2000 servers. You cannot go to each server or device to download a device diagram for each device. There should be a one-click solution for downloading all device diagrams.

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YS

Systems Manager at Coventry University

Feb 24, 2020

The dependency mapping can be quite slow sometimes, if you've got a lot of things connecting to services. It can be very slow to build up the map.

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Free Report: Device42 Reviews and More

Learn what your peers think about Device42. Get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions. Updated: March 2026.

884,873 professionals have used our research since 2012.

FL

Francisco Laborda

Network Engineer at Despegar.com

Feb 23, 2020

While the automatic IT asset discovery is great, the first time using it can be confusing when you are configuring the SNMP. I don't remember for sure but I don't think it said "SNMP community," it said "password". The first time I used it I was thinking about communities but the tool said "password," and when you say "password" in SNMP you are thinking about SNMP version 3. This is the only thing that is confusing, although there were some devices that were not included in the discovery.

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reviewer1295379

DC Lead Engineer at a financial services firm with 5,001-10,000 employees

Feb 24, 2020

If I want to delete an asset from a cabinet it does take a while. And if I'm doing it in bulk — say, for example, if we have one cabinet that has 20 servers in — if I want to remove all 20 servers, I have to do them individually, which is a bit time-consuming. If there were a way that I could just bulk-remove everything from there, that would definitely save some time.

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EW

Sr. Infrastructure Engineer at a tech services company with 1,001-5,000 employees

Feb 24, 2020

My biggest problem with the product is the upgrades. First, we have to do them manually and second, not this last time but the time before that, we actually had to build a new VM to deploy the solution again. We had to back it up and then restore it to the new version. That was inconvenient.

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CC

Lead DevOps Engineer at a financial services firm with 5,001-10,000 employees

Feb 24, 2020

Since I was focused on deploying connectors and getting all the servers to be scanned, one of the biggest pains was when a job would fail, then the output (logging) was poor. For example, "Why did it fail?" In these cases, you get a generic error. It doesn't point you in the right direction and tell you why you got the error, which is really annoying. There have been times I asked, "Is there somewhere I can see a better log as to why is this failing?" That would be a really nice improvement.

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VD

Procurement Specialist at a computer software company with 501-1,000 employees

Feb 25, 2020

The only thing which I have noticed so far that is not good is that we had an issue with some reporting from the tool, reporting we had to export. We couldn't do it in the way we wanted to, so we tried to reach out to their support but it took pretty long until we understood how we can manage the reports. We still haven't received a complete explanation of what we need to do and how to do it.

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FS

Francois Sureau

Manager, Hosting Operations at a tech vendor with 10,001+ employees

Jul 27, 2020

Device42 is a main part of our processes. We need reliability, not only in terms of the data but with the solution itself. It's really difficult when we have 10 minutes of Device42 downtime because none of our teams can work for those 10 minutes, and it's more time lost if there is longer downtime. An improvement would be to have a cluster implementation of Device42 to have high-availability and ensure that we don't have downtime in case of failure.

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IT Business Analyst at a university with 5,001-10,000 employees

Jul 27, 2020

The solution’s automatic IT asset discovery and inventory functionality functions pretty well. There could be some improvement if there were some automated scripts to get it off the ground. I know it takes a bit of effort to get all of various managed devices into one place. We have to go and change how they are managed and make sure they are all linking up correctly so they can be tracked in Device42. Some type of automated script for each to get over that initial activation.

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