Device42 Reviews

We were using Device42 for its configuration database manager, so we imported all of our devices into Device42 and tracked the changes that we made on our devices. We assigned them to owners. We used Device42 for mapping items. 

We tested Device42, moved it to production, and did all our dev on it.

The most helpful feature in Device42 was the import feature, where you can seamlessly import your information into the configuration database manager. It was straightforward to get everything in there. It was also easy to find basic information, such as the RAM and device information.

Mapping items wasn't as intuitive as importing in Device42, so this is an area for improvement.

The real-time configuration also has room for improvement in the solution.

Importing was easy, but once you had all your data there, it was hard to find precisely where everything was except for basic information. For example, when you go to the program list of what's on the Linux box, as my company was using Linux boxes, it was a little harder to find that information, and it was also hard to recategorize. If you imported your data wrong, you had to start over, and you couldn't just drag and drop items to other places.

This limitation, I feel, is due to Device42 wanting you to ensure you have the correct configuration when you import so that other people in your organization can't just move stuff around.

I want Device42 to make it easier to import and move items around and then add a lock feature, so people won't be able to do anything to the items after.

I also want better integration between Device42 and Jira because my company uses Jira as a base to make sure nothing's missing. Jira has been in the company even before Device42, so my company imported all data into Jira and then used Device42 for mapping. Device42 is housed in a database, while my company used Jira for the front-end view of all items. The issue with the integration between Jira and Device42 is that Jira has a language that isn't compatible with Device42, so integration with the two should be improved, or at least there should be a mapping function where you can tell it what to display on Jira and Device42.

I used Device42 for seven months on my last assignment, June 2022.

Device42 was highly stable, and it was nearly one hundred percent stable. I didn't experience any downtime from the solution.

Stability-wise, it's a ten out of ten.

I found Device42 pretty easy to scale up, so its scalability is a ten out of ten.

You can scale it where you need it and even do a satellite setup. For example, suppose you had some servers in California, and you had to collect data from California, or you had a hot site in California. In that case, you could put a note on Device42 that collects your device information in California, and it could send the information to wherever your base is.

For example, if your base was on the East Coast, DC, then you could send all that information, and it doesn't have to be connected 24/7 to the internet. It can send information whenever you schedule.

Once you're reconnected to the internet, you'll receive the data, so that was an excellent Device42 feature that allowed for more scalability. You could also add more notes to ensure you didn't get a lag, or you could mitigate that lag.

Device42 support was phenomenal and responsive.

When I sent an email to the support team, the technical and sales staff would call me, but I didn't find it a salesy call.

I was the lead on the Device42 project for my company, so if I got stuck, I would be able to reach out to the technical support team, and within two hours, if a staff could hop on a call with me. Otherwise, Device42 support will schedule a call with me soon. Other times, support will email me with the resolution.

I found the support team for Device42 proactive because the team also sent guides that had complete information or everything you needed. You can also search for a Device42 guide online and download a PDF version.

It was easy to talk to support and get support whenever needed. I'd rate the Device42 support team as ten out of ten.

My company's only issue with Device42 support was that my company had to move quickly to rate the solution. Still, because it's a government project, the government moves slowly, so Device42 had to give three extensions because it took longer to get it set up due to my company's internal process.

For me, the Device42 technical support is a ten out of ten.

Positive

The initial setup for Device42 was straightforward because you have guides you can follow, plus the Device42 support team will go on weekly calls with you for the setup process. You can even go on biweekly calls with support if you need to.

Integrating Device42 with the company's system and getting started on it was easy, so I'm giving the initial setup a rating of nine. The total time it took from start to finish to have a fully functioning Device42, including the planning, was seven months.

Based on the use case for Device42, I found the solution a bit expensive. However, when you look at the support and the industry standards, Device42 was on par with the industry.

Device42 is a little more affordable than ServiceNow and BMC, but in my opinion, Device42 has a bit more diminished functionality in terms of all-inclusive CMDB. Even when Device42 can display all items for you, for my company's purposes, I wouldn't say I liked the interface as much as the Jira interface. Interface-wise, you can customize Jira better based on how my management team wants to view the information.

Functionality-wise, Device42 is on par with industry standards, but price-wise, the solution is expensive.

I'm rating the pricing for the solution as eight out of ten.

My rating for Device42 is nine out of ten because it still has room for improvement. Uptime-wise, it's not one hundred percent.

My company is a customer of Device42.

I use the solution for physical assets management, IT management, and application dependency mapping.

