IBM SevOne Network Performance Management (NPM) Reviews

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 use SevOne to collect and report on network flows.

SevOne improves infrastructure planning by helping us analyze network traffic. We can look at bandwidth for specific endpoints on the customer's network and analyze traffic to identify issues. For example, maybe some connectors are unavailable. We can resolve those issues much faster.

I like SevOne's network flow reporting. 

SevOne could improve its flexibility because it isn't fully customizable and its out-of-the-box configuration doesn't cover all use cases. 

I have used SevOne for one year.

SevOne is a stable solution.

I rate SevOne eight out of 10 for scalability. 

I rate IBM support seven out of 10. There is some room for improvement.

Neutral

I have worked with many vendors as a system integrator, including ExtraHop, VMware, and Arista.

Deploying SevOne isn't complex. You can complete the initial deployment in a few days. It can take one or two weeks to design the reporting and prepare to use the solution. 

I rate IBM SevOne Network Performance Management seven out of 10. 

Our client who is using SevOne is a large client, it's big. We have to create multiple instances to support their infrastructure on the platform because they are very huge and are on-prem as well as on the cloud. Because Turbonomics is unlimited, they can do certain VM levels. I think you can do 11,000. You can collect 11,000 metrics from the VMs and you cannot go above that number. So let's say if you have 9,000 VMs, you can handle it, but sometimes you become busy and you're doing a lot of collections, or if you start collecting the processes' metrics, that is going to be a problem for you down the line. So we have about eight instances to support the platform on-prem and I think 11 or 12 on the cloud.

In terms of how SevOne improved the client's overall functioning, they reduced the cost analysis for the people. They are not good with the forecasting. They have their own capacity performance management teams that can now rely on this tool. The other benefit they are getting is that they don't have live support. If any issue comes up, like a performance issue, then the VMs are going to scale up automatically, and it is the same as in Azure. In Azure, the problem is that it is going up and down. It's a problem. When you have the SQL Server, there is the issue that we cannot do that with it.

Sometimes we have a lockup. If you have a lockup of the VM in Azure, the scale-up and down won't work. So the benefit you're getting is that we have a maintenance window, and in that maintenance window we tell everybody that we're going to scale-up or scale-down these VMs, any of these issues, and we have the maintenance time to do that. That's the benefit they're getting on that certain time. But it is not doing it automatically because in Azure there is always an issue with that. As for the VMware environment on-prem, you can do it. It does it automatically.

The feature that I have found most valuable is the scale-up and scale-down. The scale-up is an operation where the CPU boosts-up and then the memory will boost-up. That works awesomely. But the problem is when you do the case analysis, like a price analysis. Let's say you have the price. When you go to market, it picks up the cheapest rate or maybe coupons. If Azure sometimes give us a very great deal, then the Turbonomics doesn't kick in to evaluate that price. So that evaluation is always an issue that comes up. They cannot do that. They always have differences in the price. They never get those things right. That could be answered with no problem for the cloud.

In terms what could be improved, they need to integrate and get a better price. They can do cost analysis with Azure. They need to have a live cost analysis for the discounts, because if you have multiple thousands of VMs that you're doing, of course you're going to get a discount. Correct?

If you're only doing a few of them, you won't get a discount. That's the reason why they have to value the discount and coupons. The other con is that they need to be better with the accountability. In other words, the accounts or reports are not better than the others, compared with vRealize. The other thing is that you cannot write any kind of script in it to customize it to get other reports. So I'm shifting the gear into reports now.

There can be a problem of Microsoft versus Turbonomics. Because Microsoft won't allow the bigger clients to know what they're giving as a discount and they don't want Turbonomics to know what kind of discount I'm giving them. So there are pros and cons. Because these companies have a monopoly, they don't want the information of their biggest client to get out and say, "Okay, these are the coupons and these are the discounts I'm getting and let's see what Turbonomics can do."

In terms of stability, if the box is getting hot, is it having a performance issue?

