It is helpful for asset management. We can discover customers' environments and see the pain areas. The infrastructure of one of the customers was big and segregated. They had one data center in the US and one in India, and they didn't know about the types or number of devices they had. We could collect all this information by using the Device42 discovery tool. It gave a holistic view of a data center or infrastructure. We could see the kind of devices they had and how they were interconnected. We could also see how many data domains they had and how the domains were interconnected. Once we had all this information, we could integrate it with CMDB. 

The best thing is that you can integrate it with different kinds of CMDBs. You can integrate with ServiceNow, BMC Remedy, or Jira. After integrating it with a CMDB, you can push all the discovered information about the servers and network devices into the CMDB, where you maintain all the asset details. CMDB is nothing but an asset management system. All the asset details are coming from the Device42 discovery tool. It is the main and holistic source of information for any asset management system. It is required to update your CMDB or asset management system because the scan happens on a regular basis and you get updated infrastructure details. Therefore, a discovery tool like Device42 is very helpful in your environment for getting the updated inventory of your infrastructure.

It has been helpful for cloud-migration projects. It provides a lot of good information that is helpful for preparing your cloud migration plan. You get good hardware-level and application-level information. You also get all the dependency information. Device42 also provides the current sizing of the device. By looking at the current sizing of the device, you can plan your target sizing. This information or reporting is helpful. There is basically a remote collector that does all the discovery work. It also provides you with the cloud readiness report to see which device is ready to move to the cloud, and it also provides you with a comparison such as which cloud is suitable for the device or whether it should go to Azure, AWS, or Google Cloud. The cloud readiness report helps you to do better migration planning.

The most challenging part of a cloud migration project is the discovery and assessment phase. If you don't have good tools in your hand for the discovery information and assessment report, it takes a lot of time. In a cloud migration project, most time goes into the discovery and assessment phase, but if you have Device42, within 20 days, you get all the discovery, dependency, and sizing data. You also get the cloud readiness report. So, you save 80% to 90% of your time by having all this information readily available to you. If you do all these things manually, it would take you almost six months to collect all this data. 

It has helped to solve day-to-day IT problems faster. Device42 is the main source of information for any CMDB. In the previous IT era, the support team used to do monitoring manually. If a server crashed, they would raise a request or a P1 incident in the ITSM tool. With Device42, all the server information is in the CMDB. We can create automation where if any server is having an issue or has crashed, it can check the details of that server from the CMDB, and through the orchestration tool, it can create a ticket. It raises an alert, and through that alert, it creates a ticket in ITSM. That ticket is automatically assigned to the support team. The support team gets the notification that a P1 ticket has come to the queue and resolves the ticket. If there is a known issue, the orchestration tool can also automatically resolve the problem. For example, if it is a RAM issue and a particular service is stopped, then through automation, you can automatically start that service, and your server is up and running again. So, a lot of time is saved through this automation. It has saved about 70% of the time.

It helps to save costs. You have all your infrastructure information in one place in a CMDB. So, you are not managing anything manually. You are saving the money that you would have had to pay five to six consultants to manage your CMDB. Managing infrastructure is not easy, and you need to put a team together to manage your infrastructure. Device42 manages your infrastructure automatically. 

Its reports help you to consolidate things and close any gaps. It provides a utilization report through which you get to know which server is under-utilized and which server is over-utilized in the environment. You can decommission the servers that are less utilized and save money. For the servers that are more utilized, you can increase the RAM or CPU. So, it helps in reducing the size of your infrastructure and consolidating it. If one server is running an application, you can put that application on another server and decommission the server. You can consolidate the applications that are running on different servers and save money through this approach. Similarly, if you are using multiple network devices for the same purpose, you can consolidate those. You can remove the network devices that are not being utilized or are not useful. By looking at the reports and seeing the information that Device42 gives, you can create a consolidation plan for the server side, as well as the infrastructure side.

Device42 is a core solution at my company. Everything uses Device42 data. People in the company use Device42 to understand our needs in the cloud and define automated tasks. It is our source of truth for data manipulation and management in the cloud. We are unaware of what's happening in the cloud without it.

