IBM SevOne Network Performance Management (NPM) Reviews

We're using SevOne to monitor our network infrastructure. We provide monitoring services and performance capacity management for network gear, including routers, switches, wireless controllers, firewalls, and load balancers, to name a few. We have various manufacturers and different device models that we leverage the solution to monitor in our organization.

Our deployment of SevOne is mostly virtualized. We have gone completely virtual in our environment. We have SevOne deployed in different regions of the world: the U.S., Hong Kong for Asia, as well as in London for Europe. 

We've been able to expand our service with this tool, without the need for additional tools. In addition to being able to monitor network devices, the tool is capable of monitoring server-type devices as well. That means we didn't have to get a separate tool to monitor servers. We're able to ingest system log information and create alert policies on it. Overall, end-to-end, it is very flexible, enabling us to leverage the lessons learned and apply them to all the different component gear, whether it's server gear or database gear. One of the benefits is that we've been able to leverage one tool to do a lot of things.

SevOne also enables us to integrate our network performance management data across our ITSM and business decision-making tools. One component of SevOne is called Data Bus and that allows us to stream and share performance data from SevOne with external applications. We have some use case scenarios where we are sharing the performance metrics being captured in SevOne with other applications in the business. Integrating the network data with other solutions wasn't difficult. The way it works is that we're streaming the database, and small JSON payloads, into a Kafka Messaging Cluster, where external applications can just subscribe to that topic, download the data, and use those metrics as needed.

When it comes to detecting network performance issues faster, the tool is very capable. Being able to set up alerts and policies based on baselines, and deviation from baselines, is pretty good, without our having to set hard thresholds on a performance item. We have discovered things that way. Since leveraging SevOne, we see most of the outages or pre-outages in an alert from SevOne, and we can dispatch to troubleshoot the issue. We depend on it a lot at this point.

For me, the most valuable feature of SevOne is the capability to monitor any device that has SNMP availability. We can pick up any KPIs that we need, regardless of the model, type, or manufacturer. As long as the device is able to respond to SNMP, we have a way to put our SevOne hooks into the device to capture some KPI data.

One of the solution's biggest strengths is its capacity management performance, with out-of-the-box reports through NMS, as well as its ability to collect NetFlow-related data from devices. The collection of network performance and flow data is important because we have many critical business applications. Whenever there is slow processing or slow response from these applications, the first thing that the user community will look at is the network. They'll wonder, "What's going on with the network? Why are we getting a slow response?" Having those capacity-management KPIs around the components that make up that application helps greatly to narrow down where the root cause is when there is an incident.

It's also very critical that SevOne's collection abilities cover multiple vendors' equipment. Depending on the business unit's needs, it may have a combination of many manufacturers. It's very critical for us to be able to have that flexibility and not to have to worry about a specific manufacturer.

There is also support for software-defined and streaming telemetry-based networks, and we are starting to do a little bit more on that side. That's the direction in which everyone is going: telemetry and data science around the collection of the data, and proactively identifying an issue based on data models. Telemetry, and the ability to capture data in that format, is going to be a big push.

In addition, SevOne's out-of-the-box reports and workflows for automatically helping us understand what is normal and what is abnormal in our network are very comprehensive. One of the things that we like about the reports and the data we see is that, over time, we are able to create a baseline and look at it versus the actual data points. We are very quickly able to see any deviations from that baseline. It's very useful for us.

Those reports definitely speed up the solution's time-to-value. We have business timelines to deliver on. The ability to quickly onboard devices from different manufacturers and collect KPI data, and being able to leverage some of the out-of-the-box reports fairly quickly to look at the performance data, is very important to us.

We are also able to create our own reports. As a matter of fact, we allow many of our telecom engineers to come into the tool and build and customize the reports they need for their specific use cases. It's not only easy to make those reports available, but our user community can be the creators of their own reports. It's easy to use for them. The learning curve is not big. Anybody can start picking and choosing how they want to visualize the data.

For example, right now, we're working from home. There's been a lot of importance around our load balances, for how people connect remotely through our network. Being able to monitor the behavior, the active users, and any drop in users has been key. We have a custom report that we built around each of the load balancers that people come through from their homes, regardless of the users' locations. We can see the trends of active users, and how many users are dropped down. We leverage that report to communicate to our executive team how well we're providing remote workers access to the network.

And as you run some of these reports, like the health summary of the devices, you are also able to drill down to the specific KPIs of certain components. You can have a bird's-eye view, and then drill down all the way to the specific item in that report.

Finally, the solution's dashboard is very important, especially as we do capacity management analysis and as we project the growth of the organization. It helps us understand how certain devices are being utilized. That data is very important for us.

One area that requires a little bit of improvement is the topology of visualization and being able to map out connections, end-to-end. It's able to do that, but it's not as impressive as we would like it to be. We would like to understand the different interface types and the connection points better, through the visualization. Heatmaps also need further development.

In addition, you can take a device and look at all the metrics that are being collected or enabled. But having a quick map view of the KPIs versus the alerting policies that we've built around a device, and being able to map that quicker and have a one-to-one correlation, would be useful.

We've been using SevOne in this company since 2013. Personally, I've been involved with SevOne for the last three years.

It's pretty stable. We hardly have any issues with the product. When we encounter issues, they have a good support structure with their help desk. We get a pretty quick turnaround on any issues that we raise with the vendor.

It's very scalable, especially if you are going with a virtual environment. It's just a matter of deploying the collectors where you need them and quickly discovering devices.

We monitor around 7800 network devices, which includes routers, switches, wireless controllers, et cetera. In addition, we monitor about 21,000 access points.

As far as administration of the tool, we have three engineers who concentrate on the various network types to make recommendations on the KPIs and the monitoring. They also handle the onboarding of devices and configuring of alert policies.

I wasn't involved in the initial setup. Before I came onboard, SevOne was running on a lot of physical devices. But I was involved in doing the upgrades and restructuring it to be more virtualized, so that could expand the cluster and the services. Being able to go virtual, drove the ability to scale, based on the demands of the business, fairly quickly.

We have definitely seen ROI from using SevOne. We've expanded our scope of control and we've increased the number of devices in our environment. Because we have different business units, we have a multi-tenant environment where devices are for different business units. Being able to organize them separately and increase the server count or the device counts has definitely helped us to provide some additional services.

Many tools price things based on the number of KPIs that you're collecting around a device. In many cases, there could be hundreds of metrics that you need to collect. SevOne provides device-level pricing. That gives us the flexibility to turn on, and expand on, the metrics that we're collecting around those devices, without taking a financial hit.

We've looked at other products such as Zenoss and SolarWinds.

