ITRS Geneos Reviews

• Breach predictor
• Compute Engine
• Reporting
• Dashboards

In many cases we are now able to correlate multiple events and take actions while considering a large number of criteria when we do. We can more reliably instruct the product to take action when a certain number of events happened in a certain sequence. This can be done even without setting hard thresholds, but looking at the data we collected in the past and the behaviour the system has on a daily basis.

• Active Console
• Breach Predictor
• Documentation
• Data Storage

I've used Geneos 2 for three years.

Deployment is simple and straight forward. The packages also include examples on how to start them.

In some past versions yes, but the issues were immediately fixed.

No. Planning the implementation of the product on the infrastructure keeps scalability issues away. The product is easily scalable.

Customer service delivered by ITRS is to the highest standards from all points of view. Highly responsive and quick acting.

Technical support delivered by ITRS is to the highest standards from all points of view. Highly responsive and quick acting.

Yes we did. Geneos is a highly configurable monitoring system with many built-in plug-ins and offers great functionality. All of this aside, the breach predictor was one of the selling points. The old product was missing many of the expected out of the box functionalities.

The initial setup was a bit complex. We use the product to monitor the Core trading infrastructures (OTC, CFD, Low Latency, etc.), which means many servers, many processes, many metrics. It was complex as in the beginning we were not completely aware of all the capabilities of the product and our infrastructure is close to 200 Servers and 150-200 unique process which are running multiple times. It was complex due to the very high complexity of our systems and the scale.

Initial setup and delivery was done by ITRS and they were a highly professional and experienced team. Redesign and reimplementation was done in-house.

I can't say for sure as I don't know the contractual figures, but I suspect the ROI to be at least 100%.

Original setup was included in the purchase order. I can't say what the day-to-day costs are as I don't know the figures, but if we exclude the licenses, I would say about 10-25 Eur/day and still, this is a wild guess.

We did evaluate other options. One was Integrien Alive (bought by VMWare and non-existent anymore), Leutek ZIS, Quest Software Big Brother and IBM Tivoli (TEP).

Plan the implementation top to bottom before starting so you don't have to redesign it afterwards.

1. Get to know the product and the capabilities
2. Decide what you need to monitor
3. Implement it in steps, e.g. first core (hardware) and then application specific

We have started a project green movement and it is running successfully. The motive is to make sure nothing is red (faulted) and make sure it is immediately monitored and resolved or delegated. This has kept our systems and operations healthy.

This tool allows one to analyse, integrate and customize as per the systems and allows you to set your own rules.

I am hoping to get some good features on the IBM MQ messaging tool, as this is most frequently used in our team.

I would rate technical support 7/10. It's self-explaining and the support is limited.

I did not previously use a different solution; it's recommended in the project and cheap.

Initial setup is easy. The support team internal to our organization takes care of all the installations.

An in-house team implemented the solution.

It's a very effective and productive tool, and avoids any major incidents.

With ITRS, we are able to monitor in real time our infrastructure, whether it is hard disk failures, number of or failure of processes, and switch port packets being dropped.

ITRS uses SNMP to communicate with our devices as well as SNMP net probes installed on our servers. ITRS’s use of SNMP provides a lot of valuable information from the device without affecting performance.

I would like to see a user community established to assist with implementing and supporting the product.

I would also like to see suggested guidelines to accomplish a monitoring task. The issue is that ITRS is so flexible that there is more than one way to complete a task, each with benefits and disadvantages.

Technical support is 9.5/10.

The Technical Support Specialists know the product very well but not the client environment. I would recommend that a copy of the ITRS configuration for each client reside within a Technical Support Library to assist them in diagnosing and solving each client’s issues. I have no issues with utilizing SFTP to transfer my configuration to an ITRS secure server when I make a change; of course, a Save Online button would help.

Tivoli was used prior to my start. I personally used PRTG and ITRS is significantly better.

As stated, the issue is that ITRS is so flexible that there is more than one way to complete a task.

An in-house team implemented it with assistance from ITRS.

This product saves us a lot of time in development.

Plan and implement the initial framework for the enterprise size as reworking for growth would be a challenge.

In my experience, the integration interfaces/plug-ins are most valuable as these help us maintain seamless integration with our systems.

Geneos' compatibility with most of the available products has helped us improve the monitoring of our systems.

We need more hassle free plug-ins that offer "Load and Start" with minimal manual efforts.

I've used this solution for one year.

There were no issues with the deployment.

We had no issues with the performance.

It's been able to scale for our needs.

It's good, but they have a lot of scope to improve it and make it even better.

There were custom in house solutions that we are replacing with vendor products.

Performing the integration was slightly complex for us.

