We compared IBM SevOne Network Performance Monitoring and Pandora FMS 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. Pandora FMS is highly regarded for its straightforward management process, effective dashboards, and efficient network monitoring capabilities.
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 Pandora FMS could make its dashboards more customizable and improve its integration with other systems. Many also said they would like Pandora to add APIs for integration and offer better out-of-the-box analytics.
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. Pandora FMS support received high praise for their expertise, kindness, and fast response time.
Ease of Deployment: The setup process for IBM SevOne NPM is described as quick and uncomplicated, although some users may require extra configuration. Most users found Pandora FMS’s initial setup to be relatively easy.
Pricing: IBM SevOne NPM is seen as costly, particularly for smaller businesses. Pandora FMS is considered reasonably priced, and the total cost depends on the environment.
ROI: IBM SevOne NPM offers features such as device maintenance and out-of-the-box reports that contribute to its value. Pandora FMS has also demonstrated advantages in terms of return on investment.
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. Users like Pandora FMS’s management and monitoring capabilities as well as its dashboards, but the solution has been criticized for its compatibility issues, limited customization options, and slower performance.
"We can manage the entire system across the network and troubleshoot the pain points."
"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."
"Data Insight reporting tool is the most valuable feature. They came up with it a couple of years ago. The most pleasing factor is the dark theme. You don't have a white background. It has templates that you can create for all kinds of reports that you can hit on the fly. It's much better printing of the reports. If you want to send PDFs to people, the reports are actually decent. Whereas for years, the old architecture of the PDFs was rubbish and even our customers said, "We have to manipulate your PDFs because they all have bad margin breaks. SevOne fixed that a couple of years ago with the new Data Insight. It's fantastic."
"With this tool it is interesting to show the info to the client and explain where the traffic is."
"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."
"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."
"The SMP and the xStats, which is for flat file integration, are both useful for integrating the various metrics that the device provides to monitor the performance of those systems."
"It's given us the ability to create various real-time network performance reports and distribute them to any colleague who can access these reports immediately."
"We find that the reporting is particularly valuable in terms of not only communicating with our peer teams but also with the executives."
"Thanks to this software and to the work of the support team, we have everything under control."
"It is easy to create your own custom modules if you just know a little bit of scripting. If you have unique requirements, you can just make your own modules. You can even grab checks from other vendors. There are open-source checks for various things such as SMTP, etc. There is a long list of different ones from Nagios. You can just use them, and within seconds, you get yourself a check that is monitoring whatever you need. It is really flexible. I guess that's why they call it Pandora Flexible Monitoring System (FMS). It is reliable. It does the job, and it alerts. It is also surprisingly feature-rich. Our network guy just recently asked about a particular protocol to monitor the bandwidth on the network, which is not a common protocol. When I looked it up, and I found that they cover it. It is very mature for a not-so-known product."
"Pandora FMS provides us with a general report (graphical) about all of the connected devices, which helps with planning new stations and tracking them."
"You can configure several types of architecture for high availability or load balancing."
"The most valuable features are auto-discovery and automatic detection of the network topology and network monitoring."
"The solution is so lightweight that with only 4GB of ram, it allows keeping track of up to two hundred agents from a single console."
"I like this solution a lot because it has a very large Hispanic community and the platform looks very friendly."
"It provides us with proactive monitoring and is very easy to configure and maintain."
"The Wi-Fi side needs improvement."
"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."
"SevOne should work with the graphs legend functionality."
"In terms of having a complete view of our network performance, I would rate it a nine out of 10. The reason for not giving it a 10 is that there is no packet capture associated with SevOne, but we do have other tools in place to do that."
"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."
"The reporting of NMS is good, but it could be better."
"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."
"There are some tweaks and enhancements that I've already requested. One is to be able to make changes per device rather than as a global setting. That has to do with naming. It's minor."
"The user management features need to be improved. It would be nice if we had more granular control, or layers of control, out of the box."
"The product lacks APIs for integration with other systems."
"We would like the real-time monitoring of an interface to be improved within this solution."
"A nice feature in the next release would be an automation module to run workflow actions."
"I would like for the solution to be faster and have a better tolerance between parallel servers for Pandora and Pest Control."
"Their support is good, but it is just online communication. It would be great to be able to just call someone and talk to them instead of always writing. It works well for me because I am a decent communicator in email, but some people might find it difficult to describe in a written fashion and communicate with them that way. There is a learning curve to the interface, but once you get used to it, it is actually very powerful. They have a lot of options, but people struggle with the interface. They've improved it though, and it is getting better. They need to keep improving the learning curve to help buy-in. I'm the guy that manages it, so I'm comfortable with it. They can refine the upgrade agents to be easier. They can also do more refinement in end-user usability because not everyone is strong technically, and people who aren't strong technically might be averse to the product, even though it has come a long way. It has a complete GUI and everything."
"Improvements are needed for server and network discovery, including service-based discovery."
"We would like to see improvement in the mainframe integration that this solution is capable of."
"When it comes to the definition of local Software Agents for the first time in the open-source version, it can become very tedious."
More IBM SevOne Network Performance Management (NPM) Pricing and Cost Advice →
IBM SevOne Network Performance Management (NPM) is ranked 41st in Network Monitoring Software with 52 reviews while Pandora FMS is ranked 29th in Network Monitoring Software with 22 reviews. IBM SevOne Network Performance Management (NPM) is rated 8.6, while Pandora FMS is rated 9.2. 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 Pandora FMS writes "The open architecture is easy to extend and enhance". IBM SevOne Network Performance Management (NPM) is most compared with LogicMonitor, Instana Infrastructure Monitoring, SolarWinds NPM, Splunk Enterprise Security and SolarWinds Network Device Monitor, whereas Pandora FMS is most compared with Zabbix, PRTG Network Monitor, Wazuh, Nagios XI and SolarWinds NPM. See our IBM SevOne Network Performance Management (NPM) vs. Pandora FMS report.
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