It is a stable solution. They don't have to call anybody. If anybody is having any problem or performance issue, it's going to scale-up from a VMware point of view. But in Azure, sometimes if the VM needs more memory, more CPU, it cannot do that upgrade because of the lockouts. Then it's SevOne and there has to be a call out to the technical support team who comes from the bridge and starts checking the issue. That is a possibility. You can consider this tool a stable solution.

Scalability is great, amazing.

The technical support is pretty good. They are very helpful. You will have some folks who have a lot of knowledge and some who don't. So you always have this pro and con there.

The initial setup is a little bit complex and you have to first create the main database. After you create the database, make sure you start collecting. Then you have multiple collectors that start collecting the information and send it to the database. They are really technical and it's Linux based.

The setup takes about one or two days.

Usually, when you do an upgrade it takes eight hours.

In terms of ROI, when we implement SevOne, issues and calls come in and there's the reduced cost of not having a person look at it because it does it automatically. When it does it automatically, you have a timeframe if the issue doesn't resolve automatically, at which point you may have to report to a person, "Okay, this application or these VMs or whatever are having problems right now." Then you have to take a look at it and see what happened. Sometime you can clear the logs and do all the other basic techniques like the other tools do. You manually clear the log and then you look at these things. Or you can create a policy and then the extra policy will come into place. Or sometimes the time doesn't match right or your timestamps changes and you'll face these kinds of problems.

If you're asking for technical comments, then I can describe it in detail, but this is more general. For example, the IT operation can continue working the way it is, but they have to integrate SevOne into their environment. How do they want to do it? We don't know. It all depends on the different clients.

I use a lot of tools, actually. Here are the things I can recommend about Turbonomics: Scale-up, scale-down. But again, for reporting purposes, sorry, no recommendation there. The customizations are very hard. The person doing it has to be very good at analytics and has to be very good in all languages, like C-Sharp, unless you want to use the Python tool. I don't know if the Python evokes the scripts in it. I think it does, but it's very, very hard. You need a developer to write the customized reports for whatever you're looking for. If a regular person were using Turbonomics, like admin folks, they wouldn't be able to do that, unless they are a programmer.

They have to make it better for reporting. That's the first thing. Also the discount, like I mentioned about the Azure discount. It would be good if they could just get the number right.

On a scale of one to ten, I am neutral because it is not too good and not too bad. I would give SevOne a five.

In order to make it a 10, they would have to get their staff members highly active and focused on the customer's issues, and just focused on the product, on saving money. On-prem, they need to focus more on the Azure side of the house and cloud. The need to improve their internal technical knowledge and expertise. They need to hire really top-notch folks in Turbonomics.

Our company provides managed services to our global customers for our networks. We also sell our WAN networks and provide managed services on the LAN network. We use SevOne to look at the performance management of the networks that we sell to our customers including routers, switches, and network links as they go up and down. We have installed more than 100,000 devices on the non-SD WAN side of SevOne.

We can determine the performance utilization with metrics of the devices including fan speed, temperature, and other generic health checkups. If the utilization is high we raise an alarm in our ticket managing system and then our service desk can start looking into them.

We use SevOne quite extensively. We use all the modules extensively both internally and externally with our customers. They log in and use SevOne to access the tools.

The modules and the performance management reports that come with data insights are two of the most valuable features. I also find the reports for Wi-Fi, Netflow, LAN, and WAN for monitoring to be very good. 

SevOne Network Data Platform could improve its SD-WAN side. The system is still maturing. Cisco is always changing their product and new products are coming to market, they have an opportunity to focus and forge a good relationship with the SD-WAN product. They could build a strong product to provide services to SD-WAN.

I would like to see live maps as an added feature. Also, build modules on AI and EML to provide better data insights that would proactively tell us what we should be looking after.

I have been working with SevOne for three years.

There are no issues regarding scalability. You can scale horizontally as many as you want. We are able to deploy across customers. We have a regional deployment model. For one of our customers we have deployed it on their cloud so that they can keep it close to their customers and have better performance.

We rely on technical support a lot. We use them for upgrades as we can not upgrade ourselves.

I have many clusters deployed so it is difficult having to rely on them for these upgrades. It can take six to nine months for me to complete the upgrades across all the clusters. It is not just one component that requires the upgrade, there is also DI, NMS, and Wi-Fi as well.