There was a lack of information about what was installed in the data center and how they interconnect with each other. We had the information in Excel before. We installed Device42 to get the information from our environment into the Device42 database.

The solution supports our compliance and audit processes. We take a lot of advantage of it. We use the reporting to audit institutions. We can send the queries and get the reports directly from the tool. I rate the process an eight out of ten. I would have rated it ten if the product had AI features.

The solution is agentless. Application dependency mapping is a valuable feature. These are the two reasons why I believe the product is very beneficial. Before, we had servers. Every time we made some changes to the service, there was a gap between what was expected from the server and what the server was doing.

Network visualization is a basic function. The information is gathered using SNMP. It's not different from others that I've known before. A main aspect of network discovery is that we use it to manage the IP addresses. We use that feature because it is part of the core module.

The product must provide AI features. It would be very useful if I could create datasets or queries from an AI interface.

I have been using the solution for six years.

I rate the tool’s stability a ten out of ten.

The tool’s scalability is very nice. We must speak to the vendor, and they will send a new key code. We can install it and start working. It's easy to scale the product.

The technical support team is very responsive. Everything has an answer. If something can’t be done, it is because the product doesn’t do it.

Positive

We were using another tool. We wanted to integrate an asset management solution with it, but we couldn’t do it because we had to manually set the relationship between all the assets. It was time-consuming. So, we switched to Device42.

The initial setup is very easy. I rate the ease of setup a nine out of ten. It would be very easy to set up if we knew how things work.

I will recommend the tool to others. Overall, I rate the solution a nine out of ten.

The tool helps with network scanning and the discovery of asset management. 

We faced outages in the data center before implementing Device42. The tool has improved it and helped us with asset management. 

I like the tool's agentless discovery feature. The tool configures the devices based on the documentation provided. I am also impressed with its auto-discovery feature. The tool also keeps on tracking and finds whatever is in the environment. 

I would like to see API management as an additional feature in the tool's future versions. It will give more API security. 

I have been working with the tool for five months. 

The tool's technical support is very knowledgeable. They helped me with my queries. 

Positive

I would rate the tool an eight out of ten. You need to use the product for one month and see if it offers the best value for your company. 

I used Device42 for security purposes during my internship over the summer. I was tasked with trying to figure out a way to manage and secure the assets that the company I was working for had. We noticed that most of them were actually not secure, and also found out that Device42 was not up-to-date either.

Because I was using the solution to track our assets and see which ones were secure and which were not, so that we could better secure the latter, just having them all in one place definitely made it easier in some ways.

If I hadn't had Device42, I would have had to manually go through each asset, and that would not have been fun.

The most valuable feature was the ability to look up the different assets and see the different attributes that each one has, as well as being able to compare them to other assets.

It's also very important that the software provides agentless discovery.

In addition, I really enjoyed the dashboards and visuals. It was easy to navigate.

A lot of our assets didn't have information, which either meant someone wasn't keeping things up-to-date or just we didn't have enough information to go on. But for what we did have, the analytics were decent.

It was hard to know which assets I'd already looked at because if I looked up another asset with a similar name, they would still pop up. I would have to make sure I was looking at the right asset. The search function should be improved.

I used Device42 for about four weeks.

Device42 did crash on me a couple of times. I'm going into the security field and I'm an information systems major, but you can't really be working on a website designed for security and have it randomly crash on you.

This may be very cliche, but do your research on it first. Not every solution is perfect, we all know that. But if it doesn't match your needs, then it's probably useless. Having to go back and redo all the work you already did would be a disaster.

We are not using Device42 for its monitoring capabilities. We are using it just as a CMDB. We are storing the server data and using this tool for data storage. We don't do many day-to-day activities apart from updating the device information as and when it comes.

Customers are constantly expanding the environment. So, it's easier for us to keep track of how many devices have been added. We are using another tool for monitoring, and we are using Device42 as data storage. Whatever devices have been decommissioned and commissioned are in it. So, it's a central database for us. We are not relying on just one tool for device information.

The import/export for bulk operations is a valuable and good feature. 

The resources table needs a few tweaks. We've raised a feature request for this. When you click on resources, it opens up the entire CMDB or the entire data stored in Device42. If that could be customizable, it would be good. We should be allowed to add our own columns to that by writing a script or something like that. There should be an option to add or limit whatever we want.