It helps with migration and many other projects involving large amounts of data. Device42 is also our tool for those jobs. It is one of the primary resources we use to execute these projects successfully.

Device42 helps us with decision-making about resources like CPU, memory, hard disks, etc. Using information from the cloud, we can determine if we need to buy more equipment or decommission and replace outdated devices. It significantly speeds up daily tasks. It's hard to quantify in a percentage because it's comparing a manual task to automation. Without Device42, we had to run scripts manually to understand the data assets on the basic level of it. 

Device42 has a module called Utilization that runs on devices to show you how servers are being used. If you migrate to Azure or AWS, you can see the resources the server is using versus what has been allocated to the device. For example, if a server has eight CPUs and 16 gigs of ram, Device42 can tell you whether you need that capacity after you migrate to the cloud. I've run the utilization tool on customers and found they have multiple unused servers switched on and consuming power. They can turn those servers off. 

It has a new component called Insights+ that includes some preset dashboards and they plan to release more that are tailored to specific customer needs in the next few releases. It's a visualization tool that executives can check themselves, so I no longer need to output reports to an Excel spreadsheet and send them to the CEO. 

Insights+ saves some time. I know where to find the data, but it's more convenient for management because a CEO or CTO only needs to input the server name, and all the information comes up. You can see an overview of all your devices, like the number of virtual machines, laptops, desktops, etc. It is all visualized, so it's easier to find all the data on the dashboard than in an Excel spreadsheet. It doesn't necessarily save me time because I'm not the one viewing the reports, but it saves management time because they're easier to read. They don't need to comb through multiple worksheets of data to find what they need. 

Instead of migrating a server, we perform migrations based on applications because many live on the same servers. Device42 uses application dependency mapping to show incoming and outgoing dependencies from a server 

When you're migrating, you start with one application and look at the servers within that application. One application might turn into four, so you end up migrating four applications to save the customer time. Instead of having one server down four weekends in a row, you do it all on one weekend and migrate all of the servers within several applications. Device42 is an efficient migration tool, and you can leverage the utilization tool to see everything inside the device that's being used. The migration features can save you 30-40% of your time because you can see what you're doing. 

Device42 helps us troubleshoot issues faster. For example, in one of my last projects, I was discovering network switches. We got an error during discovery, so I told the customer that the switches were down before they knew themselves. It isn't a monitoring tool per se, but it can do some monitoring that helps the customer. 

It doesn't help you monitor daily, but it helps you understand what you have and the communications between each device. That's where it will help you rather than telling you when a device goes down. It really depends on how you want to use it.

In addition to discovering all your assets. Device42 has built-in CMBD functionality, so people can consolidate their applications. You get CMDB and IP address management built into Device42, so you can get rid of other applications. Other customers use NetBox, but Device42 includes NetBox information, so they got rid of that. 

Device 42 is an upgrade from those other tools because it knows what you've got. There is integration with other tools, but Device42 is close enough to real-time that the integration could potentially be once a day. If something gets upgraded and your information is sent over to ServiceNow, it will always be behind depending on how many times you sync with ServiceNow, whereas Device42 is written in real-time.

We had hoped to use Device42 to solve IT problems faster, but I was laid off before we fully implemented it. 

When we're doing patch management or when we're reviewing kit (end-of-life), it gives us the ability to manage the data center from a desk. Before we had Device42, we'd have spreadsheets or somebody would have to continually to go to the data center and physically have a look at what's available where. If somebody bought or wanted to buy new kit — if they needed, for example, six U's of space, 10 network ports and five power ports — we'd have to visit the data center and have a look at where we could fit that in. With Device42, we don't need to do any of that. We just need an internet connection to get to the Device42 appliance and we can see where the space is and what the power availability is, as well as what network capacity we've got, in which rack. Everything is there.

The continuous discovery of the infrastructure means we are able to review, and we are able to mitigate things in a quicker fashion than we would have previously. If somebody had asked us five years ago how many Server 2008's we have, because we've got a vulnerability and we need to know how many servers we need to patch, it would have taken us some time to find that out. We would have had to go through all the different platforms and find out where we're hosting 2008 Servers. With Device42, we can go in and, within 10 minutes, tell the business how many servers we need to patch.