I would prefer that SevOne release service upgrade modules that would allow our team to conduct the upgrade rather than relying on them.

The relationship we have with SevOne is good. They have maintained a good relationship with us.

We have been deploying to various customers over the past three years. we face some challenges in the SD WAN space but with LAN, WAN Wi-Fi and Netflow deployments.

We have evaluated LiveAction. LiveAction has a good interface and navigation screens for SD-WAN.

I am impressed with their LAN side, WAN side on the Wi-Fi domains, but  the SD WAN has room to improve.

If not for SD WAN, you can blindly use SevOne as a solution.

I would rate SevOne Network Data Platform an 8 out of 10.

• Quick response on reports
• User interface
• Scalability of the monitoring
• Reliability

Given the ease of access to the information in a few clicks, the user base of the product has increased tremendously. As the word of mouth spread, the increased reachability of this for the performance reporting space within our organisation increased.

Keeping up to date with market trends, new vendors and with network vendors’ product support.

More than three years.

Our installation is a very large scale one. We initially had issues getting the product to accommodate the number of network devices to monitor. After a set of fine tune steps, we did not need to turn this part back on.

We are one of SevOne's large appliance base customers, and we have not had any issues so far.

8/10

The predecessor was not up to the race! Over the years of it use, it failed to meet the expectance organically. Hence the need to look for a product with better returns in many aspects.

Straightforward I must say… Just get the appliance set up as a vanilla installation in the management systems. It’s sort of plug-and-play. It covered 75% of the network devices and servers farms out of box from day one.

SevOne has a decent pricing model, so far, for production & solutions on the shelf. Given the “object” licensing concept, it simplifies the pricing model in many ways, and gives flexibility for customer to decide.

Thoroughly evaluate what needs to be monitored from SevOne, you’ll look at it as a different ball game for the cost of what needs to be monitored.

Solarwinds – Orion, Nimsoft, IBM TNPM, Netcracker, HP Performance Insight, OPNET Net One, Previsor, TBD Fusion (Vital Suite), Watch3Net, ScienceLogic, Cisco – Prime, Network Instrument – Observer, ZenPM - SysMech.

Clearly outline what needs to be monitored from SevOne and what you aim for your organization. I don’t recommend monitoring everything.

Please engage the SevOne SME’s. It will make the implementation easier in many aspects.

This is mainly used for network performance monitoring and availability alerting. Also, we are using SevOne to help with the troubleshooting of any issue. For example, whenever there is a service outage, we have a look into the graphing data. Mainly, we are using the SNMP data and NetFlow. Other than that, we are using the ICMP availability, which is just an availability check. These are the major areas that we have been pulling.

It is a physical box installed in our data centers.

We are not building the reports. We just give the reports some basic things. It's kind of self-service for the engineers. They have access to the tool and build their own reports based on their requirements. So, they explore whatever is available out-of-the-box, like the performance report, topology, or any other kinds of alerting reports. Nowadays, they have started concentrating more on Data Insight.

Whenever there is an outage, the first thing they will do is come into SevOne and do security data analysis. They will then contact the next level (the support groups) for troubleshooting. We also get a deep dive into which host is consuming more data and utilizing what protocols. These are all NetFlow, so it is all pretty helpful. It's helping with the day-to-day operations. We have a separate team who consumes the data for the operational analysis. Whenever they do root cause analysis, they look into the data.

SevOne offers multiple integrations. They also have their own collectors and have business partnerships with other enterprise-owned companies, like NetApp. They have efficient integration which comes with the existing support, and we have been working with SevOne to implement it.

Sometimes, there are multiple issues outside of our network, but we have visibility into that kind of data.

It is pretty much a tool which provides all the data sources. You can integrate with multiple other platforms, like SD-WAN. They also do integration and offer the app data. Therefore, you can pull data from many other sources that can be used for visualization and analysis purposes. Also, they have Data Insight, which calls the SevOne API and gets the data in real-time. This is an additional model that gives a direct view into the metrics and imports critical KPIs.

