Centreon Initial Setup

WJ
Engineering Manager at a tech services company with 10,001+ employees

A different team within our organization was involved in the setup, but as I understand it, the guy from Centreon was quite familiar with it, so it was quite easy.

The deployment of Centreon took about two months, but that was mostly due to user adoption by the service desk and NOC teams.

Initially, when we did the setup, we just threw all of our devices into Centreon, and at one stage it became quite bogged down in the sense that there was too much reporting or alerting. But it was quite easy to filter things and to streamline the reporting, enabling us to get exactly what we needed, including the proactive monitoring that we needed. The flexibility that Centreon has given us to do that kind of analysis and streamlining has been invaluable.

View full review »
ZA
Monitoring Manager at a transportation company with 10,001+ employees

Setting up Centreon isn't complex. All the documentation is clear and easy to follow. The total deployment time depends on the size of your deployment. It might take only two or three hours if it's just one monitoring server. You only need to download the application and install it on your network. If you want to start from scratch, setting up the environment might take four hours.

It can take around five to 10 days to deploy for a complex deployment. It might take that long if you need to set up some monitoring on the remote side and deploy a reporting server or other components,

View full review »
FQ
Network Engineer at a computer software company with 10,001+ employees

I was not involved with the initial setup at my current company.

View full review »
Buyer's Guide
Centreon
March 2024
Learn what your peers think about Centreon. Get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions. Updated: March 2024.
765,386 professionals have used our research since 2012.
Caulson Chua - PeerSpot reviewer
Technical Services Manager at ATS

The deployment was straightforward. It wasn't too complex. We could finish setting up Centreon in less than a day. The implementation strategy depends on the user requirements, context, and scope. 

We connect the solution to the server and configure it to monitor the client's environment. It doesn't take many people to deploy Centreon. We downloaded it off the official web page and asked our IT department to set up a VM. The process involved two or three people, including an application engineer and an IT technician. 

View full review »
VB
System engineer at a financial services firm with 51-200 employees

It's simple to implement. We needed samples to copy and there are many tools on the market that required us to learn their methods, however, there are many forums that helped. Having a community around the product is great. While it may not be able to help answer brand questions, if we have a basic or specific query, we will always have someone that can answer them.

The deployment takes between three weeks to four months. It depends on the size of the IT infrastructure. If the infrastructure is big, it can take months. However, most of the time, it's not that long. It will take a while if the company and the managers don’t share a common vision. Most of the time it’s coming to agreements that take up a large portion of the setup.

While you only need one person for deployment and maintenance, the more people you have the faster you can move. In reality, one person can develop the solution for a team or a department. It's really possible.

View full review »
TH
Senior Networking Consultant at S & L NETZWERKTECHNIK GMBH

The initial setup is pretty straightforward, because it's very easy to get it running. However, you have to spend some time with it to get it to life, because if you just set it up, it is empty. Therefore, you have to take care that there are some holes in it, and you need to monitor some things. This is back to my point about a better API for the future as an improvement.

To get a basic view of your environment, it normally takes two to three days. However, if you want to go into detail, it depends how large your environment is: It could be hours or weeks.

View full review »
ND
DevOps Engineer at a computer software company with 501-1,000 employees

It's very simple to set up. A very basic installation takes, perhaps, 50 minutes. You download a package and install it, and then do some configuration. There's nothing special about it.

After, you need IT to structure your business activities with the service. There are some post-configuration operations that need to be done.

View full review »
Leandro Pereira Rodrigues - PeerSpot reviewer
IT Analyst at RNP - Rede Nacional de Ensino e Pesquisa NREN/Brazil

The initial setup is complicated because consolidating and configuring the database is a complex process.

View full review »
FH
Operation Team Engineering with 1,001-5,000 employees

We just installed the standard packages, then the rest was done via the GUI. So, it was good.

View full review »
TM
CEO at a tech services company with 11-50 employees

With any enterprise-grade monitoring system, the key thing is that you take the implementation seriously. You need to look at and understand what kind of architecture you want to set up and how you want it to be laid out for your customers. The initial process, like the initial setup process for any tool of this magnitude, will take some time if you want it to work really well. That initial time investment, however, is well worth it later on when you have the correct relationships set up and you have a reduction in false alerts, ultimately leading to a higher accuracy level for alerts.

If you're going to have success, it's very important that you take the time to set up parent-child relationships. You need to take the time to set up how the processes work for each customer because otherwise, you'll have a scenario like in Three Mile Island that had that nuclear disaster, where you get hundreds of alerts in a matter of one minute.

If it's set up correctly then it's super-useful. If a certain condition happens, you want to get an alert for the correct condition and not underlying alerts that are not useful. That's the most important thing. If it's set up correctly and you have the correct relationships and workflow all mapped out, then it's very valuable and it can save a massive amount of time. With Centreon, it's very important that you take that time to set up the parent-child relationships.

For us, it took several months to get it set up to be the way we wanted it. But, once it is in place, it is a solution that you can possibly use for decades to come.

View full review »
MM
Project Manager, Cloud Services with 501-1,000 employees

The initial setup was pretty easy. It's very similar to Nagios. The initial setup of Centreon is not difficult at all.