What we liked about SevOne is the ability to onboard any type of device that has SNMP capabilities. We could go to SevOne and say, "Hey, we have this new device," and provide the SNMP OIDs and they quickly certify that equipment for us to onboard. And the partnership we have with them is another aspect we like.

My advice is to have a good architecture review with SevOne to understand what your business needs are. Make sure that you are deploying the SevOne collectors as close to the network gear as possible, so you have the metrics with no latency over the network.

The ease of use of the dashboard has improved, now that they've introduced Data Insight, which is their new visualization reporting engine. That is a little bit more user-friendly. They've made good progress with Data Insight to make things even easier.

SevOne is an eight out of 10. They do a lot of things very well, but there are some areas that need some improvements and they're aware of them. They're working on them for future releases. Every tool has a niche environment, but there's no Holy Grail or perfect tool out there.

Overall, we feel SevOne is well-positioned. It's a very strong tool. What I like about them is the support structure. Being able to collaborate with them, when we need some additional services or recommendations on the tool, is helpful. It's a tool that positions us very well to provide immediate service and meet the needs of the business.

We use the solution for performance and capacity management reports. The product gives us flow data that helps us determine the top users. We also use the solution for LAN, WAN, and Wi-Fi.

I like the tool’s scalability and real-time reports. Earlier, we struggled to give real-time reports to clients. I also like the tool’s deployment model where we can deploy it either on-premises or in-house. We don’t have to carry the data all over the globe. Also, I am impressed with the tool's flow reporting and Wi-Fi.

The tool needs improvement in non-Cisco SD-WAN.

I have been using the product for four years.

My company has 500 users for the solution.

We talk to the tool’s support on a daily basis or whenever we need their help. The product’s support is good.

The tool’s setup was easy. We were able to onboard two major customers within two months of the product’s deployment. The overall deployment took around three months to complete.

The tool is not expensive. We were able to negotiate with SevOne on pricing.

I would rate the solution a nine out of ten.

We are a system integrator, so we help the customers implement SevOne NPM and provide first-line support. When the customers have issues, they call us first, and we open a ticket for them if they need SevOne support.

Most of my customers are in banking and finance, so they are more conservative. Some of them are in a period of transitioning their infrastructure to the cloud, but they still have an on-prem solution. In the next few years, some customers may transition to virtualized or nextgen network services, but not at this moment. Some telco customers still have the on-prem appliance to monitor the circuit server-level connectivity or for NPRs.

There are three typical use cases. First, most of our customers use the SevOne platform for network performance monitoring, including network devices and connectivity. Customers like the high availability, unlimited scalability, and fast-forwarding. 

The second use case is to provide a central platform for infrastructure monitoring, including the network server and some application monitoring. About 60 percent of our customers use it for this. The third is for server monitoring only.

The use cases are a bit different. In the old days, IBM, HP, BMC, and Microsoft required customers to deploy agents in the server to monitor them. However, the servers used SNMP. And although there are advantages to using SNMP to monitor the server, customers prefer to use a server platform for monitoring. Most of the use cases fall in the first category. The second accounts for maybe 12 percent, and 10 percent of customers only use SevOne for server monitoring.

SevOne NPM helps our customers detect performance issues faster. The solution has a polling engine to check the normal behavior of a given device in an area. It helps the operations team, but you need to configure it properly. It all depends on the implementation engineer, and the operations team must fine-tune the monitoring policy. Once it's properly configured, SevOne will help you address some issues right away. 

Without the solution, the operations team would need to manually check each device when something goes wrong. With SevOne installed, we get the alert right away, so you can say that it cuts the troubleshooting time by one to three hours, depending on the situation. If you properly configure the policy, you can proactively address potential performance issues before a failure occurs.

SevOne has multiple out-of-the-box options for reporting. They have the old reporting portal and the new one. The new reporting portal has more out-of-the-box functionality, and it looks great. It helps the customer gain visibility into the network.

SevOne's Data Appliance, unlimited scalability, and fast-forwarding are the most distinctive features. In particular, our customers like the Data Appliance because they don't need to install anything. 

Once you deploy, you can configure the IT elements and start monitoring the network or server right away. With fast-forwarding, you only need to configure one device to the lever or the server to the second level. It's amazing. The new reporting dashboard is also a lot easier to use.

SevOne NPM is good at data collection, but I think IBM needs to improve the solution's actionable insights. Many other vendors have machine learning or AI that pinpoint the potential problem for the customer or drill down to the root cause. I don't think SevOne has these capabilities at the moment. The cloud monitoring functions are also lackluster. Everyone talks about how good SevOne's cloud monitoring is, but I found it underwhelming. 

Telemetry is hot these days, and IBM can improve SevOne's support for telemetry correction. Reporting is another feature that could be better. It provides the bare minimum functionality, which is good enough for most engineers, but the management isn't advanced. The new portal provides a much lighter view and better visualization, but the management is not so good. 

You can use SevOne to monitor a mixed multi-vendor network, and it provides a baseline. It's a good platform, but we must rely on the implementation engineer who has the necessary knowledge to configure the monitoring policy for the customers. It would be better if they had some out-of-the-box policies that could help the customers.

We've been using SevOne NPM for almost eight years.

I rate SevOne eight out of 10 for stability. Our customers are happy with SevOne's stability because the system is quite robust. Some of our customers have been running it for years without issue.

I rate SevOne support nine out of 10. We've had great feedback from our customers about SevOne support. They're willing to set up a remote session upon request. You have to go through three tiers of support with most vendors, and they ask a lot of screening questions before they will do a remote session. You need to spend a lot of time before an engineer will host a remote session to look at your problematic system. 

When there's an urgent case that affects server performance, like corruption or instability, they respond fast and fix the issue right away. The support engineer can quickly sort out most issues that affect the user experience. 

Positive

The installation is fast and straightforward because you only need to configure the network interface with the proper IP to get the system up and running. It's really quick, just like flipping a switch.

The total deployment time depends on the customer's environment. It takes a little time to set up high availability and configure some aspects of the labor interface, but you can finish all the configuration in a day.

Some of our customers request integration with ITSM tools like Service Cloud. For a typical engineer, it isn't easy, but it's not that difficult, either. Some other solutions on the market have built-in integration with ITSM, but you need to use the command lines to integrate SevOne. 

The license was quite expensive in the old days, but I think the price is okay for an enterprise customer. However, SevOne is still more costly than competitors in the small or medium-sized enterprise market. 

I rate SevOne Network Performance Manager seven out of 10. The support is excellent, but the features are average. 

