The best features that we've come across enable us to create our own monitored instances. For example, we have a SQL script that is being run by Centreon, and it gives us a specific metric on the dashboard that we utilize for monitoring the performance of a third party. We integrate with third-party companies or, in this case, government institutions, and they do not give us any guarantee of the service, and they also don't give us the ability to monitor the service. However, from our side, we can monitor the throughputs with the SQL script that we have running with Centreon.

In addition, the flexibility, customizability, and analytics of Centreon's dashboards are all very good. The dashboards help us see the whole network map, and that is quite valuable for us. In addition, the dashboards have helped to improve our visibility and ability to proactively ensure the right data is available at the right time. Our service desk staff spends most of their time on the dashboards, and they use the proactive monitoring to log service requests to the L2 and L3 support. They've been invaluable in that sense.

The flexibility has given us the ability to add in our own monitoring metrics and that has been quite interesting and very useful for us as well.

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. 

The most valuable feature is that we can manually configure everything we need. After it comes inside the interface of Centreon, you can display it. Because the interface is quite user-friendly, you can manually configure the configuration very deeply, which is very pleasant and useful because you can monitor and see everything on your service list, dashboard, or MAP. The most useful feature for me is that you can create your own plugin and monitoring query.

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. 

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.

One good feature is you can see a big picture of your entire infrastructure. If one component is not reachable, this doesn't mean that you have other hosts which are not reachable, and you can see the cause of it. You can see the reason why your servers or program aren't available to the public. Therefore, you can solve the problem and save a lot of time in detecting the problem, so you don't have to search for it. You can see the problem right in the traffic interface. 

Another thing that is very powerful in Centreon is the possibility to use third-party modules. You can integrate different modules into it, so you can use the collective data in different ways for different needs. You can also create some events with it for support tickets, which is great stuff. You can automatically create some support tickets to support your IT department for an efficient way to work.

The data visualization features are great because you can get a view of the past. You can see some concurrent data correlations, because you can see your data usage over the past couple of weeks or months, so you can do capacity planning for the future. E.g., for capacity management, if you have to expand your storage, then you have more possibilities to use third-party modules or you could also buy a commercial one, like Centreon MBI, which is an enterprise feature of Centreon. Using the module, you can create reports automatically. Another benefit could be to use Centreon BAM because there you can design business cases and define KPI to get notified in a special way of escalation (first-, second-, third-level support.)

The great thing about Centreon is that it is also based upon Nagios. However, Centroen also provides the EPP, Enterprise Plugin Pack. The plugins are capable of monitoring nearly all data you want. The only necessary thing to get to your goal is it needs the destination that you want to monitor. This means you will have to have an API or some other way to make a call to the destination, so the destination can respond to it. If this is possible, you can nearly monitor all things with Centreon. This is very nice because you can monitor technical stuff and also normal things, like availability of some services, which are being used by your customers, your colleagues, or yourself, so you may get a view of the functionality behind it.

Centreon is not just a monitoring system, because if you take care of it, you will get great documentation and an overview of your topology without spending additional time to create or achieve that goal.

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.

Centreon offers infrastructure monitoring.

Centreon's most valuable feature is Opsgenie.

We have a single GUI where we can view the status of all our infrastructure.

The reports are definitely good, although, to us, the most important thing is that action is taken. When events and things happen, it's important that they're acted upon and dealt with, and that we're notified. Reporting is one of those things that can be used to show a customer that you're doing your job, but the most important thing for us is using it to do our job.

The single-pane view provides us a view of all of our network infrastructure, and it is one of the most important tools that we use to see the status of our customers' networks. Being the monitoring environment, it doesn't really do remediation, so it is not our only tool. We have three core applications that we use, and Centreon is one of those very important applications. If you're a carpenter you need a hammer, or if you're a doctor, you need a stethoscope. It's one of those core tools that, if you don't have it, it's hard to do your job.

The most important thing in any kind of monitoring system is that it's set up correctly. If this is the case, where all of the correct relationships and workflow are mapped out such that you will see only the most important details, then the single-pane view is very useful and it can save a massive amount of time.

It provides a nice benefit when it comes to helping align IT operations with business objectives. The top-down views, dashboards, and business context reporting are things that are nice to have because you want to be able to show the customer that everything is working, that problems have been addressed, and that you're providing value. The customer is the most happy when there are issues that you uncover and they're quickly addressed.

It has certainly reduced our mean time to resolution. This is because it is set up properly so that we can figure out what the issue is as quickly as possible. Reducing noise is very important and it also helps increase the accuracy of the alerts that we're receiving.

When we started using it, our work was based on Nagios completely. What we like about it is that, whereas with Nagios, by design, if you have five or six data centers, you have to open five or six web pages to see what's going on, in Centreon, this is all included in one page, a single site, one dashboard. You don't have to jump from one specific dashboard to the other.

I also really like the filtering capabilities of it. You can easily tell what's critical next to what's okay, the state of the services. It's very easy to get the whole picture quickly.

In terms of the data visualization features, since we're not looking for anything too particular or too complex, it works for us. It's very easy to find exactly what alerts you have. It's very easy to filter by a specific alert. It's very easy to search. It's very easy to configure a specific relation between alerts, to see what's good and what's bad at a given place.

I would compare it to something like Excel, perhaps. Visually, it's very easy to work with. Maybe you can't do things that are too complicated or have some sort of BI, but it has what we're looking for. What we need to understand is: Where is the alert, is there anything else affected, is it clear? And then resolve it as fast as we can. It's a very straightforward, non-complex GUI.