We did the implementation in-hosue.

It is the most adaptable product so you should go-ahead and use it.

Geneos enables customized aggregate views and alerts for both related and disparate components. This flexibility and insight facilitates proactive and prompt causation analysis. Simply put, you can easily see everything at once. If there’s an issue, you’ll know why within seconds, rather than spend precious time trying to find out.

Global support personnel, even without expertise in market data, can now easily and quickly run respective market checks and escalate with pinpoint data.

The Geneos configuration has greatly improved since the nascent version 1.0 days, but still requires specialist knowledge and convoluted config debugging when something’s not monitoring as expected. A hierarchical variable/component reference tree and more readily accessible examples would be welcome.

I've used it since the early 2000s, in the halcyon days when it was branded as ITRS NetAgent. I had led its feasibility test and global rollout for my previous company’s Triarch and TIBCO platforms. ITRS was new to TIBCO at the time, so we had worked closely to add the necessary platform-specific features; ITRS has always been easy to work with.

We had no issues with the deployment.

One original glaring issue had been the lack of fault-tolerant Gateway Servers, but that had been remedied in a release a few years ago. We also had issues with slow Gateway startup and high CPU usage, but subsequent releases and reducing the number of config include files resolved the issues.

There have been no issues scaling it for our needs.

ITRS support personnel are generally top-notch, with a technical account manager who personally sees through each query or ticket.

Various iterations of TIB Hawk, Traverse, and in-house written apps had sufficed, but never truly provided centralized, customizable, easy to use, and market data specific monitoring available via ITRS Geneos.

Initial setup itself is straightforward. There’s a single server (two in fault-tolerance) running the master “Gateway” process, and each monitored server runs a “Netprobe” process. Each tarball is extracted to a single folder, rather than strewn all over the file system. Upgrades are likewise easy.

To not run Netprobes as root, some network monitoring features necessitated writing in-house scripts to feed alongside into Geneos, but that’s also its flexibility in action.
Rather than a cookie cutter setup, you will likely find yourself continually tweaking features and adding new alerts to suit your needs.

Since ITRS was introducing a totally revamped Gateway version 2, ITRS provided a consultant to advise on the initial configuration template, which we then customized and expanded upon.

The insight into finding the weakest links in the infrastructure has enabled us to proactively upgrade servers and networks in measured phases, rather than in a big bang approach.

ITRS has recently streamlined its pricing model to be a bit less granular (computation engine is now standard, for instance), which may or may not benefit your needs. The accounts team is amenable, so try to strike a deal, whether in cost, free training, and/or onsite consultancy.

There’s a reason even Thomson Reuters retired their own monitoring product, in favor of licensing ITRS Geneos.

The Toolkit module which allows flexible scripts to be created and inserted into Geneos without having to log onto the server.

We now get more detail about the servers than before and thus it helps us to maintain a good service for our customers.

I would like it to have a better Dashboard viewer for report building. Having something like Crystal Reports embedded with the Active Console or active console would help to build reports.

I've used this solution for years.

There were no issues with the deployment.

We had no issues with the performance.

I had issues scaling it and ended up having to distribute the load over seven gateways.

6/10

We used Sentinel which was awesome but it did not provide metric views.

It's straightforward. You take it out of the box and it's simply plug and play, but it really depends on what you would like to use the product for. My advice before setting up would be to plan on what you want to achieve the product, what you would like to view without logging on to the server, what you need to know from the server, and what your customer would expect from you.

We did the implementation in-house.

It's a great and powerful tool. You can input anything you like into the tool, including a database for analysis.

The critical alerts are valuable.

We have been able to monitor the repeated critical alerts and work on producing a more stable environment for our customers.

Snoozing/maintenance work. A third color would be brilliant to identify whether the servers are being worked on, e.g. blue for maintenance.

I've used it for three years.

Issues with certain gateways. We have around 30 gateways in our environment and a lot of servers, so as you can imagine, there's a lot of data. We sometimes experienced disconnects of the gateways which was a hard one to resolve. In the end, we opened its consoles on the same server to spread the load.

Connectivity as above.

7/10.

7/10.

No previous solution was used.

It was done in-house.

The dashboard is a valuable feature.

The 'start of day' (SOD) and 'end of day' (EOD) checks were automated by using this tool, thus reducing the amount of manual work needed by almost two hours per day.

Currently the dashboard does not have the capability of providing different status levels, and this needs to be updated.

I've used it for four to five years.

No issues encountered.

No issues encountered.

No issues encountered.

We've not had much interaction with the vendor, but their training program is really poor.

Good.

No previous solution used.

It was very straightforward.

We implemented it in-house.

This is a great tool to automate all the manual day-to-day checks.