There should also be a customized dashboard. We should be able to include widgets on the dashboard. Currently, for app insights, only predefined dashboards are there. There should be an option to create our own dashboards. Instead of using scripts, they can provide a bunch of widgets, similar to what SolarWinds provides.

The discovery option is fairly simple to understand and use. If they could include an option where we could discover devices using an IP range for a subnet, that would be helpful. I'm not sure if that option is already present because we are not using this tool for monitoring.

I have been using this solution since July. It has been five months.

It's stable. We haven't had any major issues since I have been here. 

It's scalable. It all depends on how a customer purchases its license. Overall, it's able to handle the capacity.

It's being used in just one environment. It's not deployed across multiple environments. There are four to five admins who use this solution. 

They're good. I've spoken to two guys from their technical support. Whatever they told me, I have not forgotten it yet. They're good. I would rate them a 10 out of 10.

Positive

I've been working in this organization for the last five months, and I am not sure which solution they were using before. 

I don't know about its deployment, but in terms of maintenance, every now and then, we need to do some upgrades. We recently applied certificates. So, there was a little bit of downtime. That's where maintenance comes in.

Go for it at your own risk. There is a learning curve to it. There are some options or tools that I don't clearly understand. So, there is a learning curve, but once you get a hang of it, it's pretty easy.

It does agentless discovery, which has its advantages. If there is an emergency and we have to commission a server, we don't have to first install an agent on it. If it's a critical server and the customer doesn't want any downtime, we don't have to reboot the server after we install the agent. A reboot is a recommended action across all environments for any agent. However, the disadvantage of being agentless is that it limits our options for monitoring because agent-based monitoring is a good way for gathering data from devices. SolarWinds does it, OpenManage does it, and most monitoring tools, including even Splunk, have agent-based monitoring. So, not having that as an option is probably a disadvantage.

Overall, I would rate it a seven out of ten.

It's our CMDB for the whole company.

The way Device42 has improved our organization is that we now have visibility into our on-premises infrastructure. Previously, we didn't have any access to or visibility into it because we had consultancy firms. With this solution, we're able to see what is going on inside. That visibility helps us understand the impact of a problem.

It has also saved us money because we no longer have to pay the baselines of the contracts with consultancy firms. It is saving us 2 percent, but that is a lot.

The features that I have found to be most valuable in the product are the

• service discovery
• business applications
• application mapping between services.

The agentless discovery is very important because I don't have to install agents on every host.

Also, the Insights+ component is useful for us because it does business application mapping and helps us visualize it. It saves us time because we don't have to hunt for data. When I get a request, I go to Device42 and get the data. It saves me the time of writing emails to different people to get the information.

The breadth and depth of the solution's discovery of IT asset information means the system does most of the work, but they need to work on improving the database discovery part, especially for Oracle Exadata.

Also, the analytics reporting is very good, but there is a little bit missing when it comes to documentation about custom queries.

Another area for improvement is being able to distinguish the services on the individual machines. There's a lot of data and you can't map it. We need to clear the data. Because there is so much, we're not able to get what we want.

I have been using Device42 for almost two years.

It's stable.

We haven't tried to scale it. We use the solution across multiple locations, on-premises and in the cloud, and for multiple teams and organizational units. The number of end-users who access the Device42 dashboard in our organization is about 20.

The technical support is okay, but the response times are a little bit slow.

Neutral

This is our first such solution.

The initial setup was straightforward and very easy. We have the main appliance on GCP, with the agents distributed all around: on-premises and in other cloud environments. The deployment took half a day. I did the deployment myself, and then the networking team opened all the required ports and did the user creation, et cetera.

There is no maintenance required, as far as I am aware, other than making sure it's up to date.

We have not yet seen a return on investment.

It's in the top-three most expensive solutions in terms of cost, but it has all the features that are needed. The pricing is okay. It may be a little bit expensive for other companies, but we had the budget. That kind of pricing is normal because the product has a lot of functionalities.

My advice is use it, but carefully evaluate the database side because it does not support a lot of database types.

We use Device42 mostly for asset inventory because our compliance rules require us to know what devices we are using: the warranty for each device, when we install it, when we remove it — so full tracking of the device lifecycle. We use Device42 mostly for asset inventory, including physical pieces of hardware and virtual devices as well.

We expected we would use a SaaS version but it was not possible, so we use the on-premise version.

We have more than one instance of Device42. We have four implementations of it in our company. Each of them is dedicated to a single environment: government, our AWS environment, co-location, and corporate co-location. There is no possibility for each of these environments to speak with each other, so that's why we use four different Device42 instances in our company.