Also, the solution's CMDB, ITAM, and DCIM features create a single source of IT truth in our environment. These too make it a lot easier for the operations team. When incidents come up on the operations monitor, that team can easily ascertain who the owner is of these devices, where they sit, and who's responsible for them. They ensure the correct people get things looked at much quicker.

In addition, we're currently on a cloud project, so we have been using the solution to assess what we have in our environment, what we want to take to the new environment, what we need to drop in terms of hardware, the age of the hardware, as well as end-of-life operating systems or applications. It has helped us a lot with getting that kind of data.

We use the solution’s Application Dependency Mapping and that gives us some insight into a number of things. For example, if we're looking at a server that currently has a problem, the operations team can look at the Application Dependency Mapping and see what the server is part of in terms of the service. There may be a number of things that are connecting to it or that it's connecting to. That mapping gives us that insight into how parts of the infrastructure are talking to each other.

Previously, when it came to asset management, people would have been updating spreadsheets or documents about where they've moved things or what they've been doing, or they would have had to visit multiple areas to find out certain information. Device42 turns that into a hands-off approach to everything. We know it has been doing discovery continuously over evenings and weekends. So whatever data we are pulling out is fairly up to date. The time saved by using Device42, across the teams, is easily equivalent to a couple of people at least. A full-time member of staff would normally work seven-and-a-half hours every day so you're looking at 146 hours a month of savings, times two, of people not having to visit data centers to do things like capacity planning, auditing, etc.

We also use Device42 for internal audits. In that context, it saves a considerable amount of time. If we were to do it manually, we're looking at a couple of weeks' worth of work, but if we're doing it in Device42 we're probably looking at a couple of days' worth, maximum.

There was a lack of information about what was installed in the data center and how they interconnect with each other. We had the information in Excel before. We installed Device42 to get the information from our environment into the Device42 database.

The solution supports our compliance and audit processes. We take a lot of advantage of it. We use the reporting to audit institutions. We can send the queries and get the reports directly from the tool. I rate the process an eight out of ten. I would have rated it ten if the product had AI features.

Device42 instantly improved password management because we didn't have a solid solution for that. Upon installing it, I saw that was one of the little hidden gems of functionality for this. Instead of going with a single solution or platform that we weren't interested in for password management, we have that built into this functionality. It covers a lot of bases and hits a lot of points needed for an IT department. Everything is all in one boat and the solution links up to LDAPs. Whereas, if you don't go with them, you may need to get two or three solutions from different companies or providers. 

It has definitely given us an idea of dependency mapping. We have been trying to see what we can do to link all of our applications. This would improve our security posture for auditing into Device42, as we integrate that with Jira, then link all three together. It's still a work in progress, but it's getting there.

When all data centers have been added, it will be a success at this time. It is a time saving tool because we can connect all our other tools to Device42, which gives them the advantage to speak with Device42 and the ability to use data in all directions.

Device42 will be our single point of truth, and only Device42. There will be no other tool, no other person, and no other Excel sheet; it will be only Device42.

A big plus for Device42 was the auto-discovery. With it, we have updated devices, updated systems, and up-to-date systems. 

We had all the information in a mix of spreadsheets, homegrown applications, and databases, and then we moved it all into Device42. For example, we had one system that was tracking our device inventory, and we had spreadsheets for IP address allocations, while password management was completely separate. This solution really enabled us to lump everything together in one place.

Having the ability to see how things are connected and keeping track of, for example, which server, and which ports on the servers are plugged into which network switches is very helpful when we're looking at network troubleshooting, and we want to do things like mirror ports and mirror traffic. Tracking which MAC addresses belong to which devices is also linked in there.

The topology view enables us to show how our applications interact with each other and with the rack elevation we can see the equipment in each individual rack and which power outlets they're plugged into. That has also been really handy in a few cases.

It definitely saves us time, but I don't know how to quantify it because we've been using it for such a long time. I don't remember what kind of time it took to track down information in the past. Right now, it's super-simple to find whatever we're looking for. I would imagine it saves us a few hours each week.