We have a dedicated SevOne appliance for the data flow. The overall comprehensiveness of the data is good. There are no false statuses. Whatever it reports, that pretty much matches the actual device performance.

SevOne provides support for all universal connectors. They internally work with other data sources to get features implemented. We have an SD-WAN implementation and use other app data to monitor performance. If you pull that data into one centralized location, that is very useful for management.

The solution supports software-defined networks. This is required in terms of analyzing any sort of integration or performance issues, which are all very critical metrics.

The out-of-the-box reports help out and have a good design, which provide us with more value. We can import/export them. You can save a report based on your requirements. You can build some templates, and using those templates, you can then build multiple reports. So, their template option is really helping us out a lot. We use the reports out-of-the-box most of the time. We are not customizing them as of now. 

The dashboard is all based on the object indicator and different devices. They have a hierarchy where users create a report and select the required indicators to pull out some data. It is all pretty straightforward and flexible.

We have an integration with ITSM event management, ticket creation, and alerting. It provides good options in terms of REST API and SOAP API. You can follow the trap to the destination whenever there is an alleged violation. They have multiple options for integrating with any other ticketing tool as well as event mapping tools.

We previously have had discussions on some reporting enhancements. So, we raised a feature request, which was delivered from SevOne.

I have been in this domain for almost 10 years. When it comes to SevOne, I started using it two years ago.

The stability is 100%. It is very stable.

All the stakeholders in the organization are using it.

We have two administrators for the solution who are responsible for the application. 

The technical support is great. They are very quick if we get stuck and they need to provide resolution. They are experienced with the product.

We have regular calls with the sales and technical teams.

When I joined, I started using SevOne and it was already implemented. We have done some version upgrades and configurations. I am just managing it because it was already running on-premises.

SevOne offers multiple integrations. They also have their own collectors and have business partnerships with other enterprise-owned companies, like NetApp. They have efficient integration which comes with the existing support, and we have been working with SevOne to implement it.

SevOne has excellent support. They are pretty much available whenever there is an update. That is not run by us. They also work with us to complete any planned upgrades.

Before the upgrade, we have a precheck and evaluation call so we can plan the upgrade. This is based on the SevOne advisory for the version update. The upgrade is seamless, not complex.

We have definitely seen ROI. We are adding more value. This is the primary tool used, in terms of support. So, it does a really good job in terms of getting the data and our current use cases. It keeps us stabilized as well as up and running.

When comparing it with other products, those have multiple installations, e.g., for NetFlow, you need to have a different model, but also you need to have a different application. SevOne is the one tool which provides multiple features. The servers or databases have different plugins. It can be used to monitor various components of the network, applications, etc.

It is a very simple, flexible tool with an easy graphical user interface. This is a great tool for having all the SNMP and ICMP reporting in one place. There are a lot of integrations for this tool.

They offer good monitoring and reporting.

I would rate SevOne as a nine out of 10.

This is a new tool for our company. This project is the first one on which we're using this tool.

It is inexpensive compared to other monitoring tools and it provides agentless monitoring, where we don't need any kind of installation of servers. SevOne has a feature which is a policy browser. We just assign the policy and it will automatically apply it to all the servers, and it will create the thresholds as well for each and every server.

The automation feature is good because if your CMDB is OK and it is already in sync, then the automation part is good to go. Auto-closure of the ticketed issue is resolved and ticket will auto-close, which is very helpful.

There is no service mode setup in this monitoring tool if you want to snooze alerts for any specific amount of time, to account for any activity change or major incident. That is one of the drawbacks.

We have also faced some issues regarding SNMP traps.

Another difficulty is reporting. There is a limitation, per report, of 1,000 servers. Consequently, if your environment has 5,000 or 10,000 servers, you have to create separate reports, and each report will have 1,000 servers. That requires us to compromise with customers, that each report will only show 1,000 servers.

SNMP can't page exact disk utilization. So consider Unix servers. Unix servers' utilization is around 95%, and their reserve space is 5%. So SNMP will not page that extra 5%. it will only page the rest of the 90%. So from the OS end, it will see 95% usage, but in your tool you will see 90% usage because SNMP doesn't page that 5% of reserved space. That is one of the drawbacks that is not tool based, that would be considered as SNMP.

