IBM SevOne Network Performance Management (NPM) Reviews

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.

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.

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.

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 have quite a few use cases for the SevOne NMS. It's mainly for performance management by our different network teams and we also do performance management of our external customers. That means we offer businesses and schools and others access to a Comcast device for their site to give them internet, or site-to-site connectivity. We also monitor our Comcast Digital Voice in SevOne NMS. For the external customers and the Comcast Digital Voice, we're inputting flat file data into SevOne so that we can get the metrics for that flat file data and provide it to those customers. We're doing SMP and what they call xStats. 

With SevOne DI we allow our external customers to log in and get a report for their data. We give them a subset of the data that we collect so that they can see that we're staying within our SLAs.

I mainly focus on the thresholding capability of SevOne. We configure thresholds on the performance metrics and they send us alerts so that the NOC is alerted about the systems that are having issues. I maintain SevOne and I give the customers what they want. They're the ones who let me know if there's an issue. They're the ones monitoring the health of our network. We have various NOCs, depending on the device type, and they're the ones that will let me know if something needs to be modified or tweaked to enhance that performance management.

We have a SevOne NMS cluster that is also attached to a SevOne Data Insight cluster, and the SevOne NMS system is also sending out the SDB to a set of servers that we maintain for customers for rural data.

We're using the 300K which we've licensed to 200K and we're on version 5.7.22 of the NMS and 3.0 on the SDI.

The main benefit of using SevOne is the fact that we can pull in a new vendor rapidly. With the changing technologies, we can get a new vendor certified and monitored in our system faster than before. With our previous system, we had to wait for them to put it into the upgrade. It could have been months before we would actually monitor new equipment. Now, we can monitor within 10 days. 

Also, with the xStats, we're able to monitor non-SNMP data from various vendors.

SevOne provides us with continuous analytics of our network and that gives us an idea of the health of our network, where our weaknesses are, and what needs to be fixed.

In most cases, SevOne enables us to detect network performance issues faster and before they impact end-users. We've had situations where new issues have come up and we have actually used that to create a new threshold to alert us the next time. But overall, it helps us with early detection.

When it comes to having a complete view of our network performance, I would rate it very highly. It's the key piece of equipment that we use for monitoring our performance.

The most valuable feature is the NMS because that's the core of the system. Without the NMS, the other tools aren't that usable. 

The SMP and the xStats, which is for flat file integration, are both useful for integrating the various metrics that the device provides to monitor the performance of those systems.

It's also important that the solution’s collection abilities cover multiple vendors’ equipment because we have multiple vendors. For each device type, we typically have two vendors, minimum, so that we're not tied down to one vendor. That means we need to have similar monitoring capabilities on those various vendors, which SevOne is able to provide.

The solution’s out-of-the-box reports and workflows for automatically helping us understand what is normal and what is abnormal in our network is very important. That's the whole purpose for using this tool: to pick up anomalies before the customers call us up about them, whether they are internal or external customers.

There are some tweaks and enhancements that I've already requested. One is to be able to make changes per device rather than as a global setting. That has to do with naming. It's minor.

I've been using SevOne for close to 15 years.

It's very stable. We have only had a few minor issues and they were mostly hardware-related.

In terms of scalability, nothing has been able to beat it.

Currently, we have over 7 million objects monitored, and that's over 181,000 devices. We are still increasing. We're pulling in other customers who are using other tools into the SevOne. It's constantly expanding.

SevOne technical support is very good. They're always on hand. We actually have two resident engineers on site who help us on day-to-day issues. We also have help from the support and development groups for any anomalies they can't handle.

We used CA's eHealth but it wasn't very flexible. If you wanted a device certified, you had to wait for the next software release to get that certification. The vendor also wasn't very receptive to changes. It was hard to get them to adopt.

The initial setup was fairly straightforward. The system works off a master cluster, so it's easy to set up and easy to understand.

Our deployment took about a year. That was 15 years ago, but other implementations have taken a lot less time, moving forward. Our network was very complex so a lot of device certifications had to be done with SevOne, early on, to get what we needed out of it. But within the first couple months it was usable. It just took us a year to finally get us to where we wanted to be, with all the customizations.

Our initial implementation strategy was that we deployed SevOne and left the old system up and running at the same time. That way, we had a failover capability to go back to the old system, if needed.

