IBM SevOne Network Performance Management (NPM) Reviews

• UI for administration
• Ease of use
• One price, use as we need, and no add-ons to pay for
• We can leverage JMX extensively as well
• Flow collection allows us to avoid having to use a packet-capture product often.
• The cluster of the solution allows ease of access for our users all over the country and world.

We have closed monitoring gaps and consolidated multiple point solutions from varying vendors as our company has handled mergers and acquisitions.

We have extensive visibility into the performance and tuning of our java via JMX. Historically, we had JVM’s crash, and had no idea why. Now we know and can tune accordingly via data from SevOne.

Historically, before SevOne, we had constant server crashes and locks due to storage volumes filling up. That rarely happens now.

We've used it for eight years. Currently, we use PAS (various models), vPAS, and DNC. We don’t use the log analytics solution at this time.

Initially very easy. The only delay that comes into play depends on the ability of an organization to configure the devices for SNMP if they are locked down. If SNMP is running and open as likely in many organizations, it’s fast and easy.

Compared to others I’ve used, it's very solid and support is extremely responsive if and when we have had any bugs or defects. At times, when we have lived on the leading edge of advanced release code we’ve encountered more, but if we stay back on solid GD versions, it's solid.

This one comes and goes as have the members of our account team. They have all been good at trying to understand our use and business, but some push the sale too hard and that is a turn off. I know this product and know what I need and when.

In the past I have used CA NSM, HP OpenView, Concord, Spectrum, What’s up Gold, Solarwinds, BMC products, to name a few. While some competitors have a feature here or there that might be better on the whole, this is the best solution for us on the market for the dollar with the simplest ramp up and ease of administration.

It was simple as the environment wasn’t configured tightly (no ACLs, etc. to battle). There were some firewall rule changes where we needed to get to the DMZ devices we measure, but that moved quickly here.

We implemented it on our own with SevOne support assistance. For that matter we have been with them long enough that the CTO did our POC work with us.

I don’t recall that we had a hard cost other than the license/purchase, it was soft costs (OpEx labor) and we haven't worked those out, as they are ongoing. We have one employee that spends about 80% of his time working on the platform today. We have two 40K pollers, two HA units, two 10K units with one HA, three VPAS, and one DNC flow collector. So roughly $50,000 in labor annually.

They should speak to other customers to understand how it was implemented and used. Think about best practices on the server/network side so standards and processes can be established at the start to prevent rework later.

Sometimes we get requests that a customer needs CPU or disk or memory performance or utilization graphs. We add those servers or devices into the tool and then we can generate the graphs and provide them to the customer.

Customers also ask us to create alerts. The tool generates alerts for CPU utilization when it is close to, for example, 90 percent utilized.

It is deployed directly on servers as well as on virtual machines.

One of the benefits is its ability to transform raw network performance data into actionable insights. That's one of the keys for us. When something goes above a threshold, we can see it in the alerts and take action. Likewise, we can see graphs and reports and we can judge what to do before something goes wrong.

Some of the teams that are using our graphs from SevOne, and the capacity team that uses the data it generates, are able to make decisions before something bad happens.

We use SevOne to monitor a multi-vendor network. We have a lot of different kinds of devices in our scenario. We have Cisco switches and network devices from various vendors. The alerting and reports that we can generate help us see if something is not the way it should be.

• Reports
  
• Alerting

These are the most valuable features for us because the customers in our company primarily want to see performance and usage graphs, and they are always concerned with the alerts.

Another useful feature is that SevOne gives you real-time insights into your network performance. It polls every five minutes. That is important for our customers because there are some network teams that are always monitoring their networks. There is an option for setting the polling frequency to less than five minutes. That means you can monitor your infrastructure faster and we do that for some of our devices.

And the data collection functionality, using SNMP protocol, is good. It's doing its job.

I'm not really sure if this was the software's fault or a server issue, but a couple of years back the disks were failing on our SevOne physical server every month and the server would go down. The secondary server took over from the primary until the disk issue was resolved. That was annoying.

I've been using IBM SevOne Network Performance Management since 2013.

It is resilient. If the server goes down, all the data and functionality is taken over by a secondary server. In our scenario, there has been no data loss.

You can add as many devices as you want, but I think you need to buy more licenses to add more devices. But scalability is not an issue. We have seven to eight clients and we monitor more than a thousand devices for each one.

There are no new clients in the pipeline, but if another comes along, we will definitely recommend SevOne to them.

The SevOne support team is very good. Whenever you have a strange issue or a big issue, something you have never seen before, when you reach out to them they are always available. They are very fast and always help us.