One other thing. Log monitoring is not possible from SevOne and that's why we are still using another monitoring tool. URL monitoring is also not possible.

No. There is high availability. We haven't had any issue like appliances going down or the server going down.

The alerts are also properly generating, as per the policies. So if you correctly create the devices and correctly ID the devices in your tool, then I think you will get proper results with this monitoring tool.

No problems here. Regarding reports and alerts, everything is good in this tool. The only thing we faced is SNMP traps, like snoozing the servers for a specific time, which is a maintenance mode issue.

Previously we had two other CA tools. But we wanted to do everything, like automation and all types of URL monitoring, in one tool. So that's why we considered implementing this tool in our environment. Only later did we come to realize that not everything is possible through SevOne.

Setup was simple. It was not that complex because one server, one appliance would be the performance server and another would be a high availability server. The selection part was smooth.

But creating a policy, thinking with LDAP, that part takes some time, but in a good way.

This was a management issue. I, being on the technical side, was not involved in this.

If you want one tool for everything this should not be considered. For example, if you want to monitor logs, if you want to monitor URLs, that is not possible from SevOne.

If you only monitor networks, if you want to monitor appliances, you can go with this application. It's good to go with SevOne because the creation of thresholds, of policies, the grouping of servers, that is easy.

One other thing. This is mainly a web console, it's not like any appliance application that you have to go into some server and open an application. That kind of thing is not there. 

We use it to look into performances in our system and different dedicated environments. We try to draw graphs that represent what we have in terms of time response, bandwidth, and input and output across all our data centers to see if the load balance is correct. We have some traffic flows that say if the traffic is dropping and being taken by another data center. There are a lot of reports all around about different points of our architecture.

It is deployed as a physical appliance on-premises. So, we have the SevOne appliance in our data center.

Based on some metrics, we have policies that will raise issues and tickets internally, in case thresholds are being crossed. 

We have benefited mainly from the use of the dashboard interface. It makes the network visually interesting for people who are not in the network. A lot of people are not network techies who understand streams in the network. Based on location, we have streams coming in and out. They can see visually when there is some problem. They don't need to understand all the network technology behind it to be able to understand if everything is working well or if there is a problem. 

The visualization doesn't remain in the network. It is available for everyone in production management, etc.

We don't use all the features so far because we are just using the product that was there without supervision for one year. So, with a couple of colleagues, we are doing a lot of work to put everything back on track. We know that SevOne can do a lot, in terms of hitting some baselines, especially with their new visualization software, SevOne Data Insight (DI). This gives a new perspective in terms of dashboarding. It is something more dynamic and flexible than the previous version.  

There are different types of reports based on the metrics that we want to monitor and check.

The most valuable feature is that we can draw reports with the historic value of data. So, we can see if there is a trend in the past or if something has been changing over the past couple of weeks. When we have an incident, we need to go back to the occurrence of this incident some time in the future. We can see if it is something that happens regularly or not.

Data coming from our system to SevOne needs to be comprehensive. This is the way SevOne works around data flows. So far, it has been good.

They support software-defined networks as part of another module. They have their main module, which is called NMS, then they have other side software which complements the main architecture. They also support software-defined networks, like Cisco ACI. 

We made assessments internally about the system, i.e., about what could be done better. There are a lot of points. 

With the administrative management of the appliance, if some object appears from SevOne because something changed in the network or whatever, then as an administrator you will not be aware. If you are using this object in a report, this object will disappear from the report and you will not be aware of it. So, if you have 1,000 reports, you cannot always check these reports everyday to see if objects are missing or information has disappeared. We don't have any information on alerts, saying that something is happening there and maybe we need to take action. If an object was replaced by another one, or if a link was replaced by another one, then the graph needs to be changed because it doesn't exist in the graph anymore. However, we don't have this information.

This is also the same in terms of the internal architecture that we put in place inside the system. We can tag our network device based on the firmware, some rules, or a manufacturer/vendor. But, it is not always clear when we add a bunch of devices that they will mark these categories. For example, we need to make sure that one device is from a specific vendor. We have to dig deep in each device to make sure they are really attached to the correct vendor. If they're not attached to the correct vendor, then information will not be pulled in the same way, and we might be losing information. So, small tweaks need to be made to the internal management, making it easier for me.