SevOne is used mainly for network monitoring. In my company, there are different services that include mobile data, voice, and broadband. SevOne is being used across all of these three services, and it also covers our corporate network.

SevOne is also being used for business reporting and capacity planning.

SevOne provides a comprehensive view of network performance data. It supports multi-vendors out of the box, which is very good. In 90% of the cases, new devices are plug-and-play, so when a new version comes out then SevOne has support for it out of the box. This is the case with either network monitoring or NetFlow data. In the worst-case scenario, they have an open framework that we can use as the next step. It helps us to get it up and monitored fairly quickly.

The ability to support multiple vendors' equipment is very important. In fact, it is one of our top priorities because this compatibility saves us time and money, as we are able to get new equipment set up quickly and without much effort. That's a key thing for us.

I'm not able to quantify our savings in terms of monetary value but in an ideal scenario, we save two weeks of time. When we add a device, we get data out of the monitoring points. Nine times out of ten, SevOne works immediately. In the exceptions, we reach out to the vendor to clarify what they need from an SNMP point of view. After that, we take it up with the SevOne certification team. With any new vendor that comes up, SevOne provides a 10-day SLA for the free certification. That's a pretty good saving.

It is very important to us that SevOne supports streaming telemetry-based networks. As with any other company, our network is evolving and we are moving towards telemetry. We are in a pre-discussion phase with SevOne to use the telemetric components so hopefully, in the near future, we will have it in our product suite.

We do have SDN but as of today, not with SevOne. That is something that we have aspirations for and will look to in the future.

The out-of-the-box reports and workflows help us to understand what is normal and what is abnormal in our network, and this helps to speed up time-to-value. This is one of SevOne's strong points as I compare them with other vendors that I have seen over the years.

SevOne gives us the ability to edit and customize the out-of-the-box reports and we do that quite a lot. We take what SevOne has provided and we change it to fit our needs. For example, when vendors change their versions and release, we fine-tune them to accommodate these things.

It is fairly easy to customize the out-of-the-box reports, although one needs to have a bit of knowledge to do that. I see it as any other product, but there are some limitations to it. There are complex structures from certain vendors such as Cisco that are not easily supported. For instance, Alcatel-Lucent provides multiple SNMP profiles but that cannot be supported in SevOne. This had to be accomplished using other means. It is cases such as this that highlight why you need to have the knowledge but once you have that, it's fairly straightforward.

Cisco is a vendor that we have had to customize reports for. With respect to temperature monitoring or CPU reporting, some of the out-of-the-box reports don't fit that specific vendor version, so we had to modify them to use the latest MIB and SNMP OID.

We use SevOne for high-frequency polling, where we can quickly flip it on and the network operations team is able to easily troubleshoot issues.

SevOne has enabled us to integrate our network performance management data across our ITSM and business decision-making tools. All of the data that we collect is also shared with other consumers, instead of just retaining it and reporting it. This is done via the Data Bus, which is running over the open-source product, Kafka.

This was fairly easy to deploy and then open using the various device groups and object groups. Once it is open, data can be sent to other consumers. There is no need to do a lot of work. You just quickly enable the component and open it.

These integrations are key to our organization, where there are a lot of users and a high need for the data. For instance, capacity planning. A bit of analytics outside of SevOne has also been implemented, taking the data from different areas including ITSM, network inventory, configuration management, et cetera.

This performance data is key, and having such integration means that we get value out of SevOne fairly quickly. We don't need to invest time and money developing in-house products or looking for other solutions. Of course, the SevOne database component comes with a cost, but it's directly related to what the business needs.

SevOne helps us to detect network performance issues in advance of them impacting end-users through proactive alerting. The monitoring system contains threshold policies that have been configured using the dynamic thresholding approach. Specifically, it looks at a few cases to develop a baseline and calculate the standard deviation. If there is any breach or any high utilization in the specific service of a network, SevOne will provide alerts according to the severity level. It will go to our ITSM and then out to the operational users who will keep an eye on it.

We are using the basic NMS product, and we use it with DNC pretty heavily. These basic monitoring aspects are the building blocks for performance management, which is key for any organization. It is important to do network monitoring and capacity planning, which SevOne is very good at.

The Data Bus feature allows us to share data with other consumers, such as other teams in the company.

The reporting is pretty straightforward but this is an area for improvement. The reports are easy to configure but they are a bit outdated in terms of appearance and visualization. SevOne has some alternatives where you can use Data Insight and it's easy to configure, yet outdated compared to other reporting mechanisms out there.

As we are moving to virtualization, it would be helpful if there was support for Kubernetes or microservices. If this added in the future then this might help us to better manage SevOne in a virtual environment.

I have been using SevOne for nine years.

The stability is pretty good. It is the best when compared to other products on the market.

Given the peer-to-peer architecture, scalability is outstanding. You can both vertically and horizontally scale. We have approximately 60,000 network devices.

We have three or four people in the company who work with SevOne in at least a limited fashion. I am an architect and there are two advanced SevOne developers. We don't manage only SevOne but other products, as well. There is nobody who is entirely dedicated to managing SevOne.

We use SevOne support quite regularly and in geographically different places. Our agreement includes 24/7 support, which is helpful when we have to reach out. Generally, they are very good in terms of resolving the issue or providing any technical approaches, and they're friendly in nature.

Overall, the support is outstanding.

Prior to SevOne, we used another product. There were challenges with the cost and the growth of the network. Our existing solution couldn't cope, which is why we switched.

The initial setup is complex by nature but comparatively, it is simple when I consider a few of the other vendors that I have seen. Our deployment took between three and six months to complete.

When we deployed it, nine years ago, it was on a peer-to-peer architecture with physical machines. We slowly added a few instances to cover its predecessor. We continued adding appliances and within a year or two, we doubled the estate. Then year after year, we have been adding 20% to 30% to it.

Some of the services and functionality are adapted for SevOne via open-source, and the cost is very high. For the price that they are asking, it cannot be justified.

If the vendor can look into reducing the cost, and then have a different licensing model based on the usage, that would really help. A blocking point is the high upfront cost because it is challenging to get it accepted and the purchase approved. If the cost were lowered or alternatively, if they can split it over several years, for example, that would help to get the product in the door and get going.

When we first selected SevOne, we evaluated between 10 and 15 products on the market.

SevOne was the peer-to-peer technology, from an architecture perspective, which is the first reason we chose it. The second advantage was the good out-of-the-box reporting. Finally, the pricing was comparatively better.

We combine our analytics reports but we don't use SevOne in that case. We have data that comes from a non-SevOne system, we take the data feed and we have a reporting layer on top of it. Sometimes, this process takes data from SevOne and helps to provide a high-level service dashboard view. However, we do not use a SevOne dashboard to display it. Rather, we rely on the reports. 