Device42 is a source of trust for many things in our company, like IP addresses. In the past, we tried to have IP addresses centralized in an Excel spreadsheet, but now we have built automation to get information from Device42 with an API call. As a result, it's possible to deploy a new VM in 15 minutes and all the information is pulled from Device42, by our automation, to build that new VM.

It's the same for load balancers. When we want to create a new virtual IP for load balancers, we have it automated with an API call and Device42 provides all the information needed to get the job done. So Device42 helps us to build automation into our infrastructure.

Device42 is also a source of trust for our security scan. When a vulnerability is detected in our system, the system automatically looks for information in Device42 to find out who owns the server that has the vulnerabilities and what the contact email is for that team, etc.

The continuous discovery for us works daily. We can be sure, if a device has been updated, that information will be correct in Device42. We are tracking which devices haven't been updated in the last few days and, for each of them we try to understand why, and to fix things so that the discovery does update those devices' information.

I don't know if we can say it has reduced the time we spend on asset management, but in that same amount of time, we now have reliable information. In the past, we were not confident about the information we had. Now, we expect that the information we have is correct.

Also, we have many audits each year. Each audit requires us to provide evidence about how we manage our assets. There are inventory questions and it's easy for us to provide an audit report. When an auditor asks us information, we just have to a share-screen and show him, in 10 minutes, how we manage our assets, and he understands that everything is correctly managed. The audit is very quick.

We use asset management and program management. For some implementations, we also use the software management.

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. It helps us ensure that we don't have more entries in Device42 than we have in our actual co-location and that we don't have more virtual servers than we have in Device42. We are sure to have 100 percent of our devices in Device42. Not more, not less.

The agentless approach to asset discovery is a good option. Sometimes it's better off to have agents, but in our environment, for most of our servers, it's really good to have the agentless. For a few of them we would prefer to have an agent because, from the network perspective, it's sometimes difficult to allow external Device42 discovery to have access to some devices for security reasons. The security team does not allow certain kinds of access. That's why it's easier if the secured server can have a call to an external service, rather than an external service calling the server.

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.

Also, when we do an upgrade, it's mandatory to shut down the application. It takes 10 or 15 minutes to upgrade and it's once a month. It's not a big deal, but if it were possible to have no downtime, that would be better. We can plan for upgrades, but we try to have 24/7 availability in our organization, so there really isn't a good time to shut down service. Doing so always has an impact. We have teams around the world.

We were early adopters and we have used Device42 since 2013.

The scalability is pretty good. It's possible to have many devices in Device42, but we can see some limits. For a very large organization, it would be a little bit difficult to use Device42 because it's a single server. It's not possible to have scalability by load-balancing the load onto different servers. That's one of the reasons why we decided to have four different implementations, to be sure that we do not have everything on the same server.

We have more than 1,000 users in Device42 and most of them use it for the password management. Some users are using it for audit purposes, for asset management, and to be able to provide reports to senior management.

We have deployed Device42 everywhere. If our organization does not expand the number of devices, we won't need to extend Device42.

Technical support is pretty good. Each time we need them, we can have a call with them. They respond quickly. It's good support.

Before we used Device42 we had nothing except Excel sheets. We began our asset management with Device42.

I was one of the main stakeholders when we decided to choose an asset management tool. When we decided to use Device42 it was mostly because of its ease of use and that it is easy to implement. We had some meetings with other companies that provide asset management tools. With all of them, there would have been months of implementation with an implementation team to help us. It would have been a big project to implement these applications. With Device42 it was easy. It was easy to install, it's easy to manage, and easy to understand how it works. That's one of the things we like with Device42.

Our implementation of Device42 took a few months. After one month we had 80 percent of our infrastructure in Device42, and the last 20 percent took a little bit longer because we had to discuss things with security. Within three months we had 90 percent in the solution and, after six months, we had 100 percent in it.

We were looking to have automated discovery to be sure that when new devices come in, they would be automatically ID'ed in Device42 and we wouldn't need someone to add them. In one month we automated most of the implementation.

We did it ourselves, and that's one of the reasons we decided to use Device42. All of the other products asked us to use an integrator or a reseller or someone who would help us. Device42 was easy, so we decided to run with it. We were able to manage everything by ourselves.

It's difficult to say if we have seen ROI. We need the functionalities so we pay for the service. It did not replace something that might have been more expensive.

We pay $100,000 per year. There are no costs in addition to the standard licensing fees.