SDN networking is going from legacy towards object-oriented, so we don't have a choice. It is something that we are using and need. Unfortunately, our IT lead is not really into the SDN solution of ACI, as apparently it is missing some features in terms of deep analytics and monitoring of ACI hardware infrastructure as-is. In the future, we may use SDN infrastructure because I know they are releasing features every month.

We have had it in service for five years. I was not there when it was installed at the beginning. I have been handling it for a year and a halfs.

It is really stable. We don't have any issues, except when we do our disaster scenario a couple of times a year. We have to physically cut the connection between our sites for redundancy and compliance. Then, we can sometimes see that we need to ask the help of support to put back the database in a correct state because the replication is not always clicking well. But, that is most likely because of the technology used behind it. MySQL is always a bit sensitive in this kind of scenario. So, I am not sure it is really the SevOne application that has an issue. It is more the technology that lies behind it which can be a bit faulty in these kinds of scenarios. Besides the replication, it works really nice. 

Without disaster scenarios, we are reaching 100% of availability easily.

We just scaled it up a month ago because we were reaching some limits. It is quite scalable. It took a day to scale it up with the new appliances that were delivered. It is quite easy to scale.

We are monitoring 886 devices. That is infrastructure monitoring. There are more devices that we still want to monitor. Our plan is to reach 1,300.

We use the technical support quite often. It is good, though it depends on the location that is doing the support. There are several locations that do support, whether it's India, Poland, or the US. Depending on that, the support can vary as well as the response time, because we're not always in the same time zones as their support. Sometimes, it can take a long time to receive an answer if we have been redirected to the wrong support.

Since it is something new, we are in contact with the vendor. We can give them some updates about what issues we are facing and if we are happy with the product so far. 

We are using another tool called EMC Smarts, but it is more for event monitoring. So, there isn't any drawing of dashboards. It is more only thresholds for SNMP Traps that can be received. Based on that, it distributes tickets. So, we cannot see the history nor draw the status of a link. 

A long time ago, I used Nagios, which is kind of the precursor to monitoring. However, I cannot compare it to SevOne because I used it about 10 years ago. 

You have to try it. The first step may be a bit harsh because of the layout. It's an older type of layout, but it works. Once you find your way with it, it is quite easy and straightforward. But, at first, it's not always easy to handle. But, it is a good tool that works nicely. So far, we don't regret it.

We need to master the system to be able to fully grasp what can be done. It is not for every end user who wants to go into the system and start monitoring whatever they want. They need to be able to grasp some content before that. Without training or previous knowledge, it is not always easy to grasp every concept behind the solution. It is a monitoring system so it's not a system where you click, then drag and drop.

I know they support telemetry. But the device on the end user side needs to be able to send telemetry information, which is not something we can do yet. We don't have enough devices doing telemetry to really use that feature to its greatest potential. So, this is something we have on our roadmap, and probably we will dig into it in a couple of months or years when our infrastructure is evolving in that direction.

Telemetry is something that we would like to invest some more time with, because it is different from having just simple SNMP polling, which is heavy on the system. It puts on a lot of overload based on the frequency of polling. By default, it takes five minutes. We want to have something with a frequency smaller than five minutes and maybe pause every 10 seconds, and SNMP can do it, but it puts a lot of overhead on the system. With telemetry, the big advantage of telemetry is a constant stream of information. There is no overhead. We just have a constant flatline of internal usage. We don't have huge peaks. We have fast information, close to real-time. We should have closer to real time monitoring in the future, instead of just being passive and waiting. There is still a ways to go for telemetry, but most infrastructure is capable of doing it.

Nothing is perfect. I would rate it a solid seven (out of 10) because a lot of points could be improved. I have a long list of small tweaks and customization that can be brought to the system. We give some of them to the customer support, but we are not their only clients. So, they go through prioritizing all their processes. Sometimes, our propositions are refused. It is a good system, but there is still some room for big improvements.