At this time, we don't directly integrate with ITSM but we have aspirations to involve SevOne in the whole ITSM process. Ideally, any information that has been collected for ITSM can be accessed by SevOne. Also, it's a bi-directional take on the idea, where ITSM can share in the data collected by SevOne.

My advice for anybody who is considering this product is to test it, hands-on, before jumping to a conclusion about whether to implement it. It is important to compare products from other vendors to see how they perform.

Unfortunately, you have to try SevOne using different components that include the basic NMS plus Data Insight, to get a really good feel of how it collects the data and presents it. I'm confident that at the end of the evaluation, SevOne will stand out in that space.

I would rate this solution a nine out of ten.

We use it pretty extensively for all of our network performance management needs. It's monitoring Spark core and network performance. It's managing our managed-data customers' equipment on site, and it's also used to look after monitoring our internet links as well. We use it for any performance-related stats or information of that type. It has the capability for that.

It's all on-premise at the moment. We don't have the Data Insight component of the SevOne offering at this stage. We're still looking at that, but we predominantly use the platform to give us collection capability, and we'll use the data and visualize it on other platforms as well. So we have engineers that can use the data directly or natively in the tool, or we'll take the data or the collections and use those for other purposes, including billing.

It does the out-of-the-box reports and workflows to automatically help to understand what is normal or abnormal in our network. We need to see the Data Insight option to get some more of the smart features to the package. We don't have that option but for a baseline and comparisons, it's sufficient for what we need at Spark. And the capacity we use it in is more to do the collection, so we run other analytics over the data as well. The primary benefit is that we have good collection capability, which is what it gives us.

That is critically important to us. It underpins customer reports, which are contractual obligations, but we also use it for billing data. We must have accurate billing data for some of our wholesale customers. It's critical in that regard. We are so confident in SevOne that we even use it for billing.

The solution's out-of-the-box reports generally help to speed up its time to value. It's quite straightforward to get it to generate reports out-of-the-box. We have teams that use it and like that style of the interface. Even though it's an older interface, they can set up things whenever they want with whatever metrics they need to look at. It's very easy to use.

SevOne brings together its analytics reports and workflows in a single dashboard. It's required to have the Data Insight package to properly do that, which we don't have, but the product does offer that. It would require further investment from us to leverage that but it does do it quite well. We're set up in a Splunk shop. So it's very similar in terms of what you can do with Splunk visualizations but just does it much faster and more near real-time.

It provides continuous analytics of our network. The old adage is that you can't manage what you're not measuring. SevOne gives us the capability to measure the things that are important to us. We need that otherwise our operations teams are blind and we can't deliver the value to our customers who have expectations around having a whole bunch of these reports made available to them. It's very critical.

It enables us to integrate our network performance management data across our ITSM and business decision-making tools. We have ServiceNow, so we integrate our network performance alerts up into ServiceNow. It's pretty standard.

It's really straightforward to integrate the network data with these solutions. Our integration architecture is reasonably good to leverage and so we easily integrate. We haven't had any problems with it.

We use SevOne in a troubleshooting capacity for some teams, but I would say the predominant use is more to give those teams a decent quality time series chart at the right level of granularity. They need to be able to troubleshoot and support any work internally and with customers as well. Our internet links, for example, are all monitored at one-minute intervals, which is an absolute minimum requirement. If we have any disruption in internet services in New Zealand, then everyone is impacted. SevOne gives us that level of granularity, which those operational teams use all the time. They're heavily reliant on it.

The integration of network data with our ITSM helps to improve collaboration between operations and support teams. It's just a means of managing the incident, and SevOne provides a source of those, but we don't try to overload our operations teams with spurious alerts based on SevOne. It's only specific criteria that will trigger a ticket for them. It does help our business operations and functionality, but we don't go crazy about how we set it up.

It offers a complete view of our network performance. We have quite an expensive environment and a lot of different technologies. We do use it to give us views across each of the separate technology domains, whether it's a customer network or our core. We don't tend to tie everything together in an end-to-end view because of the way our network is configured, but for the views that we need across the various technology domains, it does a good job at that.

We are enabled to detect network performance issues faster and before they impact end-users. We don't necessarily get full advantage out of it in that regard, because performance alerts are a lot harder to manage than hard volts or up-down problems, but the tool does give us that data. Whether we choose to use it all the time or not is a different question.

The product just does what it says on the box. We came from two very complicated tools that were hard to get to do the very basics. SevOne does the basics very well. It's a no-fuss solution. It's easy to configure and administer. I have a small team. I don't need a lot of people to run it. It scales very well. It meets performance and collection demands. It just ticks all my boxes and therefore gives me very good SNMP collection capability.

The comprehensiveness of this solution's collection of network performance and flow data is one of the basics in the field for what it does. It meets all of our needs. So for all those areas, for the most straightforward collection capabilities, right up to NetFlow and even telemetry, it meets all those demands. Not only just basic or fundamental SNMP collection capability, but the product also supports what we need for the future with telemetry streaming. So it's very comprehensive.

It is very important to us that it provides that. We need to be doing the fundamentals but we also need to have an eye on the future because SNMP is not going to be here for that long. It will tend to drop off over the next five to ten years. And so we still need to do that, but we need an eye on the future for streaming as well. That's something that SevOne has put investment into ensuring their product can support it. It's pretty critical.

Its collection abilities cover multiple vendors' equipment. I don't think we've had an issue with any equipment that we haven't been able to interface to and collect data. We have quite a heterogeneous environment here. We have a lot of different kits. We haven't had any issues interfacing with our different equipment. So it's very flexible.

It's important to us because, like a lot of telcos, while we may be small on a world stage, we still have made various investment choices over the years, so we have a lot of different network technologies. We've got to be able to talk to Juniper, Nokia devices, and Cisco devices. That was one of the criteria when we were looking at assessing our options in the space, and one of the reasons why we went with SevOne, in addition to the other benefits as well.

The dashboard is very straightforward. It is quite streamlined. The legacy UI is not as flashy as it could be, but that's not where their product's going. It's in the data insights, which is far more beneficial for most users.

We have dashboards, but we tend to be event or exception-driven. So the dashboards are there if triage teams or customers need to look at reporting for historic purposes. It does have a fit for customers more so than us operationally because we will use exception or event-driven data if we're looking at performance and other issues.

