Device42 Valuable Features

Krishna Gopal Singh - PeerSpot reviewer
Consultant at Wipro Limited

The reporting part is valuable. You have classic reports, and you can also do advanced reporting. They also have the DOQL feature for queries. You can write SQL queries to get your data and create custom reports.

You can do Application Dependency Mapping (ADM) and design your rack rooms and buildings. You get a tree view of all the servers. You can see how a server is dependent on other servers. You can create a dependency mapping and see which server or device is connected to which devices and on which ports. Affinity is another useful feature.

It does agentless discovery, and it also supports agent-based discovery. You can put an agent on the target server, and you can do the discovery through the agent. Agentless discovery is a good feature where you can discover the target environment without putting an agent. It is similar to credential-based discovery. You just need a service account on all the servers. You don't need to put an agent, whereas when you go for agent-based discovery or scanning, you need to put an agent on the target device. You also need to restart or reboot the device after putting the agent for which sometimes you don't get approval because they are production servers. In such a case, you go with the agentless approach and just configure the service account on the target server. You do a lightweight scan and get most of the information from the infrastructure side in terms of application dependency and server dependency. However, some of the information is missing when you are not using an agent. If you have an agent on a target server, you can also get information about the software running on the server, whereas with the agentless approach, you can't get that information. This is a difference between agentless and agent-based discovery. Agentless discovery is good if you want to start using the tool because you don't need to get any approval for putting in an agent and rebooting the device. That's why most people go with the agentless approach.

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LB
Cloud automation developer at Clarivate Analytics

The REST API abilities enable us to run scripts that push information from our servers about every aspect, from the bottom up like hardware, software, storage mounts, etc. Anything we need is pushed through REST API to the Device42 server and reflected in the report it generates. 

Device42 has auto-discovery abilities, but it isn't our primary data source of truth. The agentless discovery is crucial because it reduces our dependencies and any problems that might arise between an agent and a server. Without an agent, we only need to report to Device42 using REST API. The auto-discovery that Device42 provides is agentless. It retrieves the information directly from the network or through tools like SNMP, requiring less configuration and no dependencies.

Device42 auto-discovery is divided into a few things. There is the generic discovery that browses anything on the network and gets feedback from the network about what's there. And there's another kind of discovery more specific to Cisco discovery elements or other tools like DNS, CyberArk, etc.

It depends on the license the customer buys from Device42. The benefit is getting information by installing Device42 and running that feature without more complex configuration or integration. It also has other integration and plugins with companies like ServiceNow and CyberArk and many more. 

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AHMEDKASSAB - PeerSpot reviewer
Manager, Technical Delivery at GE

One of the most valuable features, in my experience, is the precise tracking of hardware devices and their locations registered in the solution. 

Device42 allows us to determine the exact placement of assets based on the building maps and the room details. This feature has allowed us to gain the upper hand on the customers and provide them with satisfaction because they can visually see the arrangement of their assets within the organization.

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Buyer's Guide
Device42
March 2024
Learn what your peers think about Device42. Get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions. Updated: March 2024.
765,386 professionals have used our research since 2012.
LeBarron Durant - PeerSpot reviewer
System Admin at a tech services company with 51-200 employees

The most helpful feature in Device42 was the import feature, where you can seamlessly import your information into the configuration database manager. It was straightforward to get everything in there. It was also easy to find basic information, such as the RAM and device information.

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MR
MR at a financial services firm with 201-500 employees

I like the discovery tool because it finds everything the customers have. Many customers don't know what is installed on their networks, and Device42 will tell them. As long as the customer gives us details about their networks, Device42 will discover everything on that subnet, including Windows, Unix, and Linux devices, or network devices, such as switches, routers, storage, and physical servers. 

They've also just created some new interactive dashboards. CEOs can see and interact with the data rather than scrolling through endless Excel worksheets to find what they need.

Device42 can do agentless and agent-based discovery. It depends on the customer's infrastructure. Agentless is good because you don't have to install anything on customer devices, but they need to create accounts with permission to read or log onto the devices and pull back the data. Both methods are helpful. For example, you can install agents onto laptops, so it automatically sends device information back to Device42 when the users log on. 

