The remarkable feature of Geneos is the dashboard. Geneos' flexible dashboard sets it apart from other monitoring tools. Other solutions have limitations in their dashboard design and can't be customized as much. The Geneos dashboard allows unlimited creativity.  

Real-time data is one of the unique features that ITRS Geneos offers. For example, if there is an impact on a particular server and a particular application, I want to see what the impact is or what the CPU or hardware usage information is, as well as the service in the same application. I can see the real-time data and the impact by accessing ITRS Geneos and looking at the tree.

I don't want a tool that tells me when something is broken. I want the tool to tell me when something is going to break. That is the difference between ITRS Geneos and other tools. I want proactive monitoring, not reactive. I don't need to be notified after the fact that something has broken. If something is broken, I get a notification by email, and some of my customers are going to call me. ITRS Geneos provides proactive monitoring.

The great advantage of this tool is real-time monitoring. ITRS Geneos not only alerts us but also gives us a real-time view of the data. This is the tool's first great advantage. It is also lightweight and flexible and can adapt to monitor even low-latency systems, which is the tool's second advantage. Another great feature of this tool is its good presentation layer, which allows us to build custom dashboards to present to business stakeholders. This gives them a high-level status of what is being monitored. If we compare ITRS Geneos to other tools, we will find that each one specializes in a specific area, but the ITRS Geneos tool is more comprehensive. This is its great advantage.

One of the most valuable features of ITRS Geneos is the active time feature that helps with the trading applications that I support. The HP OpenView solution we previously used worked on a 24-hour seven days week cycle but the market hours are 9:00 AM to 3:30 PM. 

ITRS Geneos has good GUIs that provide us with a single view of all the various applications. We have around 500 servers, and monitoring 500 servers on individual devices is a bit challenging. Putting the various applications in a single GUI is very difficult. In ITRS Geneos, all the GUI and user-friendly dashboards are there. All the information is available at a glance, we have five segments in case any one segment, or any one problem occurs, we can highlight it, and we follow the steps. We then access the active console which is a step-by-step detailed view to resolve the issue.

I'm a massive fan of Geneos and I’m not even sure where to start when it comes to valuable features. I live and die in it and that has been the case for the last four or five years.

The ability to completely tailor and customize what it's monitoring is one of its strongest points. A lot of other monitoring tools are good at certain things, but one of my colleagues described it as the “Swiss Army Knife” of monitoring tools. It can do anything you want. And if something you need is not built-in to the product, you can quite easily build it yourself. As a developer/support engineer, that's perfect. The capacity to completely customize it in any way — incoming stuff, outgoing integrations with the tools — is quite powerful.

The tree structure that you can create in the monitoring tool itself is also very useful.

The flexibility of the product is most valuable. It is highly customizable. If you put your mind to it and think of something you could do, there's a good possibility you can get it integrated within the console, if it's not readily available. The simplicity or ease of customization has been valuable.

The flexibility to have our custom scripts cater to the application monitoring needs is one of the most important features that I value in the ITRS Geneos tool. Though ITRS provides us with certain plugins, there are a few use cases wherein the application team wants to have their own monitoring, such as doing our tracing on FX deals by leveraging the custom modules. We can easily plug the custom scripts into ITRS either in Java or by using a Python program and having the monitoring in place.

The solution's log monitoring and alerting mechanisms are very user-friendly and easy to plug and play.

In relation to real-time data, the Geneos tool from ITRS is a great tool for monitoring physical servers and virtual machines. However, it falls a bit short when it comes to monitoring containerized platforms running on OpenShift. That said, the real-time monitoring capabilities are still very effective for monitoring servers and VMs.

I give the solution a seven out of ten in its ability to predict and prevent failure.

The application team in the banks always wants stability in the environment. They never want a product that assists in monitoring to make the system unstable or overloaded. I always appreciate Geneos' stability and ease of use. For example, during a disaster recovery situation, Geneos' configuration is so good that it will automatically handle most of the items a user would not need to do, such as exporting extra resources or configuring the monitoring tool. This is very convenient because if they feel like they need to do something extra during a disaster recovery drill or any other problem, they can focus on that without having to worry about the monitoring tool.

The company started producing its product in 1998. As a mature product, ITRS Geneos has had time to evolve and change along with its customers. 
No product is designed perfectly or works well for all scenarios. Customers request features and the product evolves over time. The solution has a Custom Toolkit plugin to configure and customize our needs if nothing else can be monitored through the inbox.

