IBM SevOne Network Performance Management (NPM) Reviews

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.

• Scalability
• Speed
• Integration of performance and flow data

It allows us to see metrics and immediately map to who is causing an issue so we can react faster. It improves our mean time to resolution.

I would say that incorporating other technologies, we have great performance data, but if it started doing intelligence and looked at the patterns or correlations, that would be great.

I've used it for almost three years.

No issues with deployment – it's fairly simple and quick.

It's been great with no issues.

It has scaled to our needs; if you need more you add an appliance and off you go.

Fantastic – responsive.

The engineers are well trained – have been fantastic.

We were using EHealth (CA) and NetQOS, but we left those products for greater scalability and speed, as well as being able to consolidate those two products into one.

Pretty straightforward, but complex due to the size of our organization. This is not an issue with Sevone.

We did it in-house.

We just evaluated this product based on what we heard and we initiated a POC.

I would say spend the time to learn the product so you can fully leverage it – theres a lot to the product. If you push the solution, it can solve a lot of problems.

• 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.

We currently use SevOne for monitoring our entire infrastructure, including Network Switches, Router, VPN Sites, Servers, SAN, Databases, Connectivity to ISP, etc.

This product is able to monitor a lot of different products within on tool.

As an IT Manager this tool helps me sleep better knowing that SevOne is my eyes and ears watching the entire infrastructure.

Ability to monitor wide variety of systems with one tool eliminated the need to have many different tools to monitor our infrastructure.

Enhanced baselining capability would be an improvement.

Scalability. I have never had to worry about how to handle really big environments.

The GUI: both the dashboard/user view and the admin tool.

More than five years.

No, very stable.

No.

There are some differences between the Bulgarian and the American support teams.

Not applicable.

Very easy to setup the first installation. It is easy and fast to achieve the basic level.

Choose a SevOne partner who can provide SevOne as a service and can deliver professional services and maintenance.

I evaluated from a reseller perspective to find the best product on the market at that time: CA eHealth, Nagios, OP5, InfoVista, etc.

To get the best value, find a good partner to work with who has experience from more than one product vendor. Then, you can get a second opinion and comparisons.

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.

SevOne's ability to report metrics on specific objects very quickly. Whether it is a week, a month, or a a year's worth of data points, SevOne has improved by leveraging short-term vs. long-term memory to provide necessary statistics so we can alleviate network impacts quickly.

We integrate heavily to SevOne via API. This allows us to tie our customer performance metrics data to our customer portal, so it is a self-service function.

I think SevOne can improve by providing more details in their release notes regarding enhancements and changes. If the information can be organized in a way that highlights bigger changes it will help customers identify what areas will impact their operations most.