The other option being looked at was SolarWinds. With Centreon, there's the licensed package, but it's also an open-source platform, and that was the driving force behind the decision to go with it.

I tried a few other solutions in terms of monitoring, e.g., PRTG, LibreNMS, Nagios and Cacti. All these solutions, except LibreNMS, are very poor in terms of design. The user experience in Centreon is much better. However, in the end, you just configure some SNMP work on the solution to get your answer. The difference with Centreon is that you can easily define, in the configuration, to have the templates for each host, services, notification, etc. So, Centreon is much better than all these other solutions.

All the SNMP data is available on the devices. If you know what you want to monitor, you can do it with or without Centreon. So, it does not increase the accuracy. It provides a very user-friendly way to display it, but it's not more accurate. To be more accurate, we did use another tool, Splunk, which provides some artificial intelligence or behavioral monitoring.

In terms of pure SNMP metrics monitoring, Centreon is very good. However, if you want to diversify your monitoring with other inputs than SNMP, e.g., syslogs. Other tools can be very useful, like Splunk or ELK, for diversification.

I did evaluate other options, however, this one was the most compelling. 

This was easier to implement and had the most potential compared to other products. There were some other products that had potential. However, they were really expensive.

This product can be implemented with both small and big infrastructure. It's also a free solution up to a certain point, which works well for smaller projects.

There is a similar solution called Shinken. It has fewer functionalities and is more complicated to maintain and install. 

We have taken a look at other solutions, like Zabbix, Nagios, Check MK, and PRTG. For us, Centreon is the best solution, because we have all the benefits from the other solutions. Not all, but most of them. It's a great product to monitor our environment, so we can prevent any outage or misconfiguration on some hosts.

A main feature that sets apart Centreon versus its competitors is the possibility to expand the monitoring. You can set up different satellites to expand your monitoring or get an inside view of a special environment, such as a DMZ zone. Or, if you want to monitor a branch office from another country, so you can monitor it with an inside view of it, not just an outside view. 

We use the remote server functionality on some customer sites, because you can see an independent view and are not dependent on a single connection. If you have branch offices or bigger office outside your headquarters, you can use remote servers because if the connection is broken or disrupted, then the remote server will obtain a view of your environment and server availability. This is a good point against using other solutions. Because with other solutions, you don't have this feature. Then, you will be blind if you have this type of a situation.

Centreon is a nice product that improves on Nagios at times but it's not a very big step forward. Centreon is very much like Nagios.

I don't know the other solutions which were evaluated, but I know that there was an evaluation. As the evaluation was done before our team chose to use Centreon, I was not involved. Therefore, I can't speak much about the decision other than we knew that Centreon would be able to do what we needed it to do.

We evaluated other options, but one of the reasons that we chose Centreon is because it came out of an open-source environment, and that is something that we really liked. We do have open-source capabilities in our organization, which helped with the transition, making it easier and smoother for us.

The other solutions we tested give you a unified GUI and a platform, like "Nagios as a Service." They all do basically the same thing.

We also had Opsview, after acquiring a company that used it. We took all their checks and migrated them to Centreon, and then we closed Opsview. It was pretty easy to migrate from it - as long as it's Nagios, it's pretty easy. We had to do fixes here and there, but it was something that took a few dev-man days of work. It was not something that was a complicated project. Doing so, this saved us a lot of money. They were paying more for Opsview vs Centreon for about 10 percent of the service. We had a chance to consolidate to Opsview or Centreon, and it was clear that we should consolidate to Centreon.

Centreon is better than Nagios XI in regards to cost and support response times, when you have a problem. If you have a problem, it costs money to contact the Nagios XI support.

We have used SolarWinds Network Performance Monitor and SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor.

We do a competitor evaluation every year of the market to determine if there is a better competitor. While there are other solutions, I don't think there is a better solution than Centreon.

The solution increases the accuracy of our monitoring. The reaction that I have had from some customers, or even prospects, when we do a live demonstration involving how Centreon is working is that their experience with other solutions is bad. Centreon is a really capable tool that increases efficiency and gives you more information.

We have been a partner of other brands in the past, and comparatively, Centreon is much more stable.

If you are large customer who spends more on the solution, you receive more services versus other market competitors. Centreon offers value for its cost.

Because we are a consulting company, we usually work for large organizations, such as banks, industry and retail companies. We have a deep knowledge of monitoring tools such as SolarWinds or HPE. We have extensive knowledge of what's on the market and, knowing that, that's why we chose Centreon.

The advantages of Centreon are its flexibility and that the licensing is pretty easy compared to other solutions.

Where Centreon is weaker is that the initial deployment could be easier. It's based on the open source solution, so if you are not from the open source world, and you're not good at Linux, that could be a barrier. But for people who are familiar with Linux this would be a pro. I'm not from the Linux world so for me it is a con.

We evaluate other possibilities from time to time. Mostly, they are overpriced for what they do.

The competitive products have value, but we have used this one for more than ten years and we are not planning to change it.

We did not evaluate another solution.

We looked at:

• Centreon vs Nagios
• Centreon vs Micro Focus Network Node Manager
• Centreon vs SolarWinds
• Centreon vs ObserveOn.

If I remember it correctly, there weren't any better solutions, at least not eight years ago.

During the last couple of years we have tried other solutions but none of them have had the features that we like.

We had different solutions. We had Splunk for Big Data monitoring as well as Elasticsearch and Zabbix. These are at the top of the market, along with Centreon.