I know they're using Device42 to prep for moving stuff to the cloud. I'm not aware if they've used that data to move an app to the cloud yet. I think we are still learning the product and figuring how to get the data out so we can get the right reports, giving us the information we need.

I like the solution’s agentless approach to asset discovery because the IT and OS teams don't want to go install and maintain an agent on their systems. It's just more overhead when they have to do something like that and make sure there's enough space on the server. It's nice that it's agentless, as it will go out and connect, then do its thing.

It is not about the app affecting our security. Instead, it is about how the app will change to adapt to our security, which is very tight. Security was discussed from the very beginning and all the way through. However, we didn't change for the app. The way we deployed the app, it had to change to fit our security.

It is good tool for our customers if they want to go into the details of their infrastructure for migrating their on-prem environment to the cloud.

Device42 provides almost all the details of your infrastructure. Its reporting is very good. It has reports that you can fetch easily and are easily readable. There are a few scripts that you can also use for downloading reports in different formats.

It requires only two or three ports to be open while doing discovery. Therefore, you can have an environment which can be installed in a DMZ environment or on the customer's environment. It won't affect the security or customer's infrastructure.

Continuous asset discovery lets you continuously monitor the resource utilization when using Device42, such as: 

• Resources being used on your infrastructure. 
• If there are new communications happening on your servers, then they are being captured in Device42. 
• If there are any changes in your CMDB infrastructure, they are getting captured in your Device42 reports. 

You can download also these reports with a ServiceNow and other tools.

Customers are constantly expanding the environment. So, it's easier for us to keep track of how many devices have been added. We are using another tool for monitoring, and we are using Device42 as data storage. Whatever devices have been decommissioned and commissioned are in it. So, it's a central database for us. We are not relying on just one tool for device information.

Device42 is a source of trust for many things in our company, like IP addresses. In the past, we tried to have IP addresses centralized in an Excel spreadsheet, but now we have built automation to get information from Device42 with an API call. As a result, it's possible to deploy a new VM in 15 minutes and all the information is pulled from Device42, by our automation, to build that new VM.

It's the same for load balancers. When we want to create a new virtual IP for load balancers, we have it automated with an API call and Device42 provides all the information needed to get the job done. So Device42 helps us to build automation into our infrastructure.

Device42 is also a source of trust for our security scan. When a vulnerability is detected in our system, the system automatically looks for information in Device42 to find out who owns the server that has the vulnerabilities and what the contact email is for that team, etc.

The continuous discovery for us works daily. We can be sure, if a device has been updated, that information will be correct in Device42. We are tracking which devices haven't been updated in the last few days and, for each of them we try to understand why, and to fix things so that the discovery does update those devices' information.

I don't know if we can say it has reduced the time we spend on asset management, but in that same amount of time, we now have reliable information. In the past, we were not confident about the information we had. Now, we expect that the information we have is correct.

Also, we have many audits each year. Each audit requires us to provide evidence about how we manage our assets. There are inventory questions and it's easy for us to provide an audit report. When an auditor asks us information, we just have to a share-screen and show him, in 10 minutes, how we manage our assets, and he understands that everything is correctly managed. The audit is very quick.

Having general software inventory in one location has helped us tremendously, even around Service Desk. Our Service Desk tool integrates into the asset management. When a user calls with a problem, we can link their device to it. Then we see a history: 

• Do they have old, aging hardware?
• Does it need to be replaced?
• Is this model continuing calling in for issues?

We have been able to make educated decisions about replacing hardware and software due to this solution.

We are doing discovery of cloud asset management devices. This has given us more rich enhanced data to make decisions on where to place things based on like-minded services.

I have used the solution in conjunction with audits of our IT assets. I am able to pull reports in minutes instead of it taking days of putting everything together.

It has helped us identify some areas of security enhancements.

We faced outages in the data center before implementing Device42. The tool has improved it and helped us with asset management. 

Because I was using the solution to track our assets and see which ones were secure and which were not, so that we could better secure the latter, just having them all in one place definitely made it easier in some ways.

