Centreon Valuable Features

VB
System engineer at a financial services firm with 51-200 employees

For servers and applications, it was very, very efficient.

The flexibility and customizability of Centreon's reports, analytics, and dashboards are good. It is of very great value that we can create a graphic map. It gives a good understanding to managers and directors about the importance of monitoring within the company and, as a system engineer, to have a very efficient vision of what is happening when your app is not working. You can be informed before your customers. Afterward as well, you can better communicate with your customers and can let them know that you are resolving the problem. It's the best tool on the market for that at the moment.

It's not sufficient to have only this tool if you would like to anticipate a lot of problems. You can add other tools. However, it’s really useful in particular to keep this tool and to understand where the problem is, and who’s working on it. It's important that the company invests money in monitoring tools and the business.

Centreon's dashboards help you see all of your customers in one place. We use only one dashboard for some applications. For example, we made a dashboard for a critical app with all of the equipment of the app as the server. We put everything on the map. I work only with IT teams with interns. I don't work in an IT department or work with professional customers, so it’s hard to assess dashboards fully.

We use Centreon Plugin Packs Connectors, for the database with our SQL. It was very comfortable to use the plugin directly and it was very simple to implement.

Certain devices and equipment have plugin packs that helped our organization support and/or integrate. For example, a Windows Server component, and a Linux component. We have some tools in which we know what we need to supervise on a server for the database. We have some metrics that we are using, however, it’s easier with the pack.

We can implement a project very fast and we don't have many things to think about. There's no fear of forgetting something important. It was very comfortable and to use with all the free components it has.

It’s important that we have ready-to-use connectors and integrations for helping to provide a clear, comprehensive view of our organization. It's very easy, and it's not very complicated to implement. It's very well developed, and you can be confident using it.

We did use Anomaly Detection to help alert unusual dysfunctional behavior. It was a project, however, we don't use it every day. It was a project that we developed for the ability to anticipate some problems in the IT system. For example, a server that will be crushed or a problem with the CPU. There are some tools that can alert us about future issues. However, I haven’t fully implemented anything due to a lack of time.

Centreon is great for helping to monitor our IT infrastructure and cloud-to-edge and providing holistic visibility. It's very efficient. It's graphically very simple to find task user information. 

Another thing that we love about it, is when we work for example, with the Army, they prefer to work with French projects yet take, for example, a US solution. It's great in France to use a French project.

For more than ten years they’ve developed new things every year. They like to always be on the top of the market with their project, and the progress they make year after year is incredible. Three years ago, I discovered that if we have money to spend with them, they have some teams of developers and we can share with them our budget and they can then develop something directly for our company. Afterward, they’ll use part of the work to improve themselves. I found this a very smart way of working.

Centreon helped measure service performance by modeling IT service maps for business-critical IT workflows. It was more informative according to my use case. We can make some weekly reports, daily reports, or monthly reports.

Centreon is great for helping to drive business performance and excellence and aligning IT operations with business objectives. It improved performance in terms of understanding the past. If it's very well configured, someone can fix a problem quickly. There is some progress that can be made in anticipating the future and trying to improve the performance of the future as a company to avoid problems and prevent incidents before they arise.

The product is helping to consolidate all alerts, KPIs, and business maps, as well as managing metrics across domains. For example, if we have a team who doesn't know how to contribute, or how to implement these parts, it's possible to solicit consulting assistance. They can help us remotely, or they come to our company to help us to configure items. If someone works with a big company, for example, they can get help from someone to come in for a few days or a week and assist them.

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ND
DevOps Engineer at a computer software company with 501-1,000 employees

The most valuable feature is the ability to build an abstraction of service visualization. You can add services to an entity called Business Activities and you can see the state of these activities.

It also provides a nice dashboard, or what's called the Centreon MAP, and you can extract information very well from that for building reports for customers. It gives you a representation of service and business activities. You can access all the information in one place.

We also use Centreon Plugin Packs. They help us support Linux servers' operating systems. When it comes to monitoring things, you can set an agent on the client's operating system or you can have agentless access. For the agent-based monitoring, you need to install it directly on each OS that you want to monitor. For agentless monitoring, you can simply click through the interface to provide a Plugin Pack, and you can run it directly.

It can also help you look at KPIs because calculations can be done directly in Centreon.

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ZA
Monitoring Manager at a transportation company with 10,001+ employees

The reporting and monitoring features are the most valuable. The monitoring is easy to set up, and the reports are filled with helpful information. You can quickly find and fix the problem when there is an incident. 

We use out-of-the-box reports instead of customizing them. When we deploy something, it comes with some reporting templates, so we just use those. We use the existing reporting template to get information about the monitoring device. It's easy to apply the template to our reports. We can do it in two to five minutes.  

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. 

We also use Plugin Packs to monitor most of our equipment because it's simple to deploy a monitoring template. If I want to monitor a device, I install the Plugin Pack and the required package. If the Plugin Pack doesn't give me the information I want, I can write a plugin to monitor the device. We do this for a few instruments.

Anomaly Detection is another handy feature that we use to discover some issues. I estimate that using Anomaly Detection has cut our resolution time in half. 

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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.
763,955 professionals have used our research since 2012.
Caulson Chua - PeerSpot reviewer
Technical Services Manager at ATS

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. 

The dashboard is user-friendly, and the solution provides good reporting and visibility. The layout is straightforward. You can click on the drop-down list to select the server you want. The anomaly detection feature helped us reduce our average resolution time by 30 minutes to an hour. 

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

Centreon's most valuable feature is Opsgenie.

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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.
763,955 professionals have used our research since 2012.