IBM SevOne Network Performance Management (NPM) Reviews

• 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.

Very quick graph generation.

Previously, we used a customized MRTG solution. Graph generation was painfully slow. With SevOne, we are able to generate graphs and reports quickly.

Features like SMS support and a faster way to create objects in calculation editor would be good.

1+ year.

No issues.

No problems.

Very good.

SevOne has much faster performance than our previous solution.

Initial setup is straightforward.

SolarWinds and Cisco Prime.

For performance monitoring, give SevOne a shot.

• Near real-time raw data availability for two years for analysis
• Scalability of architecture
• Ease of build
• Installation of virtual appliances

It diagnoses and separates network issues from application issues based on flow analysis.

This is my favorite part of a review, so I am providing many ways to improve the product:

• Application session tracking
• Improve virtual appliance scalability
• Dashboard and report delivery
• Integration with service management (ServiceNow, Remedy) should be an out-of-the-box API

In my current organization, SevOne is fairly new. It is being built up to be used in the production environment. But as an architect, I have used this product at various mobile telcos.

No

No

Excellent

I previously used CA and HP solutions. The main reason for switching was the latency in data collection and presentation. Also, the level of customisation required to change the reports resulted in a high capex cost to organization, each time the customer requested any change.

Initial setup was very smooth; we used a virtual appliance.

This product needs a lot of handholding and close collaboration with network design resources, in terms of choosing the appliance and the number of licenses. Otherwise, SevOne may look like expensive, which it is not.

It was chosen over CA eHealth.

It is a very good product, easy to stand up, and a good tool for network engineers.

It has several features, but the ones most valuable to us are--

• Basic Network monitoring;
• Reporting (performance metrics, third-party data, status maps, device configuration, etc.);
• Scalability (monitor devices and metrics, and maintain speed); and
• It's Linux-based.

Delegate some of the networking monitoring work to SevOne.

The reporting capabilities provided important metrics and data that helped in the oversight of our system, network, and overall IT infrastructure, both in terms of applications and hardware.

It needs a platform to add portals. Some of the low-level features and how they work could use some improvements.

A cause-and-effect kind of pattern would be helpful.

There have been no issues deploying it.

It's been stable. We've had no issues with instability.

We've had no issues scaling it for our needs.

Their technical support is really top notch. We've had several instances when our trouble tickets have been responded to quickly and with sufficient fixes.

The initial setup was straightforward. It was simple and quite intuitive.

Make sure you have good, clear requirements for what you want SevOne to do. If you do, then it will do the job very well. If not, you should consider something else.

There are several valuable feature, but the ones most useful for us are:

• Capacity monitoring/reporting and graphing
• Netflow stats gathering
• Infrastructure availability monitoring

It's given us the ability to accommodate our company's entire global network infrastructure (routers, switches, load balancers, firewalls, etc.) and provide historical trending analytics for interfaces and network traffic and general production graphing and reporting over a chosen time period.

The graphing function can be tailored for all levels of management reporting.

Also, the ability of the product to integrate into other vendor management platforms to allow the polling and alerting streams to be maintained.

The product is perpetually evolving with a number of complimentary products in the pipeline. However, the basis of the product remains stable and any improvements are regarded as ‘enhancements’ and based upon industry market research at a given time and the facility to provide enhancement requests from individual customers.

The initial setup must be planned well to fit your environment.

I've used it for four years as a mainstream strategic management tool. In total, seven years.

The deployment is reasonably straightforward and documentation is good.

Only a few minor issues which were resolved by SevOne support.

One of the key benefits of the product is its ability to scale. There were no issues with regards to scalability. You can add more licenses or more SevOne appliances into your cluster as needed.

Customer service is excellent. This can be provided via a SevOne TAM (Technical Account Manager) program if the size of the SevOne cluster/estate warrants it.

Technical support is excellent.

Tivoli ITNM for availability monitoring - Too complicated/over engineered and too much of a support overhead to justify remaining with it.

Tivoli NetView for capacity monitoring - An out-of-support legacy tool which had limitations for what our company wanted to do with respect to reporting.

The initial setup was straightforward. Because initial solution design is very important, planning the initial setup with respect to you own environment is key. Ensure that all required IP connectivity and product specific UDP/TCP ports are open and available.

The implementation was done via both vendor and in-house teams. The vendor team’s expertise was excellent.

Our ROI is excellent. The product captures production issues and streams events to service teams who monitor our infrastructure. The product also provides pre-emptive production reporting so that any potential issues can be caught before causing a potential outage.

The licensing is based upon a network element of a device. An element is a single SNMP entity. The product can be tailored to manage to the number of elements that are managed on a device. So start off by identifying what elements are required to be managed and base your licensing on that, allowing room for future growth.

We scoped upgrading our existing product suite.

Evaluate and research to ensure your requirements are met.

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 features we are seeing the greatest benefit from are the enhanced reporting, net-flow data collection, and the data retention.

The tool has given a great visibility of what is going on our network and has helped to troubleshoot network-related issues quickly and accurately.

We use very few capabilities of this product, and from what we use I am very happy with in regards to what the tool offers.

But keep in mind that if you're using the the PLA version of SevOne, the hardware support runs out in five years, so if something were to happen to the hardware after this period, it would not be covered.

I've been using it for over two years, and the company for over five.

There were no issues with the deployment.

There were no issues with the stability.

There were no issues with the scalability.

Customer service is very good.

Technical support is very good.

I did not set up the system as it was done years ago and I just maintain it.

At the time, it was done by a highly-experienced vendor team.

If you need a solution for network performance, this is a very good option.

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.