I have used Device42's data center infrastructure management when customers required it. I'm a Device42 consultant, so I deliver what the customer needs. For example, I can show them what they've got at their data centers. If they need to add a new server to a rack, you can see it on the screen before you go to the data center and identify the spaces in the rack where it should go. 

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Rodney K Wright II - PeerSpot reviewer
Windows System Administrator II at a tech services company with 201-500 employees

The topology layout is the most valuable feature. The IT asset discovery was fairly thorough. Device42 is still a growing technology, but it has an active user base and decent customer support. The data center infrastructure management features are essential.

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YS
Systems Manager at Coventry University

One of the most valuable features is its ability to auto-discover a lot of the infrastructure, without having to manually put everything in. The auto-discovery is brilliant. You can have it scheduled to run on a regular basis, and the infrastructure is always getting updated within the platform. I would rate the asset discovery very highly. It's very comprehensive. It covers quite a lot of different methods for doing discovery and it supports a lot of different types of hardware as well.

The agentless discovery is the one thing that makes this a brilliant tool. The fact that you don't have to deploy an agent onto anything and you can do discovery directly through the appliance, just with credentials, is what really makes it stand out.

It's also easy for everybody to go into it and search for something, and the searching is very quick as well. You can get to get the information very quickly.

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GS
IT Business Analyst at a university with 5,001-10,000 employees
  • The password management feature
  • Data center management and tracking
  • Room management
  • Application Dependency Mapping
  • Automated asset tracking and inventory

Any successful IT department needs to have the functionalities that these features provide, whether through Device42 or through a different support application. The better that they can be supported, the more organized and successful a department will be, especially when an outage/issue comes up. Device42 has everything in one place and links it altogether. This helps when you need to figure out where things are going wrong, where things are happening, or how everything is linked together.

Application Dependency Mapping is in a lot of places scattered through different applications. We are trying to centralize that into Device42. When you first start, you look at things like they are just one application or issue. However, when you can think of it as a dependency map, then you can trace any issue you have back to the source and figure out where the issue is happening and what will be affected when I change this one thing. It has improved our thinking about an IP application or IT system in a sense that everything is linked together and one thing will change another.

The asset discovery is pretty comprehensive and covers everything needed.

The solution provides continuous asset discovery, which is great. If there wasn't continuous discovery, then there would be no way to have devices updated if things changed.

Right now, we have full use of the password management functionality that Device42 provides. The main thing is everyone can login to use it for all their setup. This is the password management under "Secrets".

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SM
Sr. System Engineer at a tech services company with 201-500 employees

The auto-discovery and API are big values for us. We like these features because:

  • They make requests easy against the Device42 system. 
  • They are an open standard that we can use for all our other systems, connecting to all our other systems. 

The solution’s automatic IT asset discovery and inventory functionality is a great feature. It was a great idea to create this functionality because we have thousands of systems. To do this manually, it's really a pain.

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JR
Corporate Information Technology Manager at SupplyPoint

Just having this solution at all has been really solid for us. If I had to pick one part of it, it would be a toss-up between the IP address tracking and the password management. I'm not sure which one of those I'd rank higher.

We have a lot of different devices and some of them have many IP addresses, so keeping track of which ones are assigned where is very critical for putting new devices on the network and giving them new addresses. All of our devices are statically assigned, so if we don't keep good records then we could accidentally assign a duplicate, which would cause problems on the network.

As far as password management goes, before we had this we didn't have anything. We had shared passwords, which is always a horrible idea. Now we have the ability to know who has accessed a password, who's looked at it, and when it's been used or when it's been changed. That's helped us from a security standpoint.

In addition, the solution has some very good relational capabilities that show us how certain devices relate to each other and how some of our environment actually works together.

It also helps us track equipment replacement to know when we have swapped out parts and how much money we've spent on a particular server over its lifetime. We try to utilize all the pieces of it that we currently license.

We use it to track our servers, storage, switches, firewalls, and most recently we started putting our desktops and laptops in it too.

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CC
Lead DevOps Engineer at a financial services firm with 5,001-10,000 employees

The most valuable feature would be the scanning stuff: the discovery. It has a lot of different hardware that it can talk to, providing a lot of good information. The way the solution’s automatic IT asset discovery and inventory functionality works is you set up a discovery job, then you can schedule it to run. I schedule all of the runs daily at different times so nothing is interfering with anything else. It's nice to know that you can set up the scan, schedule it, and sit back. You can check them every day and make sure everything ran, making sure nothing had errors, then you're good to go. Anything new is going to automatically be discovered, which is nice. It takes some of the stress off because you don't have to know, "If this team opened new servers, we need make sure now it will automatically pick them up." It is one less thing to worry about. It gathers a lot of data points.