We have hundreds of people in our company who work with SevOne. We have the NOCs that are monitoring the health of the network. We have the end-users that are monitoring their pieces, whether that would be an application server or a range of business. And then we have our commercial customers that are getting the utilization and health metrics of the services that we're providing to them. We also have salespeople who are monitoring it to make sure that their customers don't need to upgrade.

We used a SevOne resource in addition to our own team. SevOne's team was excellent. Every time we came up with something, they were really rapid to come up with a fix or with a method for us to keep going. They were totally onboard with our solution.

We've been able to get off of other platforms, resulting in a cost savings.

Also, the fact that we can monitor our customers' data performance and stay within our SLA means we don't have to send money back to them. If we don't meet our SLAs, we have to pay them back. SevOne provides us with a great cost savings there.

The pricing has been fair.

In addition to the standard licensing fees, we have the annual maintenance fee because we purchased the hardware from SevOne.

We looked at four or five other vendors and we had a bakeoff among them. The main difference between them and SevOne, at the time, was cost. SevOne could provide the same information and data at a much cheaper price.

I prefer physicals, but virtual systems work if they have the capacity that SevOne recommends. You can't undersize the systems.

We don't do flow data here, although one group tested it in the past but they never purchased it. But it's nice to be able, within 10 days or less, to recertify a new device. That's one of the reasons we picked SevOne years ago. And we can modify those certifications at any time, ourselves, and that is something we do.

Overall, for what we're using it for it's very solid.

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.

My use case at the initial startup was very simple. I had a carrier, which was a backbone globally implemented, and I needed a monitoring solution. The type of solution I needed had to capture SNMP traps, poll my equipment, perform traffic analysis, deal with historical data, and things like that. This requirement has remained constant through the entire seven years of implementation with them.

At the end of the month, we're ending our relationship with this vendor for a variety of different reasons. Among the problems is the pricing model that they have, although a lot of it has to do with the fact that their virtualization solution isn't compatible with our Kubernetes environment.

SevOne has enabled us to integrate network performance management data across ITSM and our business decision-making tools, predominantly through the ServiceNow platform. We also did a Salesforce implementation where SevOne leveraged Salesforce to determine if a circuit was production versus non-production. Essentially, this distinction implies whether we should care about it, or not.

The integration with Salesforce was pretty easy, where most of the work was on the Salesforce side. It was probably one of the simpler integrations that we did for the platform.

The comprehensiveness of SevOne in terms of collecting network performance and flow data, when we started using this in 2013, was very limited. It was developed predominantly for a Cisco network and I'm a hundred percent Juniper. As such, it required a lot of work to get the platform to not only understand it but to speak in terms of Juniper MIB files, and even the nomenclature. For a Cisco network, it would have been a situation where you opened the box, plugged it in, and walked away. With Juniper, it was very much not that.

At this point, our collection capabilities are limited to just Juniper equipment. This is restricted by the tool that we have, which only covers Juniper networks.

With respect to streaming telemetry, we do not have it implemented. We were working with them to try and understand what they could do in this regard, but I do not believe that they supported streaming telemetry at the time.

The most valuable feature as of late has been the API integration with ServiceNow. Honestly, the biggest bang for the buck I've got out of SevOne has been this development. The bi-directional integration with ServiceNow has saved me a lot of money in man-hours, over the course of the last few years.

I don't have an exact figure for how much money I have saved, but I can say that it's hundreds of thousands of dollars. What it comes down to is when you're able to automate the console work with the ticketing system, you're saving people from copying and pasting, and other such menial tasks. For example, you are able to auto-populate tickets, update tickets, change the status of tickets, and also do verification to see if something is valid. You can make determinations such as whether there is a ticket currently open or whether there was a ticket previously open. Automating things like that, so a human no longer has to do them, can save hours a day per human per shift.

The out of the box reports and workflows are very sufficient for helping to understand what's normal and abnormal in the network. Out of the box, the reports were certainly there and even though it didn't necessarily understand Juniper, the minute we turned it on, we had a bunch of data. In fact, there was a lot of data that we had never previously seen before on the backbone, made available to us just by virtue of turning it on. It just needed to be cleaned up and polished.

We were aware of the reporting when we decided to implement SevOne, as we had done a lot of pre-sales work with them to make sure we knew what to expect out of the box. Even if we needed to do a lot of customization, it was certainly expected, and that's what we saw. It was important to us because we needed to immediately show some sort of value with all of the work that we'd invested over the course of the implementation. I needed to show almost a day-one value, and that certainly did help.