You have one single view, which is good. As the administrator, the permissions are the same for every account in the Active Directory. 

We use the solution’s Anomaly Detection feature. It helps our teams to predict potential issues. I like this option for its graph. The graph is very good for when you want to look at evaluating your system over time. It also automates the alerting process. 

It is very easy to manage because the visibility is good.

I find the product's scalability to be one of the most valuable features since it allows us to add unlimited devices for monitoring and to set up additional polling servers without additional license cost or downtime in our monitoring.

You can concentrate and orchestrate several other solutions from other vendors. You can consolidate those solutions all in one place, then maintain and monitor from that single point. This creates ease of use. It is a very powerful solution from this point of view.

Centreon has some additional modules. Through these modules you can have all kinds of reporting and dashboarding, which are fully customizable, not only from the content point of view, but also from the graphical point of view. You can design, implement, and deploy real maps representing your services from a geographical and service point of view. So, executives can view their services, e.g., if there is an impact and which are the services impacted. In this way, you can strictly separate the dashboard for the technical stuff and create a separate dashboard for executives to see business information. These are the specific capabilities of Centreon. 

You can do some predictive metrics using the tools of Centreon. Therefore, you can have an alarm of sorts before some events can occur.

Connecting to any system, such as traditional on-prem, cloud, virtualized, or edge devices, is very simple. There are hundreds of plugins ready to be deployed with several key monitoring indicators that take place. This is very powerful because you can simply pick up the connectors made available by the plugin's package. 

You can use the API to develop any type of integration. The plugins for users are capable of covering the major vendors and other kinds of software, e.g., the major types of ticketing software that are widely available. 

What I like most about Centreon is that it is very flexible and customizable, based on the user and/or business needs. Centreon is very flexible when it comes to monitoring parameters. We can use scripts found on the internet or scripts created by our infra/apps team.

Also, the data visualization features are very simple and straightforward, yet very informative.

Finally, it is very simple and user-friendly. It is easy to understand and to make your way around it.

We use almost everything in the product. What is most important are the monitoring, alerting, and the dashboards. If we don't have basic monitoring, we don't have a NOC. It's the basis of the functionality of the system. 

The dashboards are valuable because they ease troubleshooting and viewing. It becomes easier to locate the source of a problem. We can use BAM for that as well, but we only have it in one of the installations, one that has the Centreon Business edition; the others are using the free version. The dashboards make it easier to communicate with our clients. They don't want to see the alert console, they want to see a beautiful dashboard representing their network and their business and to watch it in case something is wrong in their environment.

We use the reports, but not that much, although the reporting is very good. We use it for creating books, monthly reports for our clients. We use the reports for analysis and to say, "These ones require growing," or "This is too big. You can lower the memory and save some money on your cloud." That is a monthly service we provide to our clients. 

Centreon is also very versatile. There are a lot of built-in plugins that ease the work. But if we need to connect to some device that doesn't have a plugin ready, we can customize a plugin and create monitoring for the device ourselves. It's quite easy. When there is a plugin, it speeds the implementation of new devices. If there isn't one, it takes a little longer, but we are not unable to monitor the device. We are always able to monitor.

The most valuable feature of the solution is the flexibility, the ability to integrate all kinds of equipment. As long as something has an IP you can monitor it. What we try to achieve all the time is not only saying a company's system is available, but to give additional data on the performance of the equipment. So the flexibility is what matters the most to us, where we can script everything. Centreon has a lot of Plugin Packs, meaning they support, by design, a lot of devices. And on top of that, we have the ability to add our own scripts and do whatever we want and display the data as we want in the central dashboards.

The customizable reports and dashboards are really flexible. We started this partnership with Centreon, when we were looking for a solution, because of the flexibility of the reporting. That's what we found to be most attractive in the solution. You can display the data as you want. It's a bit tricky at first to understand how it works, how the data is organized, but once you go through the learning curve, the tool is really powerful.

Also, because we are able to segregate the data within Centreon, by customer, using the dashboards, we are able to see all our customers in one place, and bring all the relevant information to us directly.

The most valuable feature is the monitoring of servers and networks, because we have a lot of them and need to maintain control.

I can't point to one valuable feature. All of Centreon is good.

The most important feature is that it permits us to receive alarms if there is an incident within the infrastructure. 

The feature I love the most is the reporting feature, the MBI (Monitoring Business Intelligence) which permits us to send advanced reports to our customers in PDF format or in Doc format.

We also deploy Centreon Map which gives our customers intuitive views of their respective information systems.

The monitoring of our infrastructure, but it is very important to have a BI report because we must monetize everything. The monitoring is good, but we must also have a bigger view of the infrastructure. So, the BI report is very important.

All of it is valuable: 

• ability to schedule downtime
• intensity or depth of monitoring which it does
• different plugin packs
• Centreon MAP
• Centreon BI.

It supports active monitoring so we don't have to use traps. From time to time traps are not very useful because we never know if they are actually working or not. The reporting part is also valuable as are the event logs. Using them we can check right away if something has had a hiccup.

Also, the downtimes feature where, for example, if the ISP is doing some maintenance on its network, we have the option to put downtime on the devices or the services, so we won't get any false alarms.

The collection part, due to the flexibility and scalability.

• Predetermined templates, which allow for simple and fast service monitoring configuration.
• E-mail alert notifications
  

I've only really worked with the basic features of Centreon, including the monitoring and simple reporting for dashboards. 

I have seen on the demonstration that there are a lot of other features which could be interesting, however, I have not had the chance to really see them or deploy them for our customers. 

We have the business activity monitoring, the map, and the MBI modules and they are all very good.