We use the solution’s Application Dependency Mapping. It was the biggest reason that we went with Device42. I've seen some eyes open in surprise, for example, "Whoa, I didn't realize this talked to so many things." It's really eyeopening. This is the whole point of app dependencies. Sometimes, you're not able to take a step back, look at the big picture, and go, "Wow, things talk to other things a lot more than we thought they did."

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DP
Technical Service Engineer at Fujitsu
  • Device42 is very easy to install.
  • It has lighter graphics. The graphics are easily loadable.
  • The front-end is good and user-friendly. 
  • It provides network device discovery and Application Dependency Mapping.
  • It has agentless discovery; you don't need to put agents on your servers. You can open one or two ports to discover all your infrastructure.
  • It has a Remote Collector facility where you can use that facility to discover your DMZ environment as well as your load balancers and domain appliances.
  • It provides inbound and outbound connections for your servers.
  • Application Dependency Mapping helps us understand on which servers are our applications dependent and what things affect our application.
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BA
Senior Monitoring Tools Associate at a financial services firm with 51-200 employees

The import/export for bulk operations is a valuable and good feature. 

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FS
Manager, Hosting Operations at a tech vendor with 10,001+ employees

We use asset management and program management. For some implementations, we also use the software management.

We use the automatic IT asset discovery for different things, like VMware discovery and SNMP discovery for network devices. It helps us to keep hardware information up to date in Device42, and the VMware discovery helps us to keep virtual device inventory up to date. It helps us ensure that we don't have more entries in Device42 than we have in our actual co-location and that we don't have more virtual servers than we have in Device42. We are sure to have 100 percent of our devices in Device42. Not more, not less.

The agentless approach to asset discovery is a good option. Sometimes it's better off to have agents, but in our environment, for most of our servers, it's really good to have the agentless. For a few of them we would prefer to have an agent because, from the network perspective, it's sometimes difficult to allow external Device42 discovery to have access to some devices for security reasons. The security team does not allow certain kinds of access. That's why it's easier if the secured server can have a call to an external service, rather than an external service calling the server.

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JK
Manager, Endpoint Management at a retailer with 10,001+ employees

The asset inventory and software inventory are the most valuable features. The asset inventory is great because previously we had devices all over the place. We have been able to do multiscans to find devices that we didn't know about, which was great. From the software aspect, we have been able to keep a detailed history of software that has been installed on machines and version controls. Then, we are able to make educated decisions on, "Is this software being installed as a one-off and part of the corporate image or should it be deprecated as the software gets older where we plan to do upgrades this way?"

The solution’s automatic IT asset discovery and inventory functionality was great when we first implemented it. We made some changes that didn't allow us to use some of those automated discovery tools. However, the software was good and adapted to our needs. We just went in a different way using the same software. The asset discovery is very comprehensive. We found a lot of information that we didn't even know we had.

We use the solution’s Application Dependency Mapping. It has been able to help us with troubleshooting. We now have a deeper understanding of how our applications talk to each other.

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ON
Security Engineer at Protego trust

I like the tool's agentless discovery feature. The tool configures the devices based on the documentation provided. I am also impressed with its auto-discovery feature. The tool also keeps on tracking and finds whatever is in the environment. 

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Cayla Evans - PeerSpot reviewer
Incoming Data Security Analyst at a tech vendor with 1-10 employees

The most valuable feature was the ability to look up the different assets and see the different attributes that each one has, as well as being able to compare them to other assets.

It's also very important that the software provides agentless discovery.

In addition, I really enjoyed the dashboards and visuals. It was easy to navigate.

A lot of our assets didn't have information, which either meant someone wasn't keeping things up-to-date or just we didn't have enough information to go on. But for what we did have, the analytics were decent.

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KA
Technical Officer at a tech services company with 11-50 employees

We haven't been used to it for a long while, however, it's actually essential for our customers. 