If I hadn't had Device42, I would have had to manually go through each asset, and that would not have been fun.

The way Device42 has improved our organization is that we now have visibility into our on-premises infrastructure. Previously, we didn't have any access to or visibility into it because we had consultancy firms. With this solution, we're able to see what is going on inside. That visibility helps us understand the impact of a problem.

It has also saved us money because we no longer have to pay the baselines of the contracts with consultancy firms. It is saving us 2 percent, but that is a lot.

The fact that the solution provides continuous asset discovery is key to our operation because we treat our instances like cattle, not pets. If something breaks in the build or along any step of the way, or something just stops responding, normally we just shoot it and spin another one up. So we have to have something that notices that something remotely changed, and that can then pull that back into the records inside of Device42.

The solution's CMDB, ITAM, and DCIM features absolutely create a single source of IT truth in our environment. That's why we use Device42; because that is what we have to have. When I worked at Bluehost, we were using Act! tables and they were really painful to use as a source of truth because they were never kept up to date. Device42 is much easier to keep up to date. And because of the way it works, and the reports that it has, we all trust it as our IP address management tool. It's the best IPAM tool out there.

And deployment of the solution has definitely increased our security posture because you can only secure what you know about. If you don't know about it, you can't make sure that it's secure.

We were working with Excel sheets and they were not automatic and were difficult to administrate and update. It required manual work every time we needed to add new hardware or new virtuals. With the automatic discovery in the tool, we have been able to leave these Excel sheets behind.

The continuous asset discovery is great. For example, a few months ago we installed new racks with new servers and, with automatic discovery, all the new racks are showing inside the tool. The people who have a password to get into the tool can check what kind of hardware was installed and how many virtual machines are inside the servers. That's great.

The solution's CMDB, ITAM, and DCIM features create a single source of IT truth in our environment. For us this has had a very good impact. It's easier for our managers and others who consume this tool. We can show to the rest of the teams how things have become more visible throughout the company.

Device42 has also saved us a lot of time, not necessarily in managing the devices but in collecting the devices. And with the inventory tool, we discovered that we have a lot of old things configured in the devices. That saved us a lot of time because, for example, we had old VLANs around that had been forgotten. With the tool, we can discover which devices have old configurations and we can remote to them and remove these configurations. If we didn't have the tool, we might have to go into each, device by device, numbering in the hundreds or thousands of devices, and check if they have this configuration in them. But with the Device42, we have this information in a few minutes. A task that might take two or three hours a day can be achieved in 40 minutes.

In security, we can check specific things that have to be configured in devices. While the security team is not 100 percent involved in the project, they have started to use the tool to check different security things on the networking devices. With the inventory check, they can see if a specific configuration in various routers has already been configured.

Before Device42, the company didn't have any kind of asset management software at all. So if there were to be a fire in an office, for example, and we would want to make a claim on insurance, we would have had no idea what, exactly, we had in that office. Now that we have Device42, we're integrating every single office into it so we know exactly what's where. That's a huge improvement.

It has also reduced the amount of time spent on managing our IT assets. It has probably halved the time it takes to do the management side of it.

It makes it easier for anyone to find an asset in a cabinet and it makes it easier for me to figure out if I have room and/or power in a cabinet to rack servers.

It has also reduced the time spent managing our IT assets by a good 40 to 50 percent. We have also used the solution in conjunction with audits of our IT assets and, in that context, it saves a lot of time when everything's right there at your fingertips. I would estimate that it saves 50 to 60 percent, in terms of time, when doing audits.

Previously, our company had a lot of issues keeping track of all the data centers and the inventory, as well as the purchase orders. All of these were managed by other tools. The good thing about Device42 is that it can be used for all this together. We don't need to spend time checking many other tools and files.

The solution has reduced the time spent managing our IT assets. It's an easy-to-use program and everything is pretty understandable. We are able to manage everything pretty quickly, definitely saving time with the tool. For every task, my colleagues have told me that they save between five and 15 minutes. There might be some 30 tasks to do during the day, so it can save a lot of time.