With respect to customization, the reports themselves didn't take too much effort. We have had a resident SevOne engineer help manage the platform and tend to those apps throughout the entire implementation of SevOne. From my standpoint, it was simply a case of asking the resident engineer for what I needed or what I expected, and whether it was a function of hours or days. Shortly after, I would have exactly what I needed.

An example of how we have customized reporting is the top talking report. It is important because we have a lot of customers that are very bandwidth-intensive. This report is for aggregate bandwidth and it is from a trap-generation standpoint.

I also have a performance metric where we monitor a specific group of circuits that are notorious for having capacity issues with customers. Essentially, it is a top talker traffic graph where I get the top ten circuits for the past 24 hours, and it's a live graph. I get it as a report, but I can also watch it in real-time.

SevOne provides continuous analytics of our network and it's important because if you're in a network where you're polling every three minutes or every five minutes, then you could be missing important events. There's a lot of stuff happening and it can be very damaging in a matter of seconds. If you're not polling or collecting data to absorb that frequency or that duration, then you're not doing anything. You're completely overlooking the important stuff. Being able to see in some form or another, not always in the graph, but being able to see that real-time activity and have it called out to a human is exceptionally important. Again, it doesn't need to be a graph, but that's one of the things we leverage SevOne for.

With respect to giving us a complete view of our network performance, it's been very good. I don't know how many times a week I have a STEM vice president come to me and ask me what's going on with the backbone or how the backbone is performing with a certain world event or corporate event. Whatever it may be, I can get a very good visual summary, very quickly, just by virtue of logging in. It's just a matter of making sure that you have the right graph. You have to tell SevOne what you need and have it presented to you in the right way. Otherwise, it doesn't know. Once you accomplish that, it's immediate.

SevOne has enabled us to detect network performance issues faster, and before they impact end-users. It is very good at capturing those events, documenting them, opening a ticket, and letting a human know about them. There is a definite ability of proactiveness with the tool.

If I consider where we were in 2013, it could take several hours or days to detect events in some cases. I have examples of catastrophic events happening that we never even knew about, that SevOne is able to capture. I estimate that we are 60% faster on average at capturing and actioning events, hopefully proactively.

Their virtualization solution is not compatible with our Kubernetes environment, which is one of the reasons we are ending our relationship with them. I didn't spend a lot of time evaluating with them why it was the case. It was simply not a roadmap item for them, so it was a pretty quick conversation.

We have been using SevOne for approximately seven years.

This product is very scalable, especially if it's just a matter of growing the network. You add more devices, make sure your licensing is in check, and the system ingests it as that equipment is green-lighted.

If you're changing technology, adding layers upon which you want them to monitor, it is still scalable, although it takes a little bit more work.

We have approximately two dozen users in the organization.

Their technical support is very competent. We have had an immediate reaction to our issues, even without the resident engineer involved. Their technical support is 24/7. That said, I've actually had very minimal interaction with them, aside from some hand-holding during software upgrades. Other than that, the platform has been rock solid.

Prior to using SevOne, we were using an internal homegrown solution.

After we got done building it, it largely sat idle until we started onboarding customers. As customers grew, a need for a focused operations group, tooling, processes, and procedures arose. That's where SevOne came in. We needed a legit platform to monitor the backbone rather than use existing processes and procedures that just didn't work or didn't apply.

Essentially, with the growth of the backbone and the responsibility of it, we realized that we needed an enterprise-grade solution.

The initial setup was pretty straightforward. We knew that the biggest hurdle we had to overcome was the Juniper compatibility, so that's where we focused the resources in the planning.

The means of actually getting it installed, upgrading the software, and then actually discovering the network worked as expected. It crawled, it discovered, and it did everything we needed it to. It just needed to be tuned for a 100% Juniper network.

Of course, the Juniper tuning took many hours of post-sales engineering support as well as a resident engineer. It took a lot of work on the SevOne side to actually get it to that point.

In total, the deployment took approximately three months.

I and a colleague were responsible for deployment.

Maintenance requires one FTE.

In terms of ROI, I don't have a whole lot in terms of metrics. However, I would say that with DI, someone has definitely started to come around from a visualization standpoint. Not only do you get an alert with an indicative color like red, orange, or yellow, but it is well represented for different stakeholders. It is not only useful for the engineer sitting at the desk but also for the tier-three that supports that engineer, all the way up to the vice president, who just wants to know how things are going.

