We performed a comparison between Centreon and vRealize Network Insight based on real PeerSpot user reviews.
Find out in this report how the two Network Monitoring Software solutions compare in terms of features, pricing, service and support, easy of deployment, and ROI."We can manage the entire system across the network and troubleshoot the pain points."
"Centreon's most valuable features are preventative maintenance and cost-efficiency. Everything is monitored, and we get a log before the system fails. We have an opportunity to fix the issue and avoid downtime."
"Another feature we use is Business Activity, which provides us with an end-user perspective when a service is down or isn't working correctly. This is helpful when monitoring the KPIs. When we see a device or server that isn't working, we find the root cause."
"It supports active monitoring so we don't have to use traps. From time to time traps are not very useful because we never know if they are actually working or not. The reporting part is also valuable as are the event logs. Using them we can check right away if something has had a hiccup."
"We have the business activity monitoring, the map, and the MBI modules and they are all very good."
"The most important feature is that it permits us to receive alarms if there is an incident within the infrastructure. The feature I love the most is the reporting feature, the MBI (Monitoring Business Intelligence) which permits us to send advanced reports to our customers in PDF format or in Doc format. We also deploy Centreon Map which gives our customers intuitive views of their information system."
"I really like the filtering capabilities of it. You can easily tell what's critical next to what's okay, the state of the services. It's very easy to get the whole picture quickly."
"The downtimes feature is helpful. If the ISP is doing some maintenance on its network, we have the option to put downtime on the devices or the services, so we won't get any false alarms."
"Centreon's most valuable feature is Opsgenie."
"It helps a lot because, until now, we didn't have the tools to figure out the micro level, VM-to-VM kind of traffic; that was not in the current environment. We could not figure out VM-to-VM communication from the other tools. This is the tool which gives us end-to-end transparency."
"It's user-friendly. It's similar to the GUI that most VMware products are moving to, and the consistency across those makes it easy to switch from one product to another. Also, the search bar at the top is plain text and it helps you, it guides you along with your search query, so that helps. The first day you're in there you can start building actual queries."
"One of the most valuable features is the ability to look at the traffic flows, to look at NetFlow data."
"It allowed us to set up NSX and to do microsegmentation, without all of the pain points of having to determine each port and each IP address that needed to have access, and which ones needed to be blocked."
"We can see everything going on in NSX and get a good picture of our environment."
"The most valuable feature is the profiling of the applications for micro-segmentation... It has made the migration to NSX much easier. Most of the sys admins within the smaller silos, they have no idea what ports are needed to run their stuff at all. I am pretty sure the micro-segmentation would never, ever have occurred without it."
"It provides deep visibility into what is happening with traffic and helps us manage our network."
"If we deploy NSX it shows us how the workflow will flow in the organization, what the roadblocks are, and what we need to do to overcome those hurdles. When we run this product, it gives us reports which describe problems with physical switches. We work with the network team to get them all resolved."
"The Wi-Fi side needs improvement."
"I would like to see a better UI, one which is more responsive."
"The Home view could be improved by adding customization functions that allow users to change the size of the widgets for a more uniform layout."
"The reporting has room for improvement."
"This solution lacks service monitoring in the cloud."
"Centreon is actually missing an easy way to create a trendline for the metrics. Actually it is possible to create it, but you need a good knowledge of math, Centreon, and RRD."
"Centreon supports officially 10,000 services per poller. That is not much for larger customers, because this limit is reached very quickly. We use it with three times the limit without any problems, but Centreon says, "Okay, we are only supporting it with 10,000 services." We are aware that increasing the limit has different impacts because they need to support it. However, for most customers, it would be be very good if they could increase the limit of services."
"It is necessary to improve service monitoring of database services in the free version."
"Sometimes, when the GUI and some of the search fields are being reset, and I return to the page, then I have to set them again. Therefore, some improvement on the UI and the filtering is needed."
"While it's not exactly a feature, what normally happens when we are trying to look at the VM flow portion is - although Network Insight does have options to integrate a few physical switches into it - we can't really get an end-to-end flow of the network. We might be using a few switches that are not supported by Network Insight. That is where they can improve, in the support for more physical switches and network devices."
"It needs to be a little easier to use and to understand the information it's putting out. That would make it more helpful. If you're not a network person you need to understand things like network policies and concepts. If you gave it to a regular admin, it would be nice if it were easier for them to pick up what is going on, understand the flows and whether or not stuff should be talking to each other, as opposed to just port groups and IP addresses."
"There could be some deeper analytics into packet inspection and trace flows. It could use some kind of machine learning to look at Layer 7 traffic for potential malware or corrupt packets."
"The solution is very much viewer centric and it would be nice if it would transcend just the virtual infrastructure."
"When we talk about those micro-segmentation rules, there's an Export function. It is very macro-segmentation oriented instead. So if you choose an application, it will find the tiers within that application and say that it's communicating on, say, port 80 to a separate VLAN. There might be 200 machines in that other VLAN. You don't want to open port 80 at all of them. So we need a lot more granularity in those suggested firewall rules."
"I want to see more in terms of microsegmentation. As of now, I can see the rules, but they are not in a readable format that I can convert to microsegmentation and can fit into NSX Manager."
"In a very general way, I would like to see an improvement in interoperability with third-party product, from other vendors."
"I'd like to see better support for being able to search the hardware NetFlow data. It ingests fairly well, but you can't tell, in a lot of cases, what source the data came from. I'd like to see more support for picking specific sources. That way you could really make a compelling use case. There are also some difficulties where it can't exactly trace the path between source and destination but if you hit the reverse flow on the same search it shows the entire path."
Centreon is ranked 11th in Network Monitoring Software with 27 reviews while vRealize Network Insight is ranked 23rd in Network Monitoring Software with 44 reviews. Centreon is rated 8.6, while vRealize Network Insight is rated 8.6. The top reviewer of Centreon writes "Proactive reporting guides our NOC on what needs to be fixed, saving them time". On the other hand, the top reviewer of vRealize Network Insight writes "Provides deep analytical insights and makes migrations efficient with dependency mapping". Centreon is most compared with Zabbix, PRTG Network Monitor, Nagios Core, Icinga and Nagios XI, whereas vRealize Network Insight is most compared with ThousandEyes, NETSCOUT vSTREAM, AppNeta by Broadcom, Zabbix and VMware Aria Operations for Applications. See our Centreon vs. vRealize Network Insight report.
See our list of best Network Monitoring Software vendors and best IT Infrastructure Monitoring vendors.
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