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."I like the artificial intelligence and machine learning that it uses in the solution. Because once the solution discovers all the assets, all the infrastructure, and all the dependencies between services, it learns how it works. So, it learns to predict when a problem is going to happen. It becomes predictive in an autonomous way."
"It is a scalable solution."
"Start anywhere application modelling brings a fantastic opportunity for users to see what is where."
"BMC Helix Discovery is very intuitive."
"The most valuable feature of BMC Helix Discovery is it operates well. It is well known and has gained recognition for its software."
"The most valuable feature is the automated service mapping."
"BMC provides great support. As managed service support, they are gold."
"A valuable feature concerns the ability to integrate with different solutions."
"The most helpful feature in Device42 was the import feature, where you can seamlessly import your information into the configuration database manager."
"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."
"One of the most valuable features in my experience is the precise tracking of hardware devices and their locations registered in the solution. The solution allows to determine the exact placement of assets based on the building maps and the room details. This feature has allowed us to gain upper hand on the customers and provide them with a great satisfaction because they can visually see the arrangement of their assets within the organisation or building."
"The REST API abilities enables us to run scripts that pull information from our servers about software, storage, etc. Anything we need is pushed through REST API to the Device42 server and reflected in the report it generates."
"The pricing is reasonable."
"The auto-discovery is brilliant. You can have it scheduled to run on a regular basis, and the infrastructure is always getting updated within the platform. I would rate the asset discovery very highly. It's very comprehensive. It covers quite a lot of different methods for doing discovery and it supports a lot of different types of hardware as well."
"The solution's automatic IT asset discovery and inventory functionality are top-notch. The thing I like is that it's open-source. If I need to change them — and they've given me links on GitHub to have them — I can go and change them to pull exactly what I want, as frequently as I want."
"The continuous asset discovery is good because it means not having to manually input all the small data, such as IP addresses, leases, etc. It helps and saves us a lot of time."
"It would be nice to see more updates to the solution."
"There are certain limitations in the mapping feature of the solution."
"The solution's scalability is an area with certain shortcomings where improvements are needed."
"The product is not fully automated."
"A review of end of life data would be nice."
"The solution is definitely useful."
"The CMDB could be improved. Getting data from the CMDB is the greatest challenge."
"An area that can be improved is the IoT."
"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."
"The resources table needs a few tweaks. We've raised a feature request for this. When you click on resources, it opens up the entire CMDB or the entire data stored in Device42. If that could be customizable, it would be good. We should be allowed to add our own columns to that by writing a script or something like that. There should be an option to add or limit whatever we want."
"When servers have two network adapters, automatically discovered will be only one network card because the other one is a backup. Device42 has some problems to find the other connection."
"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."
"Configuring rPDUs in the data center for Device42 required us to add multiple discovery jobs. The rPDUs were referred to the ISPDUs and daisy-chained. They would automatically assign a unique SMP port, but Device42 didn't allow SMP ranges, so we had to create a discovery job for each rPDU individually. We submitted a feature request to mitigate that."
"My biggest problem with the product is the upgrades. First, we have to do them manually and second, not this last time but the time before that, we actually had to build a new VM to deploy the solution again. We had to back it up and then restore it to the new version. That was inconvenient."
"If they could make it so their remote connector could do as much as 10,000 devices, that would be better."
"The architecture is a bit old-fashioned. Device42 is on one server, appliance, virtual machine, or guest. We are loading more into Device42 than it can hold. Overloading Device42 with REST API calls or tasks will directly impact every aspect because the server will be too busy to answer requests."
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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