We need to be thinking about streaming telemetry protocols. They already have the port for enhanced visualization, which they already have through Data Insight. I can't really think of anything else that needs improvement. It's meeting all the needs in those areas for now and the things they're claiming for the future are where we're hitting as well. There are some areas around multi-cloud or hybrid cloud solutions that we need to look at because we do have more of our workloads in the cloud so we need to consider how we can monitor the foreign stats in that regard. It's not something we've specifically looked at for SevOne at this point in time, but that would be something for us to consider.

In terms of stability, I can only recall one incident in the last four years. Most incidents are due to Kafka feeds, which are not part of SevOne, that we feed data to. I think we've had one problem with one upgrade, but otherwise the platform's stable. It just works. 

One other issue we've had is where we didn't dimension the box sufficiently well, we changed the polling interval and level, and we didn't have enough capacity, but that was simply an under-dimensioning problem on our side.

I bought SevOne because it scales. The rules are very clear for what you want to collect and how frequently, and you dimension it accordingly. It just scales. We have no issue with that whatsoever.

There are several hundred users using it. We predominantly have tier 1 operations people, but the majority would be what we class as tier 2 network engineers so that they're doing an operations role, but in a second-level capacity, and they would be using the tool directly. Then the majority of the rest of the audience are customers who are checking the performance stats because we're providing reports to them of utilization on their links, various other utilization metrics, and availability performance metrics to them as part of the managed services we offer to them. There are several thousand customers.

I have one team that looks after it, they have six people who don't only exclusively look after SevOne. They look after a whole bunch of monitoring and management tools. So we have one staff member and a backup. It's essentially two people, but they're on other apps as well. So we have a very lean number of people working on the tool.

We have licensed it for all the usage we need across Spark. It's already fully deployed at the moment for everything that we need in our organization, so it wouldn't expand much beyond that.

The technical support is pretty good. We don't log many calls with SevOne. We try to be as self-sufficient as possible, but for upgrades, patches and queries, they have been really good. Compared to some of our other vendors like IBM who aren't so Flash, SevOne has been really good and easy to deal with.

We previously used several other solutions. We used an IBM product and we also have smaller solutions still around the company, but they'll ultimately be replaced with SevOne.

We switched to SevOne because the other platforms were too expensive and weren't performing. It was largely a cost-out opportunity for us and a chance to also deliver a better functioning package up and network performance management tool to our business.

The initial setup was very straightforward. It was really more of an issue just to get the money. And then once we had the money, it was very straightforward to roll it out.

We were driven by two migrations off of legacy components. It took us less than six months to get off the first system we were exiting, and then we spent another six months getting off the subsequent system. So it was probably about a year before we got off two of our original legacy performance management tools. And most of that was really around getting the data feeds sorted out, ensuring all the devices that need to be managed were part of automatic feeds into SevOne. SevOne itself is straightforward because it's an actual appliance base and it does not require much effort required to band it up.

Our implementation strategy was to replace like for like before exploiting any extra features of SevOne. We were collecting team metrics of 20,000 boxes. Then the replacement had to do the same as a starting point in order for us to exit the old system. So it was pretty much like for like, in terms of the implementation. And we did have a mix of PaaS and VM boxes as well. So we do have a mix within our environment for the collectors.

I have a team at Spark and we largely like to be self-sufficient. So my own team did some training and is quite familiar with tools in the space. They were able to run with the new technology and set it up. We had established a project team that carried out the implementation and the migration off our legacy platforms. That was all in-house.

We haven't actually measured ROI but in terms of the total cost of ownership, SevOne has certainly saved the company quite a bit of money. It's basically avoidance of paying high licenses with other suppliers is what we've saved. Our operations teams have a system that gives them the potential to give meantime to repair and it gives them the better ability in that area. We don't measure that so much. It's more about the savings we have from moving from one toolset to another. It's also operational efficiencies. I have five performance management tools and we can have one. People have got one place to go.

As with any vendor tool, having a good commercial contract is part of what makes the tool successful, and we got a lot of value out of it very quickly because we were able to secure a good commercial arrangement. It lived up to everything else that SevOne claimed on the box. So we were able to get the value straight away. 

Every vendor's licensing model is different. SevOne took quite a bit of exploration to understand the license. But if a customer is looking at it, just to understand what they're getting into in terms of managed objects and what counts towards a managed object, then they'll be fine. They'll know what they're up for and you don't get any surprises when it comes to buying additional licenses. The last thing you want to do is invest in a tool and then find out that there are ongoing incremental costs as you add more. My advice would be to secure a good deal upfront at a good price and then it becomes more attractive within the business to sell it.

We have ongoing support and maintenance, so that's an annual OPEX for us, but that's very reasonably priced. If we look at the total cost of ownership of SevOne to our previous toolsets, then SevOne still comes out way ahead by comparison.

We did evaluate other solutions. We looked at the market and ultimately chose SevOne. 

We did look at doing upgrades to our existing platforms. We also looked at Splunk but that wasn't good value for money in terms of just doing SNMP monitoring. We also looked at some other open-source solutions as well.

We had a good license deal from SevOne, which made it appealing, and because we have such a good discount, that really helps in terms of our selection process. The other vendors are all pretty much doing the same sorts of things. So it was most important to get a good commercial deal with the supplier and SevOne was the only one who really stepped up to do that. 

In terms of other criteria, we wanted the scale. We wanted ease of deployment. We wanted the fundamentals to be done straight away and easily, and we wanted low support and high value in terms of meeting our varied business users. It ticked all those boxes.

We haven't done too much with software-defined, but we have certainly looked at the telemetry capabilities, and it does support those. While it doesn't support all of our technology in that space, it does support two-thirds of what we need to do and the other options to support telemetry. Another kit we have is something that we can work with SevOne to do, which is an offer they've made to us. It's quite good.

Support is very key, and with all of our vendors, we want to have good technologies, good function, and capability, but we want to have a good relationship with the supplier, and SevOne has made a lot of changes organizationally and consolidated back to the US. Despite all of those changes and acquisitions, they've still maintained an excellent relationship with us. I only had an update from the COO earlier in the week, telling us where things were going. You don't get too many suppliers that make an effort to reach out in that capacity, which is really good.

We have not done too much in the way of customization. We haven't really needed to. The product is fully featured enough to meet all of our needs in any performance area but it does have options to do that if we needed it, we just haven't had a demand for it.

My advice would be to take the time to plan out what you need and just validate that it'll work with the technologies in your environment. I would also probably go with the Data Insight module from day one. I wouldn't use the native interface within the product. So plan for that as part of any deployment, and then you'll get a lot more value upfront.

SevOne is one of the biggest strategic investments we've made. It just works. It just does what we want with no fuss about it. SevOne is built on open-source technologies. If I had a bigger team, I could have written my own, but we didn't. So it was convenient to buy an off-the-shelf solution like SevOne because we knew it would just work and tick all those boxes and we'd get the value straight away, and for very little license outlay compared to what we were paying. It was a bit of a no-brainer.