The biggest lesson we have learned from using this solution is that if we want to have clear asset management, we need to have the same processes, policies, and rules in each part of our organization. If each part of the organization works only on its side, it's really difficult to reconcile asset management. That's why each technical team that owns devices has to share their processes and work in the same manner. When that is done, it's really easy to have good asset management.

We don't use the solution's Application Dependency Mapping. In our organization, it's too difficult for a team to be able to provide information on application mapping and to be able to reconcile what Device42 discovers with what we have. So we decided not to use it.

Device42 does not affect our security. We try to use it so that it fits within our security requirements.

In the past, one person was working on maintaining Device42 and that was enough. But now that Device42 is critical for our organization, we have two people working on it to be sure that when someone is on holiday, a second person is there in case of trouble. They work as managers of asset management.

I would rate it at nine out of 10. It's difficult to give a 10 because it's always possible to do better, but it's a pretty good solution.

Our use case for Device42 is to capture all our infrastructure in a single tool. We need the ability to have that view of where our infrastructure is: servers, storage, network equipment, and applications sitting on top of servers. Our use case is to have that single pane for where all that is.

When we're doing patch management or when we're reviewing kit (end-of-life), it gives us the ability to manage the data center from a desk. Before we had Device42, we'd have spreadsheets or somebody would have to continually to go to the data center and physically have a look at what's available where. If somebody bought or wanted to buy new kit — if they needed, for example, six U's of space, 10 network ports and five power ports — we'd have to visit the data center and have a look at where we could fit that in. With Device42, we don't need to do any of that. We just need an internet connection to get to the Device42 appliance and we can see where the space is and what the power availability is, as well as what network capacity we've got, in which rack. Everything is there.

The continuous discovery of the infrastructure means we are able to review, and we are able to mitigate things in a quicker fashion than we would have previously. If somebody had asked us five years ago how many Server 2008's we have, because we've got a vulnerability and we need to know how many servers we need to patch, it would have taken us some time to find that out. We would have had to go through all the different platforms and find out where we're hosting 2008 Servers. With Device42, we can go in and, within 10 minutes, tell the business how many servers we need to patch.

Also, the solution's CMDB, ITAM, and DCIM features create a single source of IT truth in our environment. These too make it a lot easier for the operations team. When incidents come up on the operations monitor, that team can easily ascertain who the owner is of these devices, where they sit, and who's responsible for them. They ensure the correct people get things looked at much quicker.

In addition, we're currently on a cloud project, so we have been using the solution to assess what we have in our environment, what we want to take to the new environment, what we need to drop in terms of hardware, the age of the hardware, as well as end-of-life operating systems or applications. It has helped us a lot with getting that kind of data.

We use the solution’s Application Dependency Mapping and that gives us some insight into a number of things. For example, if we're looking at a server that currently has a problem, the operations team can look at the Application Dependency Mapping and see what the server is part of in terms of the service. There may be a number of things that are connecting to it or that it's connecting to. That mapping gives us that insight into how parts of the infrastructure are talking to each other.

Previously, when it came to asset management, people would have been updating spreadsheets or documents about where they've moved things or what they've been doing, or they would have had to visit multiple areas to find out certain information. Device42 turns that into a hands-off approach to everything. We know it has been doing discovery continuously over evenings and weekends. So whatever data we are pulling out is fairly up to date. The time saved by using Device42, across the teams, is easily equivalent to a couple of people at least. A full-time member of staff would normally work seven-and-a-half hours every day so you're looking at 146 hours a month of savings, times two, of people not having to visit data centers to do things like capacity planning, auditing, etc.

We also use Device42 for internal audits. In that context, it saves a considerable amount of time. If we were to do it manually, we're looking at a couple of weeks' worth of work, but if we're doing it in Device42 we're probably looking at a couple of days' worth, maximum.

One of the most valuable features is its ability to auto-discover a lot of the infrastructure, without having to manually put everything in. 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.

The agentless discovery is the one thing that makes this a brilliant tool. The fact that you don't have to deploy an agent onto anything and you can do discovery directly through the appliance, just with credentials, is what really makes it stand out.

It's also easy for everybody to go into it and search for something, and the searching is very quick as well. You can get to get the information very quickly.

Room for improvement would be in the discovery. Although the discovery it does is really good, there are certain elements that could be better in terms of a deeper discovery. An example would be teaming on Windows Server. It doesn't currently pick up that functionality well. 

Also, 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. 

The certificate management could also be a little bit better.

