We compared IBM SevOne Network Performance Monitoring and Meraki Dashboard across several parameters based on our users' reviews. After reading the collected data, you can find our conclusion below:
Features: IBM SevOne NPM users like its modular design, performance management reports, and real-time insights. The solution is also praised for its SNMP data collection and integration with ITSM solutions. Meraki Dashboard users like its centralized console, cable testing, firmware updates, and group policy features. The solution is also praised as user-friendly, stable, and scalable.
Room for Improvement: IBM SevOne NPM could benefit from better SD-WAN capabilities and live maps. Users say the solution could also improve its AI/ML modules and provide more actionable insights. Users say Meraki Dashboard could improve its client VPN, hardware discovery, and integration with external solutions, Some users mentioned a need for more comprehensive documentation and granular control.
Service and Support: Customers reported generally positive experiences with IBM customer service, praising the support team's availability and responsiveness. However, some users said they would rather not have to rely so heavily on support for upgrades. Meraki Dashboard's customer service receives mixed feedback. Some users spoke fondly of the technical support they received, while others expressed frustration over long wait times and had a hard time finding the right person to help them.
Ease of Deployment: The setup process for IBM SevOne NPM is described as quick and uncomplicated, although some users may require extra configuration. Users said Meraki Dashboard was effortless and intuitive to set up, noting that features like templates and configuration cloning saved time during deployment.
Pricing: IBM SevOne NPM is seen as costly, particularly for smaller businesses. Opinions on Meraki Dashboard's pricing varied, with some users finding it pricey and others deeming it fair.
ROI: IBM SevOne NPM offers features such as device maintenance and out-of-the-box reports that contribute to its value. Meraki Dashboard simplifies IT operations, and some users expect returns within a few years.
Comparison Results: IBM SevOne NPM stands out for its real-time insights, integration capabilities, straightforward setup, and top-notch customer service. Users say the solution could improve its AI/ML capabilities and lower its pricing to be more affordable for smaller businesses. Meraki Dashboard is a scalable, user-friendly solution with a smooth, painless setup made easy by built-in templates and features like configuration cloning. However, some users complained that the solution is too expensive and needs better integration with non-Cisco platforms.
"We can manage the entire system across the network and troubleshoot the pain points."
"The single dashboard is a valuable feature."
"Its ability to monitor practically any type of network device via SNMP is most valuable. This is the main functionality that we're using. If a network device exposes a metric, such as interface utilization, SevOne will monitor it for us."
"One of the most valuable features is the graphs, which you can build instantly. I have used some open-source platforms in the past, but they are not as good. With SevOne, the sampling in the graph can be every few seconds, not just every few minutes, and that's really helpful. It's really fast."
"Scalability. I have never had to worry about how to handle really big environments."
"Another useful feature is that SevOne gives you real-time insights into your network performance. It polls every five minutes. That is important for our customers because there are some network teams that are always monitoring their networks."
"One of the solution's biggest strengths is its capacity management performance, with out-of-the-box reports through NMS, as well as its ability to collect NetFlow-related data from devices. The collection of network performance and flow data is important because we have many critical business applications."
"We find that the reporting is particularly valuable in terms of not only communicating with our peer teams but also with the executives."
"SevOne provides support for all universal connectors. They internally work with other data sources to get features implemented. We have an SD-WAN implementation and use other app data to monitor performance. If you pull that data into one centralized location, that is very useful for management."
"SevOne has rich API capabilities, giving us the flexibility to control what we collect and customize the collection, creation, and manipulation of now metrics as necessary."
"It is very easy to manage. It has good security, and it is working well with our firewall."
"We have found the client dashboard to be very simple to use, especially in our Meraki environment."
"The most valuable feature is the single pane of glass that gives you multisite visibility."
"Meraki Dashboard does not require a lot of maintenance. Cisco tells communicates through the Meraki Dashboard web client, it will automatically send updates to the equipment. They will send you an email on what day the updates will take place. If you want to proceed, you can click on accept, or you can decline them and schedule the updates at another time."
"The feature I find most valuable is the single pane of glass where you can configure a monitor view, all from one dashboard. For example, on the wireless side, you can configure it under the configuration panel, and then view statistics like location analytics, user analytics, etc."
"It's a simple, functional solution."
"Some of the features I have found valuable are the ease of access, simple configuration, and monitoring."
"It's really user-friendly."
"The technical support needs improvement."
"The Wi-Fi side needs improvement."
"The GUI: both the dashboard/user view and the admin tool."
"There are a lot of pain points. My main problem is that we don't have a high availability system. There are 20 peers. We're going to lose the end-of-life appliances that are old. If we lose a peer and it doesn't come back, we lose all that data. The reason we don't have high availability is because it's double the charge."
"High-frequency polling is data-intensive because you're pulling more. If SevOne could figure out a way to manage the impact of high-frequency polling on the system, that would be very popular."
"Some similar solutions offer end-to-end visibility."
"The reporting of NMS is good, but it could be better."
"Their virtualization solution is not compatible with our Kubernetes environment, which is one of the reasons we are ending our relationship with them."
"One area that requires a little bit of improvement is the topology of visualization and being able to map out connections, end-to-end. It's able to do that, but it's not as impressive as we would like it to be. We would like to understand the different interface types and the connection points better, through the visualization. Heatmaps also need further development."
"I'm not really sure if this was the software's fault or a server issue, but a couple of years back the disks were failing on our SevOne physical server every month and the server would go down. The secondary server took over from the primary until the disk issue was resolved. That was annoying."
"An area for improvement in Meraki Dashboard is licensing management because it's a little complex. Product licensing can be made a little bit easier through license concurrency and a more straightforward approach to applying the license to products and services."
"The price could be lower because the license for access points is expensive."
"It would be helpful to have the ability to create a floor plan based on an existing PDF or JPEG, which is automatically converted into a usable network map."
"For my purposes, I don't need to see any other features added to the Meraki Dashboard. I have no criticisms and I do like the tool. If I had a criticism for it, it would be about the pricing because it could be a little less, but again, for the service that you get, I won't complain about that too much."
"It would be nicer if the dashboard was lighter."
"Something that needs to be improved, is the fact that you if you don't renew the subscription license, it stops working. I would also like to see SSL BPM support for anything else."
"The MDM, however, is bad. We're using another MDM now because Meraki was so bad."
"One area that could use improvement in the Meraki Dashboard is user-friendliness when navigating to port configurations."
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IBM SevOne Network Performance Management (NPM) is ranked 39th in Network Monitoring Software with 53 reviews while Meraki Dashboard is ranked 9th in Network Monitoring Software with 51 reviews. IBM SevOne Network Performance Management (NPM) is rated 8.4, while Meraki Dashboard is rated 8.6. The top reviewer of IBM SevOne Network Performance Management (NPM) writes "We can get a new vendor certified and monitored in our system significantly faster than before". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Meraki Dashboard writes "Incredibly easy to use, great troubleshooting and prevention of malicious events". IBM SevOne Network Performance Management (NPM) is most compared with Instana Infrastructure Monitoring, LogicMonitor, SolarWinds Network Device Monitor, NETSCOUT nGeniusONE and Splunk Enterprise Security, whereas Meraki Dashboard is most compared with Cisco DNA Center, SolarWinds NPM, ThousandEyes, Mist AI and Cloud and Zabbix. See our IBM SevOne Network Performance Management (NPM) vs. Meraki Dashboard report.
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