Positive

I deployed SevOne on a virtual machine a couple of years back. The deployment was easy and straightforward. The installation wizard helps, giving you all the details of what is happening. There was no confusion. And it was fast as well. It took roughly two hours.

Someone from our deployment team helped me. He told me to just "apply this, do this, do that," apart from what the wizard showed me. I believe he was in touch with the SevOne guys.

I can't say anything specific about the investment in the solution because I'm not given that data by my company. But our clients are still using this solution after many years with our company. That is a good indicator that they must be getting a good return.

There are other tools that we have used, like eHealth from CA. It also gives you graphs but we don't like that tool. We like SevOne. It is older than SevOne. We are using it for some clients that have had it from the beginning, so we cannot remove it. But eHealth has bugs. With SevOne, I don't have any complaints.

Definitely go for it. The interface is user-friendly, and it provides so many reports and alerts. It gives you a good, total package. And the support team is also very cooperative.

I can't think of very much that the solution lacks. Everything looks okay to me.

The fact that it's agentless. With agents, you only see what you instrument and what you tell it to look at. With SevOne, I have complete infrastructure visibility and can see anything on the network.

In 2002, my company was using Tivoli and I was totally frustrated in our inability to see anything. The first thing we fixed was storage and only got around to monitoring in 2008, which was a mess. We had trouble keeping our agents running and had 5 actions for every 125.

Now, we have about 125 actions as opposed to 125 phone calls of issues, increasing our proactive measures hundred-fold. We also began providing rich detailed data to our customer on system performance to the point that they had to change their processes and level of transparency.

We're blowing away our competition.

I think that the downstream suppression could be improved. Suppression must all be done manually, but this improvement is on SevOne's roadmap, I believe.

I've used SevOne since 2010.

For our POC in 2010, we did a little bit of work ahead of time, laying down a small system and receiving an actionable date within four hours. A sister company was having a problem with a payroll system and had no monitoring on the system, so we installed a full suite of SevOne for them on a shared, virtual environment. We deployed those in 24 hours and we provided real-time data into how well the infrastructure was performing.

The only stability issue we had was with a recent upgrade, which took us a long time to backup and restore. We had significant issues with the stability of the PLA platform early on but they fixed and relaunched – very few companies have done that. The PAS and DNC have been rock solid.

No issues with scalability – that’s what's sweet about this product, unlike Tivoli with which he did have scalability issues. SevOne is peer-to-peer so you just add another PAS to the cluster. It's like lots of hands making light work – no problems scaling.

9/10 – they are working on improving that, but have a way to go yet.

We looked at a bunch – we did and RFI – Opnet, NetQS, SevOne and a fourth one. We ended up testing NetQOS (CA owned) and SevOne.

Tivoli – we're still using it as a backup, but all of our RCA and SLA reporting are coming from SevOne.

Easiest deploying product I have ever worked with. It's intuitive. I used to be a Unix admin, and I haven’t done this deployment before, yet I'm able to find data as I need.

We implemented SevOne through our in-house team.

The ROI for my kind of business is difficult to assess, but if I could get rid of Tivoli, I'd reduce my load by two FTE’s which would give me a six month ROI as a back-of-the-envelope kind of guess.

We have increased our capability a hundred-fold over, so it was more of a customer performance thing than ROI. I could see stuff I never saw before. In our root-cause analysis, I would typically have eight level-six people and it could take 24 hours. That’s a lot of horsepower. Now it takes us a quarter of the time. That’s huge.

We looked at a bunch during the RFI process – Opnet, NetQS, SevOne, and a fourth one. We ended up testing NetQOS (CA owned) and SevOne.

I would advise someone to test drive the product and see if it's what you need. I've recommended many people to use this product because it deploys so easily.

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

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

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

I have been using the product for four years.

My company has 500 users for the solution.

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

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

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

I would rate the solution a nine out of ten.

The most valuable feature for us is its flexibility to handle different systems and different functions. We use it for networking, service systems, PDU's, and anything that's available for SO&P.

We had multiple systems when I first got here. We use SevOne to stabilize our system and standardize our operations around it. It's simple enough for me to hire administrative-level employees who can function in a capable manner. And I save money, too, because I can hire less-expensive employees who don't need to have high levels of education and a lot of training.

We've also been able to move away from having a dozen systems, databases and collections station. I've got a distributed architecture now based on an appliance. I also have less things to have to patch if there's an issue.