I would rate SevOne a nine out of ten. To make it a perfect ten, it should be free. They're almost at a perfect ten. The only thing that worries me with SevOne is that they were acquired by Turbonomic and now by IBM. The only reason I bumped them down a point is because IBM now owns them and in an ironic twist, we exited IBM four years ago and now we're back with them owning the product we moved to. My concerns are not the technology, I think they have a good technology future, but it's more around the vendor who they're owned by now that that causes me concern.

Our primary use cases are for network alerting and reporting.

The out-of-the-box reports helped speed up its time to value. It's very important to make the tool usable, so you can prove to management that money was spent wisely.

SevOne has improved my organization by taking us to a single pane of glass for alerting on the network reports. For NOC, they only have a single pane of glass they have to look at.

It can be very thorough and very complete if you buy all of the appropriate modules and you have enough licenses to cover all the gear on your network. Some of the niceness is the flexibility of the tool and what you can do, but some of the complexity is due to that flexibility. The tool can be very complex depending on what you want to do, but that complexity makes it flexible to see things in different ways.

It enables us to detect network performance issues faster and before they impact users. Looking at IP SLA metrics and seeing that something has exceeded the baseline before users actually call up and say that there's a problem.

I've found Data Insight to be the most valuable for mining the data that the tool collects.

Without data insights, it's really hard to mine the data out of the NMS tool. Data Insight makes it more flexible.

The network data collection has been very flexible for us. It's been thorough in areas that were lacking. They have a team that I've worked with to add other pieces to it. So if it's missing something out-of-the-box, they work with me to add it. I was able to collect that data. It's not perfect, but it's pretty thorough.

The ability to assess the comprehensiveness of the solution's collection network is important. I wish they had some things in there that they don't for us to sunset some of our homegrown tools, but it's not a showstopper.

Its collection abilities cover multiple vendors' equipment but that's lower on our priority list for our deployment. We mainly have one vendor for the majority of our environment but we do have some others, so it is nice having the ability to look at other vendors.

The out-of-the-box reports and workflows for automatically helping to understand what is normal and what is abnormal in our network are very poor if you only have NMS and that is the only portion of step one that you own. DI makes things a lot better. 

DI actually lets you get to the data in a way that is easy to view without DI getting the data out of NMS. NMS is great at harvesting the data and storing the data, but it's terrible at giving managerial style views to see the data, as well as reporting is hard to mine the data in the reports. It's a very old-school feeling. DI puts a modern view on top of the tool, allowing you to get to the data in a cleaner fashion and faster data mining.

We use its ability to edit and customize out-of-the-box reports. It's been easy to edit, but I've run into some bugs. I'm focused solely on DI because NMS reporting is not very good. DI is a newer tool for them. I've run into several bugs that have slowed me down. It's easy to use other than I've run into the occasional bug that has caused problems.

I've given the firewall team reports that only look at their gear versus NOC is able to see all gear. I have done team-specific views. 

It provides continuous analytics of our network. I find it helpful, and I believe other people on my team find it helpful to be able to see all of the stats in a single tool. They can see an alert and then they can see the stats for the gear that was associated with that alert. I think that is very helpful.

NMS has several areas for improvement. It should be more user-friendly inside of NMS for some of the functionality in there. It's been getting better the last version or two, but there have been bugs in there whenever I've gone to new versions. 

There have been some features that were advertised that I would have that weren't actually there yet. They were kind of there, but even their tech support team didn't know how to use them because they were so new, and the documentation wasn't very thorough around those bleeding-edge features.

I have been using SevOne for two and a half to three years. 

It is very stable. 

Scalability has been good. It apparently has the ability to scale very broadly as long as you have the resources to deploy more instances of the tool, it is very nice on that front. The scalability is good.

We have around 30 users. Some of the users are in network operations and network engineering. Obviously, the network management team and some management use it to be able to get their visibility into how the network looks.

We have essentially two people managing the environment and they're both in the network management team. It eats up a fair amount of their time in order to really take advantage of what the tool can do.

It is used pretty extensively for the gear that we have deployed it on. We bought it for the monitoring. There are plans to expand, to include more of our network gear in the tool. I have no idea of the timeline, but I would say it's used pretty extensively. The gear that is modeled on there is only mounted on SevOne. We've taken off of all of our other monitoring to get down to a single pane of glass.

I would give their tech support very high marks. Tech support has been very helpful.

The initial setup was straightforward. 

I don't know that we've ever finished the deployment. The tool is flexible so we're always trying new things. But getting it off the ground and running and alerting, I would say took about a month and a half to two months.

We deployed it in parallel to our existing monitoring tools and then took devices out of our existing monitoring tools as we proved that they were inside of SevOne.

We did not use an integrator for the deployment. 

I have seen ROI. 

Be careful of how the licensing works. From the administration side of things, I am a propeller head. I do not know anything that has a dollar sign in it. Those are numbers I do not know.

We looked at large, standard NMS tools as well as open-source options. 

My advice would be to plan exactly what you're trying to get before you do the deployment and do as much research as you can before you go through the week-long training session that they give you with the initial purchase. There was a week-long training that we got as part of the initial purchase, but the training came before we even had the tool onsite. So I was not able to ask questions intelligently.

With flexibility comes complexity, and the other is going to be management. See everything that SevOne can do, they are going to ask for a lot. So you need to get management understanding what the tool can do with what you have deployed right now. Don't promise them the world. Filter down what management's expectations are.

I would rate SevOne a seven out of ten.

We are using this solution for monitoring the network for performance and availability. We have about 25 SevOne peers that are monitoring almost 8,000 devices. These devices include routers, switches, firewalls, etc.

On any outage, SevOne is pretty quick to send an alert. We've got an operations center that consumes the alert and sends it to the device owners so that they can minimize the time of impact of that alert. Such outages happen at least once a month, and whenever there is a real outage, SevOne is the one to detect it.

The comprehensiveness of SevOne's collection of network performance and flow data is very good. For NetFlow, I would rate it a 10 out of 10 because it collects everything that NetFlow delivers. You can also customize the reports to show only what you'd like to see or what your customers would like to see. For network monitoring, I would rate it a nine out of 10 because you can collect all the information and slice and dice that information in whatever manner you feel necessary to consume that data. We've got an operations team that subscribes only to the alerts. So, we've got tier two and tier three people who are looking at reports, and they slice and dice those reports however they like.