Finally, it would be good to introduce a mobile app. At the moment, you can connect to the web interface through your mobile and select a mobile view, but it's still very much a desktop view on your mobile. It's not very mobile-friendly. So it would be good either to have a mobile app, or a specific mobile endpoint on the web front. You would visit a separate URL or it would detect that you're on a mobile and rearrange the view to be mobile-friendly, like dynamic websites do at the moment.

We've been using Device42 for about five years now.

The stability is very good. We've never had any stability issues with the appliance where it continuously goes down or anything like that. We've not had a problem with that.

Scalability-wise, there could be improvements. Currently, the scalability is only upwards. You have to increase the resources that you apply to it. You can't have multiple instances of the same thing. You can't scale horizontally; it's just vertical.

Technical support is excellent. The engineers are knowledgeable and they respond in a very timely fashion.

The initial setup is straightforward but, at the same time, depending on your business and the complexity of the infrastructure, it can become complex. Not the actual implementation of Device42, but to get Device42 to the point where it can do the discoveries on your infrastructure can become complicated, depending on how your infrastructure has been set up. But to actually get Device42 up and running, in terms of just the appliance, is very easy.

Our deployment took six to eight months. Getting the appliance running was very quick, but to get all of the integrations done, and working with all the different teams to allow the agentless discoveries to happen, and configuring firewalls, policies, etc., it took that long to get it all in place and to make sure that the data that we're capturing is actually useful and correct.

The implementation strategy was quite straightforward because we didn't have anything else before. We started from scratch to capture everything, starting from the network layer and going up to the server storage layer, and then the application layer.

We deployed it ourselves.

Effectively, we didn't have a product before Device42. But with it, we're looking at a reduction in terms of man-hours to manage IT infrastructure and do asset management. That's where the return on investment has come. 

Another part of the return on investment is when a vulnerability comes out. With this solution, we can identify the machines very quickly, rather than having an engineer sitting there for a whole day or two working out what needs to be done. An engineer can go through Device42 and spend half an hour to pull a report.

We pay annually for our licenses, which includes core, the Application Dependency module, and software discovery.

We evaluated two or three other options on the market. At the time, we chose Device42 because of its effectiveness in actually discovering the infrastructure. The second reason was the cost and the third was its ease of use.

We looked at RackTables, OpenDCIM, and we looked at another one from BMC and, for asset management, we looked at ServiceNow.

The biggest lesson I would take from using the solution is to have an understanding of your infrastructure so you can better plan how you implement Device42. As with anything, there are obviously limitations as to what it can do. Sometimes there are certain politics within your business that may stop you from getting the most out of Device42.

Also, although we didn't actually do so, I think it would be good to have a close relationship with the vendor of Device42, at the implementation stage. Our relationship has matured and been built post-implementation of Device42. It's going to be beneficial, for anybody who wants to put Device42 in, to get the vendor onboard before you implement it.

I don't think Device42 has really affected our environment's security posture, as long as we understand how Device42 is doing these discoveries. We actually have Device42 in a fairly locked-down environment. Only certain teams have access to it because of the sensitivity of what's inside it. On the flip side, it provides that single pane of glass. You could say that there is a higher risk with it because we now have one place in which all the information is held. But I think the benefits outweigh that little bit of risk that we've taken on by having all the information in one place.

In terms of people using Device42 as a platform, we're somewhere around the 50 or 60 mark. They range from service desk analysts who use the secrets vault functionality, to the infrastructure team — system engineers, network engineers, infrastructure architects, network architects, desktop engineers, database administrators. Those are the kind of people who tend to use Device42's core functionality which is asset, infrastructure, and data center management. The secrets vault is spread across our whole department and the infrastructure side is heavily used by the infrastructure teams, which includes my team, systems, the network team, and the architects.

Deployment and maintenance are quite lightweight. To manage the whole thing you only need one or two people, and they are spread across the different teams in our environment. We have one person in the network team and one in the systems team to ensure that things are ticking over and for planning upgrades.

Our environment is not massive but it's not a small environment. In terms of what it costs us to run Device42, we find it a very good value for money. We will definitely be using it for the foreseeable future and our plans are to extend its usage into the cloud where we are already capturing things. But we want to make the visibility of cloud resources in Device42 much better. Device42  are improving cloud discovery as well. The way we've got it set up, it doesn't give us the same visibility that we have on-prem. So we want to start working on making sure that the visibility of our cloud deployments is just as good as we have on-prem, with deep discoveries, etc.