The way they handle their data migration while upgrading the system needs to be simplified and standardized. I don't want to have to bring out professional services to help me when I upgrade to a new server. Every upgrade we've done -- and we've done them all -- have been highly disruptive and extraordinarily difficult. Upgrades of new systems should not be this complex. I have 125 appliances in my environment. The migration really needs to be performed in the most non-disruptive manner as possible. I can't afford anything less.

I've also found a horrible flaw in the migration process where the database is now using redundant disks. The operating system is not, so if I lose my operating system disk, I lose my system. That's a significant weakness because they basically rate controllers. Everything is rated a 5 except for the OS disk.

I'm not sure why this is the case. They have improved their reporting capabilities significantly over the years. I would like to see them continue, even to the point of maybe introducing a standalone reporting server. Either that or allow me to extract data into a data warehouse so that I can get more extensive reporting functions.

We're having that issue now where I am trying to extract data, so instead of keeping years' worth of data on the system, I keep three months of live data and then move the data offsite. It's been very difficult in the way they store data. It's inconsistent with the way other vendors do it, so it's been difficult.

We've used it since 2008, so about 8 years now.

We've had a few issues pop up here and there, but generally it's been a stable product. My biggest complaint now is that I've got 70 systems I have to upgrade with no simple way to do it. I'll have to get professional services involved, and that's going to be expensive.

Technical support is very knowledgable. There are some really very bright people there. I think, though, that some of their designs have restricted their ability to provide a flexibly response. That could be argued either way, good or bad. They are typically very reactive to issues as they are discovered and we've found ways to resolve most issues as they come up.

We had an aging infrastructure and we were looking for alternatives. Other products required DBA's, administrators, and developers. However, SevOne packaged everything together in a simple enough manner so that I could maintain a workforce and which was capable of operating the system without building and maintaining the entire infrastructure.

We have an ROI as our licensing price point is very reasonable. We're roughly five times the size we were when we first started using this product.

The most valuable features for us are the huge number of network devices it can monitor. It has a lot of useful features, not only the basic things like measurements of CPU, disk, and memory, but it also has the ability to measure net flow.

Also, we've found their good support to be valuable.

It help us to monitor a large variety of network devices and servers from our customers.

In the area of server monitoring, it has some areas for improvement. For example, when you need to measure the CPU usage on Windows servers, it does not have the option to measure the total usage of CPU, only the measure of each core or CPU. Total CPU usage is something that's important to us.

I've used it for three years.

The vendor helped us with deployment.

Yes, we had stability issues. Specifically, when we update to a new version, it often affects the reports that are created.

We did not have any scalability issues.

Customer service is a 10 out of 10.

Technical support is a 10 out of 10.

In my previous job, we used ManageEngine. In this new job, we have always used SevOne.

I wasn't involved in the initial setup, so I don't know.

We implemented it with a vendor term. Their expertise was very high.

I don't know if we evaluated other options because management chose this solution.

It's a good option, particularly because of SevOne's support.

The reports and the graphics. With this tool it is interesting to show the info to the client and explain where the traffic is.

I can't, I arrived in the last days of the project, just to make reports.

The method of searching for SIP and the way to create the groups.

Four months.

No.

No.

Eight out of 10.

I didn’t do the switch, the company had the product when I arrived.

I didn’t do the setup.

I can´t answer that.

I didn’t choose the product but I had used others.

Although it is a very good monitoring tool, it can be confusing when you try to add devices and they don’t appear correctly. Then you need to check SID on the SevOne database. There it does not display when the error pops up.

• Alerting
• Graphing

We are able to alert the correct application owners, as well as troubleshoot problems quicker, leading to less downtime.

• Customization of fields
• The UI is a little dated, but it doesn’t cause any features to fall short of what they need to do.

I have been using it for 1.5 years.

I have not encountered any stability issues.

I have not encountered any scalability issues.

Technical support is 10/10; responses to questions are within 20 minutes and the longest time to be resolved was three days.

I previously used BMC BPPM (ProactiveNet). SevOne was already being used by the network group. Price was a major player in the decision to switch.

The product was set up and installed by SevOne technicians. So, initial setup was very straightforward.

SevOne is usually spot-on with their scaling of an environment. Be sure that you tell them exactly what you want to monitor. Objects can grow quickly with each additional service you wish to monitor.

Before choosing SevOne, we evaluated SolarWinds, TrueSight, and ScienceLogic.

As with anything, if you want this to succeed, have a plan and focus; the product has many great features, so don’t get distracted. It’s easy to want to show everyone what you can do with the product. We focused on basic monitoring first and since then expanded to the other offerings of the product.