Device42 is a really impressive tool. Their discovery seems to be really coordinated, in the sense that we have different types of discoveries we can actually run. That's one unique aspect about them. 

The way they manage the assets, in general, is actually impressive, and the way they recognize, the software is good. 

The fact that you really don't need to put an agent on is helpful. That's really an impressive aspect of the product overall.

The initial setup is easy.

The stability is good. 

The pricing is reasonable.

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AS
Cloud Engineer at a computer software company with 1,001-5,000 employees

The features that I have found to be most valuable in the product are the

  • service discovery
  • business applications
  • application mapping between services.

The agentless discovery is very important because I don't have to install agents on every host.

Also, the Insights+ component is useful for us because it does business application mapping and helps us visualize it. It saves us time because we don't have to hunt for data. When I get a request, I go to Device42 and get the data. It saves me the time of writing emails to different people to get the information.

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TT
Security Engineer at a tech vendor with 501-1,000 employees

The discovery is the most valuable feature. Device42 has remote connectors that will go out and look for the changes. You can run Nmap. You can do one-way DNS zone syncs and that's pretty important. Those are the things that are really quite strong for Device42 to report back on your infrastructure.

The solution's automatic IT asset discovery and inventory functionality are top-notch. The thing I like is that it's open-source. If I need to change them — and they've given me links on GitHub to have them — I can go and change them to pull exactly what I want, as frequently as I want. 

Also, I can show this to CEOs, and they understand it. So the front-end is awesome. 

Once you get the reports done

  • the monthly device add-on trends are awesome
  • the changes are awesome
  • the IP statistics, device statistics, and your building's statistics are all really good.
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FL
Network Engineer at Despegar.com

The most valuable feature is the part that enables us to draw or build our rack and represent all the devices and interactively click on a physical device to "see" inside it. We can see the virtual machines inside a given server and all the details about them, with the storage connected to them, etc. From a global, data center perspective, you can see the rack and you can click and see all the virtuals running inside. That's a cool thing.

Overall, the automatic IT asset discovery is very comprehensive.

The solution's agentless approach to asset discovery is very important for us because installing agents on physical or virtual devices is not easy in our company. We have to escalate these kinds of things to different levels of security. Not having to install agents makes it easy for us.

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ER
DC Lead Engineer at a financial services firm with 5,001-10,000 employees

I think the auto-discovery is very good. It works well. I don't use it too much myself, but from the feedback I get from other teams — they use it a lot — it seems to work really well. From what I understand it's very comprehensive because it picks up everything: all the IP address ranges and locations, as long as we've input the devices correctly. It is very comprehensive and picks up a lot of stuff.

Also, the continuous asset discovery is good because it means not having to manually input all the small data, such as IP addresses, leases, etc. It helps and saves us a lot of time.

The DCIM makes everything easier. If we need to do something remotely, or if we need to get an engineer out to a comms room somewhere, we can tell them exactly where it is, what it's called, and what's patched into it. It ensures that people don't make mistakes.

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EW
Sr. Infrastructure Engineer at a tech services company with 1,001-5,000 employees

The most valuable part is the ease of use. There's no training involved. It's pretty simple and straightforward.

I also like the inventory functionality. I don't know that we're using it exactly how it's made to be used, but it works for us.

The asset discovery goes out and finds new devices and puts them under Unknown Devices, and then we go in and have to fix it and change it to what it is. It works really well. The fact that it's continuous is convenient. We don't have to worry about it. It just works.

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VD
Procurement Specialist at a computer software company with 501-1,000 employees

It's an easy-to-use tool. It's not too complicated with too many settings. It has a pretty friendly user interface and is understandable at first sight. Everything was pretty clearly explained in the tutorial when I started using it.

And I would rate its automatic IT asset discovery and inventory functionality at eight-and-a half or nine out of 10. It works well for us. I haven't been working with the tool for that long, but over those five months it's has been really helpful for us. My colleagues who have been working with the tool longer than I have are also very satisfied with it. It's really helping us to keep track of everything: 

  • the buildings we are using for data centers
  • all the rooms in them 
  • all racks 
  • inventory 
  • following purchase orders
  • and information about all our vendors. 
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Buyer's Guide
Device42
March 2024
Learn what your peers think about Device42. Get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions. Updated: March 2024.
765,386 professionals have used our research since 2012.