We cleaned all our infrastructure and built Centreon from scratch, but we already knew what we were doing. For the deployment of an empty environment, it was very quick. It took a few days. The difficulties were on our side, making our specific checks and fitting them into the plug-ins, but that didn't have to do with Centreon. We had to go back and do some re-engineering. For us, it was easy.

In terms of our strategy for restructuring, we had a lot of checks that were irrelevant, servers that were irrelevant, and checks that weren't written correctly. Our strategy was, first of all, to have the minimum number of checks needed; second, to have a naming convention; and third, wherever possible, to use a Centreon plug-in and not write our own. It took us a while because we had a lot to review. We have a lot of different applications with a lot of different checks. It was more of an in-house project of processes and procedures. We took advantage of the new Centreon to clean up everything and do it right.

View full review »
MD
IT Analyst at La Corporation D'urgences-Santé

The initial setup is very easy. On the website, if you want to create an account, you go to the website for the cloud. There, you have the possibility to run a test of the system, before you want to implement it.

The implementation process was the same as the last system that I used. This made it easier to use.

View full review »
JL
Global Operations Center Lead at a logistics company with 10,001+ employees

The initial setup was straightforward, as the product is available in ISO image format, ready for deployment. Centreon also has a comprehensive guide and documentation that are simple and easy to follow.

View full review »
MF
CEO at Artesys Orion

The initial setup is not complex for skilled Centreon users, even in cases of customers with very heterogeneous infrastructure. In fact Centreon has the ability to grow horizontally when needed, using the ready to use plugins. Usually, for customers from 500 up to 1000 hosts to be monitored, the implementation process may require from two up to four weeks for a basic-standard deployment.

View full review »
CP
Global Operations Center Engineer at a logistics company with 1,001-5,000 employees

The initial setup was very simple and straightforward, including installation, adding of nodes, creating services, etc.

View full review »
TC
Managing Director, CANADA at EvaBssi

During the initial setup we faced some issues. Part of it was because we had to become more knowledgeable in the solution. There are some gray areas and if you don't know the product well you may have issues. Another part of it was some bugs that we came across, although that's part of every software solution in IT nowadays. But the initial setup could be easier.

Our deployment took 10 days, but because our customers want specific dashboards and specific KPIs, we worked on that also.

The goal was to properly size the infrastructure to make sure we have room to grow. We wanted to make sure we have best practices in place for future deployments. If today we have 1,000 hosts and tomorrow we have 5,000, can we grow easily or do we need to redo everything? We also worked on how to structure the data. What kind of data do we want to pull from the hosts? And once everything was set up, how would we display this data? We also wanted to make sure we reduced the false positive alarms as much as we could.

We have five or six people who work with the solution. We have some developers who are working on scripting. We have non-technical people who are more focused on building reporting, and when they have a question or something doesn't work, they ask a monitoring expert to interpret the data. And we also have our customers who have the read-only view of Centreon and the dashboards where they can see the real-time data.

There is no maintenance of the solution on our side, other than adding new hosts or updating, when required.

View full review »
MH
President at ITS Solucoes

The setup is very easy. Centreon itself is an ISO that you boot. You answer some questions and it's up and running. In terms of configuration, you can put in the IP address of the host and attach the plugins and they are ready for monitoring. It's very easy. If it had a more complete discovery feature, it would be even better, but it's already very easy.

The time it takes for the initial deployment depends on how many hosts, and how deeply, you want to monitor. But in less than a week, you can have good monitoring set up for a small to medium sized company. The longer part for us is the interview with the business, the analysts and the system analysts, to understand their particular applications and services and the impact of those on their business, to create business dashboards and business monitoring.

View full review »
VM
Global IT Operations Manager

Each major upgrade is complex due to bugs.

View full review »
DC
Product Manager - IT Project Manager at PROSERVIA

The implementation was very easy.

View full review »
LF
CEO & CTO at a tech services company

When I started with Centreon, the initial setup was very difficult because they didn't package the product. But now, setup is very easy and we are able to deploy Centreon very quickly.

View full review »
RB
IT Project Owner

To use Centreon is easy. 

To get it started is a lot of work, since it comes empty. We had to push information into it to make it work.

View full review »
SD
Chief Technology Officer at a comms service provider with 51-200 employees

The setup was very simple. It's pretty much all automated.

View full review »
KK
Monitoring expert

It quite easy to set up. In the past, usually our admins would do it, but lately I have tried to do it myself, and I would say it's quite easy to put up.

View full review »
it_user810555 - PeerSpot reviewer
Solution Architect - Open Technology Solution - Airbus Group BU at a tech services company with 10,001+ employees

The first setup was eight years ago and it was not very complex. We had an expert in Linux so it was not really a big issue, with ten years' experience in monitoring systems. There were no specific difficulties with it.

View full review »
MC
Network Project Manager at a tech services company with 11-50 employees

When I came on board, Centreon was already up and running, and I did not have the experience of going through the initial setup. As it was already complete, I can't really speak to the process. I don't know if it was straightforward or complex or how long the deployment took in general.

View full review »
Buyer's Guide
Centreon
March 2024
Learn what your peers think about Centreon. Get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions. Updated: March 2024.
765,386 professionals have used our research since 2012.