Its collection abilities across multiple vendors' equipment are really good. If we don't have an SNMP OID for a particular vendor, the only thing that the architects at my company need to do is to supply us the SNMP OIDs and/or MIBs. We send these to SevOne, and they certify it. We can then install it in the SevOne system, and it'll start monitoring that equipment. Its collection abilities are important because we've got multiple vendors in the network, and each specialty, such as a firewall or a router, has different collection needs. We're able to meet these specific collection needs based on the device types.

For our operations, the dashboard is very important because that's how our customers are making day-to-day and long-term strategic decisions, for six months to a year, about their network. We're not using any reports for capacity planning as such, but this is an idea that is going to be put in place shortly.

It provides continuous analytics of the network, which helps our customers in making smarter decisions and ensuring that things are up and running.

In terms of the integration of network performance management data with our ITSM tool, we don't have a direct integration with ServiceNow. We have integrated SevOne with Netcool, and Netcool is integrated with ServiceNow. It is pretty easy to integrate. We've got people on our team who are responsible for Netcool, and if we want to define a new policy or alert, we show them what alert we're sending over, and they integrate it in a matter of a couple of hours.

Its ability to monitor practically any type of network device via SNMP is most valuable. This is the main functionality that we're using. If a network device exposes a metric, such as interface utilization, SevOne will monitor it for us.

The reporting is very good in SevOne. We have static thresholds that are defined by our architects. They give these static thresholds to us, and we implement the alerting policies based on those static thresholds. We also have the capability of doing base-lining or deviation from normal or mean, but we haven't implemented that in our network. 

The out-of-the-box reports are of quality, and they would get you up to speed faster than having to build custom reports. I wasn't here when the reports were created, so I haven't, as such, used the out-of-the-box reports.

We are able to use SevOne's analytics, reports, and workflows in a single dashboard. Its dashboard is very easy to use and put together. It is also really easy to understand. If I had to give it a grade, I would give it an eight out of 10.

In terms of having a complete view of our network performance, I would rate it a nine out of 10. The reason for not giving it a 10 is that there is no packet capture associated with SevOne, but we do have other tools in place to do that.

In terms of stability, because of our move to VMs from physical appliances, some things have become a little unstable. It doesn't seem to be a SevOne issue, but we had to have a lot of calls with their technical support to figure out what's going on with it, but overall, it is pretty solid. 

I have been using this solution for one year and two or three months.

Overall, it is pretty solid. We've made some changes to the SevOne infrastructure, and we moved to VMs from physical appliances. Because of this transition, some things have become a little unstable, but we're working on these issues. It doesn't seem to be a SevOne issue, but because of the change of infrastructure of SevOne, we have had to have a lot of calls with their technical support to figure out what's going on with it. 

It is extremely scalable. We're managing almost 8,000 devices, and if we need to add 8,000 more devices, we just need to add a commensurate number of peers to handle that load. It is horizontally scalable, which is nice.

They're readily available, and they work with us in a very friendly way. They are very willing to help us. Some support desks, especially in performance monitoring, push you to solve your own problem, whereas SevOne's support is the exact opposite. Everyone I've worked with has been helpful. I would give them an A. 

I think they used HP OpenView. I have no idea about the reasons for switching.

I was not involved in its initial setup. For its maintenance, we've got two people in the US and two people in the Philippines who help us. They do network monitoring. The two people in the Philippines work part-time on it because they also support other tools. So, we have three people in total for 8,000 devices.

I would advise evaluating it thoroughly to make sure it is right for your network, and it meets your administrative needs. This should be a major or key element of your decision process.

SevOne supports software-defined and streaming telemetry-based networks, but we are not using any of that. I've also not customized out-of-the-box reports. I've only created custom reports for various customer groups that are consuming the data.

I would rate SevOne Network Data Platform a nine out of 10.

We use SevOne to manage about 10,000 network devices on our system. We monitor those devices with all the performance data, run reports, and see alerts. We have a manager of managers that sits above SevOne that actually displays all of our alerts, does some correlation and other things. We also provide some maps and reporting.

SevOne also enables us to detect network performance issues faster and before they impact end-users. We were monitoring the load balancers on our backstage passes for access to the network. And we can see, it went from around 3% to around 75% over a couple-of-week period where they had to send in all the remote access and change everything. SevOne really did a number for us, during the pandemic, of isolating which load balances were overloaded with users working from home. So that right there, was worth its weight in gold, because the management created all these reports for load balancers, for access for remote workers, and that's all they focused on, for a couple of months. So that was nice.

It has saved at least 50% because if we're just using ping and a couple of other tools, you can't really see that, all these devices went down at the same time, that segment, or that peer.

Data Insight reporting tool is the most valuable feature. They came up with it a couple of years ago. The most pleasing factor is the dark theme. You don't have a white background. It has templates that you can create for all kinds of reports that you can hit on the fly. It has a much better printing of the reports. If you want to send PDFs to people, the reports are actually decent. Whereas for years, the old architecture of the PDFs was rubbish and even our customers said, "We have to manipulate your PDFs because they all have bad margin breaks. SevOne fixed that a couple of years ago with the new Data Insight. It's fantastic. I would say the reporting of the new Data Insight is my favorite feature. 

We also have the Wifi Controller feature and we're starting to turn that up. That's going to be nice because we're going to be able to monitor wifi. Our group used to monitor wifi, about 10 years ago, maybe even longer, and then they took it away and gave it to Cisco Prime LAN. And they come to find out that Cisco Prime wasn't monitoring it as well as they thought. So we got some quotes from SevOne for a wifi solution, and now we're implementing that. We're excited about the wifi solution.

We also use NetFlow and Databus. It's not that new, maybe five years old. But everybody's starting to get on board where we just send our raw data to scientists. They correlate all the data into how they want to report on it. Those are a few of the new things that we like to use.

I would rate the comprehensiveness of SevOne's collection of network performance and flow data a ten out of ten. I've used Concord and eHealth before this. I used HP OpenView for 15 years. Right now, SevOne is top-notch for me because it's an all-in-one package, and it's easy for the operator to learn. If I can learn it, anybody can learn it. But it has a lot of features underneath that. I am one of the admins, but we have some really top-notch programmers that go in and get that in-depth data. I operate as an admin, I help people out, create policies, and everything. But when it comes to the in-depth stuff, I leave that to the scripters. I'd rather just click on the GUIs and let somebody else scrub through the comments.

It's extremely important that SevOne's collection abilities cover multiple vendors' equipment. We have F5 Firewalls, Palo Alto load-balancers, intrusion protection devices, ClearPass servers, Aruba, we got it all. SevOne has a good process. We also like the certification where we get the MIBs and the OIDs from the customer or the vendor. And they say, "We'd like to monitor this CPU key performance indicator." Or "These HC octets and the interfaces. If it's above 80% we want an alert."

