IBM SevOne Network Performance Management (NPM) Reviews

• 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.

• The ease of device certification – self-certify or have SevOne certify devices for me.
• Stability has been pretty good for us over the years – it’s a pretty stable platform.

We are actually using it for commercial use. We can see where customers are disconnecting and their orders failing, which results in us continuing to bill them and having to reimburse them. SevOne enables us to look at the data and see that the customer has disconnected so we can stop billing and reimbursing them. We also can discover outages before the customer complains.

I think that the upgrade process could be improved, which can be painful at times. SevOne knows it's an issue and they're working on it.

I've used it for eight years.

We only encountered issues during upgrades. The initial deployment was not a problem as we just deployed three new servers a couple months ago. There was one minor issue which should have been picked up but which we found out later. Typically deployments are pretty smooth.

No issues with stability.

So far the product has scaled to our needs. We broke it early on but the past few years it has scaled to our needs.

8-9/10

7-8/10

We used EHealth (a former CA product). Because of the upgrades and device certifications, we had to switch.

Setup was straightforward.

We implemented through the vendor and they were very good.

We're managing it with one person so the cost is cheaper than some of our other tools.

We looked at other solutions, but management chose SevOne because of its cost.

Test it out in your environment – it all depends on your environment, but it fits very well for ours.

• It provides accurate data, which is critical.
• I also like the very quick reporting, as I can pull up graphs and charts very quickly.
• Real time reporting – one-minute polling, as opposed to fifteen-minute polling, so that’s fifteen times better. If we had better equipment I think we could do it even quicker.

With previous platforms we had to manually add and remove devices. With this solution, it's all automatic – all auto discovery and deletion, which is amazing. It gives us visibility that we didn’t have before.

I can't think of anything as they have been very good to us, though it’s a little bit expensive. You could pay three times and get junk, or pay just once and get something good.

I've been using it since 2012.

No, actually it was really quick, and the only issues were from our own internal teams. We would have had it deployed in a month-and-a-half without those hurdles, but it took six months, which is not bad either.

It's been rock solid.

We still have the original server form and we have not had to install much additional hardware, except just to add teams to the server.

It's really good.

We're on a first name basis with all our support guys. We have gone to Delaware and Boston to visit them; they are good people.

We previously used HP OVPI and we switched because the granularity of data, faster response time, quicker display, the tool was cheaper as well, and required less manual intervention.

It was pretty straightforward.

We implemented with a vendor team – those guys know their stuff. They are one of the reasons we chose the product.

We evaluated EMC Watch3net and InfoVista. There were even more – maybe a good seven other vendors we looked at.

You have to know what you're looking for – we knew exactly what we were looking for and basically if you know that it's much easier to find a solution that meets your needs. Stick to your guns – don’t settle. We did not settle.

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.