We performed a comparison between BMC Helix Discovery and Device42 based on real PeerSpot user reviews.
Find out in this report how the two IT Asset Management solutions compare in terms of features, pricing, service and support, easy of deployment, and ROI."Weekly reports to management really make our life simple."
"The solution is very stable and powerful."
"The most valuable feature is Windows proxy. We now need to install an additional link proxy server in Windows. The proxy is available as an outpost in the Elastic store. That is the advanced feature is added. There are many other features which can be used once we discover them. One time I was scanning the servers and all, going to data from additional based on the additional features, including advanced data like score upper display data successfully discover servers. There are many things good things that can be implemented using it while we haven’t installed those yet."
"A valuable feature concerns the ability to integrate with different solutions."
"The tool's accuracy of the results we receive looks promising in general. Its values are more than 95 percent accurate compared to other clients or different tools. I would say that Discovery offers a valuable mechanism to discover information."
"Start anywhere application modelling brings a fantastic opportunity for users to see what is where."
"BMC Helix Discovery is very intuitive."
"It is a scalable solution."
"Device42 has everything in one place and links it altogether. This helps when you need to figure out where things are going wrong, where things are happening, or how everything is linked together."
"The IP address tracking [is valuable]... We have a lot of different devices and some of them have many IP addresses, so keeping track of which ones are assigned where is very critical for putting new devices on the network and giving them new addresses. All of our devices are statically assigned, so if we don't keep good records then we could accidentally assign a duplicate, which would cause problems on the network."
"We use the automatic IT asset discovery for different things, like VMware discovery and SNMP discovery for network devices. It helps us to keep hardware information up to date in Device42, and the VMware discovery helps us to keep virtual device inventory up to date... We are sure to have 100 percent of our devices in Device42. Not more, not less."
"The topology layout is the most valuable feature."
"The way the solution’s automatic IT asset discovery and inventory functionality works is you set up a discovery job, then you can schedule it to run. I schedule all of the runs daily at different times so nothing is interfering with anything else. It's nice to know that you can set up the scan, schedule it, and sit back. You can check them every day and make sure everything ran, making sure nothing had errors, then you're good to go. Anything new is going to automatically be discovered, which is nice. It takes some of the stress off because you don't have to know, "If this team opened new servers, we need make sure now it will automatically pick them up." It is one less thing to worry about. It gathers a lot of data points."
"The most valuable part is the ease of use. There's no training involved. It's pretty simple and straightforward."
"The import/export for bulk operations is a valuable and good feature."
"They've also just created some new interactive dashboards. CEOs can see and interact with the data rather than scrolling through endless Excel worksheets to find what they need."
"BMC Helix Discovery needs more customization options."
"The improvement which we require is to delete the Internet service. Till some of the features are coming, like, internally side. If you are taking one server to model, there are a lot of usages like three structures per diagram is coming, and we have to do the man lot of manual work. Instead of that, whatever our requirement, we should be able to provide the servers and get the structure. So this is what we want to implement with such data."
"The product is not fully automated."
"An area that can be improved is the IoT."
"The monitoring tools could be more stable."
"The solution's scalability is an area with certain shortcomings where improvements are needed."
"The solution is definitely useful."
"What would make BMC Helix Discovery better is if it had more client-side discovery features, for example, printers and desktops. Right now, it's focused more on data center discovery, so if it had additional features focused on the client-side discovery, that would be great. In the next release of BMC Helix Discovery, I'd like more client-side discovery features such as desktop discovery, printer discovery, and other IP-based client-side discovery features. The solution can discover desktops and printers, but there's still room for improvement on the client side."
"Since I was focused on deploying connectors and getting all the servers to be scanned, one of the biggest pains was when a job would fail, then the output (logging) was poor. For example, "Why did it fail?" In these cases, you get a generic error. It doesn't point you in the right direction and tell you why you got the error, which is really annoying. There have been times I asked, "Is there somewhere I can see a better log as to why is this failing?" That would be a really nice improvement."
"If I want to delete an asset from a cabinet it does take a while. And if I'm doing it in bulk — say, for example, if we have one cabinet that has 20 servers in — if I want to remove all 20 servers, I have to do them individually, which is a bit time-consuming. If there were a way that I could just bulk-remove everything from there, that would definitely save some time."
"Mapping items wasn't as intuitive as importing in Device42, so this is an area for improvement."
"The only thing which I have noticed so far that is not good is that we had an issue with some reporting from the tool, reporting we had to export. We couldn't do it in the way we wanted to, so we tried to reach out to their support but it took pretty long until we understood how we can manage the reports. We still haven't received a complete explanation of what we need to do and how to do it."
"While the automatic IT asset discovery is great, the first time using it can be confusing when you are configuring the SNMP. I don't remember for sure but I don't think it said "SNMP community," it said "password". The first time I used it I was thinking about communities but the tool said "password," and when you say "password" in SNMP you are thinking about SNMP version 3. This is the only thing that is confusing, although there were some devices that were not included in the discovery."
"A con for Device42 is that Kubernetes integration is lacking. You pay for 10,000 spot licenses and if you're spinning up a Kubernetes cluster, or four or five or six Kubernetes clusters like we do, you're going to have 5,000 or 6,000 nodes in each of those, doing different types of business things."
"The solution’s automatic IT asset discovery and inventory functionality functions pretty well. There could be some improvement if there were some automated scripts to get it off the ground. I know it takes a bit of effort to get all of various managed devices into one place. We have to go and change how they are managed and make sure they are all linking up correctly so they can be tracked in Device42. Some type of automated script for each to get over that initial activation."
"It would be nice for the agent to have an installer versus a single file across multiple systems."
BMC Helix Discovery is ranked 2nd in IT Asset Management with 20 reviews while Device42 is ranked 6th in IT Asset Management with 25 reviews. BMC Helix Discovery is rated 8.6, while Device42 is rated 8.4. The top reviewer of BMC Helix Discovery writes "Definitely useful but the old technology makes customizations very difficult". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Device42 writes "Good reporting and discovery capabilities, and helpful for understanding device dependencies and asset management". BMC Helix Discovery is most compared with ServiceNow, BMC Remedy , ServiceNow Discovery, Qualys VMDR and ManageEngine IT Asset Management, whereas Device42 is most compared with ServiceNow, ServiceNow CMDB, Infoblox IPAM, JIRA Service Management and NetBox.dev. See our BMC Helix Discovery vs. Device42 report.
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