With the vendors, we just take a new vendor like Aruba, they'll want to monitor the fan speed or whatever, we'll take that OID and send it to SevOne. Their certification team is top-notch. They have a 10-day turnaround, but for us, they always provide it quicker. We tell the customer 10 days but we sometimes tell the customer too, that they're always quicker. And they always are.

The process is easy. As long as the homework is done ahead of time, either by us or the vendor, we just provide SevOne with the OIDs, they provide us with a file, and we import it into SevOne. We apply it to the right vendor and all our key performance indicators are there. It's wonderful.

We're also just starting to monitor software-defined and streaming telemetry-based networks in our environment. We got a new manager and he's been pushing it. He loves SevOne. We use Data Bus, NetFlow, and we're doing the telemetry stuff. I don't really understand it, but we're working with some scientists on ride controls, to send them that data. When they started doing this, I told them "You better get some sharp people down here." And they did. 

The manager is a great manager. He's holding everybody's hands to the fire, and I got a bunch of burn marks on my hands. But we're getting progress. SevOne was great, but we weren't taking it to the next level. And other people were coming up with other tools, saying "This tool does this." And we said, "Well, SevOne does that, if you want us to do a proof of concept." So we've been doing all these proof of concepts.

In the old days, reports had nice baselines and stuff that we could use for deviations. With the new Data Insight reporting tool, now we have percentiles that we could have in the old ones, but when you had a reporting tool that wasn't that good, you're not real excited about baselines and stuff.

With Data Insight, we can see baselines and deviations. We can decide how many deviations we want to view. We can do percentiles. We can do time over time, and the graphing in which you can separate the graphs. Data Insight is a game-changer for reporting. 

You can look at the reports and it's just a picture, so your brain can say, "Whoa, that's out of normal. There's the baseline and there's somebody making a backup in the middle of the day or something." So, the out-of-the-box reporting is very nice. Every time they upgrade us, they upgrade Data Insight and they add more templates that their team has decided that the crews could use out there. They're great. I always see the new templates and I just copy it all over to my environment and change the names so people don't see.

The dashboards are fantastic. I don't use them as much as I should. I just started creating some. I'm doing it in the new Data Insights. You can customize it to your customers. We don't do much of that because we don't have a big enough crew to manage all the users out there, there are hundreds of users. And if we had to be their reporting gurus, we'd be hung up all day long, just clicking on reports for people. 

I love the dashboards because you can put it all in the front. You can have heat maps on the CPU. If you want it to have a dashboard for all of F5 you could just have the dashboard for F5 and say, "Hey, we're having CPU problems. I just want a heat map. Show me something red that I can click on and go troubleshoot." It's so nice.

There are a lot of pain points. My main problem is that we don't have a high availability system. There are 20 peers. We're going to lose the end-of-life appliances that are old. If we lose a peer and it doesn't come back, we lose all that data. The reason we don't have high availability is because it's double the charge.

I wish there was some way that we could just get a snapshot of our system so that if one of our peers failed, we could go through the process and get it back to where it was. If we built another peer, and it took us four days to build another peer and get all the firewall rules and everything it would be nice when it came back if we had a snapshot that said, "Hey, peer two, that died." Then can we just slap all that data onto the new peer two and have all that historical data, as opposed to just importing it new, and it wouldn't have any data from the past. That's kind of a pie in the sky thing. But I would like some kind of backup system.

I've been using it for about eight years now, which is actually a long time. Usually, our applications come and go. 

The stability is dynamite. We are having some issues in our VM world, where we don't have visibility to our peers that are out in the VM world. Sometimes our teams might get a peer locked up or whatever, but it's never SevOne's problem. When we had our appliances, it was rock solid. There were no issues with SevOne. You had a disk array and if you had a disk that went bad, you just ordered the disk and dispatched somebody out. I'd give them a positive as far as stability.

Scalability seems to be incredible. We're adding peers one after another. We got the wifi solution and then we just added four new peers, two on the east coast, two on the west coast of the United States. We just order more peers and get them built. SevOne sends us the OVA files. We install it, we open up a case of SevOne. They help us bring it into the cluster. And boom, we've got another whole peer ready for another 1000, 2000 devices. So its expandability is very nice, much better than OpenView and the other things I worked on.

We previously used HP OpenView. That was my thing. I liked it because of the maps, you could have all kinds of cartoons and stuff in the background. That was fun for the graphic artist people. SevOne just blew HP OpenView out of the water.

We had four servers and around 10,000 devices out there and we just couldn't handle it, it was just too much for HP OpenView. HP OpenView stagnated because I used it for about 15 years, and the last five years it looked like it was dying on the vine, with the support and stuff. They changed systems and our people in charge of budgeting and projects, decided not to go the route that HP suggested and went the SevOne route, which I'm glad they did.

I was the sidekick for the setup but it seemed to be pretty easy. I had installed, from setup, HP OpenView systems with four D80 servers around the world. The SevOne environment was pretty good. We were small at the beginning.

Without the planning and everything, just when we got the devices and turned them up, it took around a week or two. We were in our own little lab, testing.

We had a database and we were taking Cisco devices first. Once we had all key indicators identified that they wanted to monitor, we did it. Then we slowly brought in each vendor with the certified files and checked them as we imported them. It was a good plan.

We've used SevOne any chance we can get. We call them in all the time. They have a really tight relationship with my boss. They bring them in whenever there are questions on anything. And their support team is fantastic. We open up calls and get our tickets taken care of nicely.

SevOne is definitely earning its money because different departments are requesting SevOne monitoring for certain situations. And it's extra-billing, of course. I never see any of it, I just see the devices and we add them and we charge them. So they're bringing in money. 

They're getting their money back.

They were constantly looking at other products. I don't look at them. I don't even have time to think about other products. They looked at NerveCenter but NerveCenter is different. My customer is constantly looking for other replacements that are cheaper. Everybody's looking at their budget and asking "How can we get cheaper?" 

At one time they suggested ThousandEyes. It's much cheaper and easier. Well, they had ThousandEyes monitoring a little section of their network and they realized that there's no way ThousandEyes can do it. It's just too big of a network. ThousandEyes can do little stuff but overall, I work on changes all the time and I do my SevOne stuff, and the guy does his ThousandEyes stuff and his stuff is not quite right. 

My advice would be to read the PDFs they have and then look at the videos on YouTube. That's what I do. I'm not a voracious reader, but I go to YouTube a lot. 

I would rate SevOne a nine out of ten.