They've come a long way in developing that. Back in the day, all people wanted was something that told them the status; red is bad, green is good, yellow means that you should look into it. That was all the information that they had. These days, people want predictive analysis and they want to be able to trend failure. They want to be able to dig into the numbers a little bit more and graphically represent that. To this end, DI is actually something that they're doing to chase that down and fill that void.

Historically, that hadn't been the case. I think DI came out approximately four years ago, and I think that's something that they're really doing to try and add value to the platform.

The pricing has not evolved with the market, which is one of the reasons we are moving to a new product.

When we implemented SevOne, we had been evaluating other options for a couple of years for varying needs, although not necessarily the backbone. During that process, we had noted that SevOne would be the most accommodating and capable for our needs.

At the time, it just wasn't possible for us to implement it.

SevOne is capable of bringing together its analytics reports and workflows in a single dashboard, although I don't actively use that specific dashboard. The stuff that I use with SevOne is very specific to a need at the moment and as such, I don't require the use of a collapsed view. In my world, it's hard to summarize everything in one place. Everything is going to be compartmentalized, so I have multiple dashboards with different data. It isn't that I don't want to use a single pane of glass but it just doesn't serve any purpose for what I need on a daily basis.

Overall, this is a good product and we had a really good relationship with the vendor. When it all started, I had a pretty basic need that I was unable to get any support internally for. We had spoken with them before, and at that initial time, I had some internal obstructions to bringing them onboard. The problems were not financially related and over time, as usual, things changed and the obstructions were gone. Once that happened, I was given the opportunity and the power to develop my own tooling suite for my team, and SevOne was a pretty easy discussion at that point in time.

The relationship continued to be a really good one up until a couple of years ago, when we were growing and of course, they wanted in on that, but their pricing was not adapting to what we were seeing in the market. They were still doing pricing from 2013 when we bought in. Naturally, anytime I expand tool usage, it works in my best interest to make sure that what I'm using is still the best implementation for not only the cost but also, the scalability at the time.

The biggest lesson that I have learned from using SevOne is that leveraging your platforms to do more work in place of a human, isn't always a bad thing. A lot of people think that you're just trying to replace humans with automation and software. What it really boils down to is that you're enabling those humans to do something else that is more important. It's not a function of eliminating jobs. It's letting the humans work on more important, complex items, and let the software and the automation do what they can to contribute to that equation.

It's not that it's necessarily been a challenge or an obstacle for me, but it is important to consider it when explaining the process. When you explain to someone that we're changing this process because SevOne can now do a certain aspect of it, with human involvement starting somewhere further down the line, you have to be able to sell that as an improvement to the process. Ultimately, it's allowing that human to focus on other things that have previously been neglected.

This problem of automating a task that is historically done by a human has been a lesson that I've learned with SevOne. The reality is that you have to let automation do what it can, and let humans do the more important engineering work. Getting away from that stigma and letting the software do its job and really focusing on releasing that, allowing the humans to do the more technical and engineering-level work, is really an act in cost-savings and from a Human Resourcing standpoint, you're getting more bang for your buck out of it. You don't want to pay people a lot of money an hour to sit there and say that red is bad and green is good. If you can get away from that, you're going to be more efficient.

I would rate this solution a seven out of ten.

We use SevOne to display all the information from Cisco IP SLA regarding the delay, voice quality, etc.

It's a great solution for highlighting and discovering useful information regarding our network's elements.  There is a cheaper solution available,  but in general, SevOne is a good solution for analyzing network information. It's also very easy to use.

As I mentioned before, there are cheaper solutions available. Earlier, our management team only managed ICMP, like IP SLA. That's why, at that point in time, we decide to use Cisco IP SLA.

Well, I don't know if it's in development at SevOne, but some similar solutions offer end-to-end visibility, both regarding the server and also the network elements.

Other solutions also include the server and some additional layers, like an operating system or database, and in some cases, the application, too; their network elements are designed for management-level.

I don't know if SevOne plans on incorporating these features into their next release, but they should.

On a scale from one to ten, I would give SevOne a rating of nine.

I have been using SevOne since 2016.

SevOne provides us with great stability in the production environment. It's also very scalable, too.

From my personal experience, the support has been good.

Initially, we wanted a specif look and feel regarding our SevOne solution. That took some extra time, but that's to be expected. In general, we got some useful information right out of the box with SevOne. Overall, it's easy to set up.