ITRS Geneos is configurable based on the architecture and therefore provides lightweight data collection. There is one agent running on the machine which needs to be monitored, and the data the particular agent will collect is completely configurable. It can start from very basic monitoring, checking CP utilization and memory, and go to a much deeper analysis of the data by installing more plugins, like messaging queues, IBM MQ monitoring, and so on. One of the best features is that the solution is very configurable because it is an evolved product of over 20 years, and it can still run on machines that are not really good with system resources. These machines have less CPU and memory, and the solution can run on those machines also without taking much capacity and without slowing down the application itself.

Geneos is a stable product. Compared to many open-source products like Prometheus and others, Geneos is more stable. Additionally, they offer an on-prem solution, which benefits banks with data security concerns, as they cannot send their data to the cloud. The agent will never go down once everything is configured correctly. 

There are many native features, and they are continuously developing and reviewing their APIs, allowing for automation and configuration. You can create a package with the agent and deploy it centrally. If one server fails, the agent will automatically be reinstalled. For Windows, you can create a package check and install it. They provide templates for different OS versions that can be hosted on their central platform. Once the agent is installed, it will automatically add KPIs and eliminate the need for manual work. This level of automation is achievable. If you need custom monitoring, you'll need to write a script based on your use case and upload it, and then it will work accordingly.

ITRS Geneos offers features such as auto-scaling and auto-healing.

ITRS Geneos has different plug-ins, or, like, we have log monitoring plug-ins like file monitoring. Also, ITRS Geneos' dashboard feature is good.

The flexibility of the console is probably the biggest value. It is the ease in which you can pull the data together onto a screen. You can pivot the screen to however you choose to look at it. So, you can take a simple approach, and it can show business flow. Then, you can give it to a manager or business user who can see their flow and it quickly helps with the flow. Therefore, you create more of a technical view and look at more of the environment through a construction or routine lens.

The second biggest value is the ease of being able to configure and modify alerts to better manage them.

The third biggest value is that you can automate responses, so you can get it to run scripts. You can invoke a script automatically based on an event or can trigger manually if you want to carefully manage the situation. We also integrated it into ServiceNow, so if there is an event on the console, then we automatically generate a ticket, so there is an audit trail. The added benefit of ServiceNow integration is that you can leverage the on-call functionality to provide responses out of hours.

One thing we're utilizing in Geneos is the Gateway-SQL. That's really helpful for us. Using Gateway-SQL, we are able to merge two different views into one. Suppose we have to check something in the log and that we have to check something in the database and do a comparison before publishing a result. We can achieve that using Gateway-SQL.

Another valuable feature in Geneos is the FIX Analyser, because in our automation we are dealing with a lot of FIX messages.

On top of that we use the dashboards which are very good for presenting everything in one place, and we can send it to our higher management. We have different kinds of dashboards. For our application team, we have a full-view dashboard where we have set up the status of the processes, the hardware, and everything. Then we have a management dashboard for looking at applications. It tells us if the whole of application XYZ is green or not. We can design different kinds of dashboard per our needs.

Alerting happens in real time, and we can set up the sampling interval. If we want something to be checked every five seconds, we can do that in Geneos. We have different intervals set up. Some things are not really important and have been set up with sampling every one minute. We also have things we sample every 20 second and things we sample every five seconds.

The customizability and the speed, those are the two best things about it. You really just can't customize and fine tune many monitoring tools to get the degree of specificity that you want from the metrics. That's one area where Geneos has excelled. And it's just really fast. 

Also, the Netprobe is so lightweight compared to the agents that most monitoring tools use. It's really superior to the competition. The agent that is used by almost every competitive tool takes a lot more system resources. It's slower and it requires a greater effort and more compromises in terms of security to install on the monitored servers. With Geneos, because it lives outside the code, it is far easier and far less taxing on the monitored systems.

It is better than any monitoring product I've ever used in terms of providing real-time metric data. Everything else I've ever used has a lag that is significant enough to make a difference to our customers. This solution is nearly instant.

The web dashboards are very good, also lightweight. They're responsive and pretty easy to set up.

It's a very powerful application monitoring tool across the industry. Many free, open-source tools are available. There are also paid tools, but ITRS Geneos is a real-time application monitoring tool where the user can monitor, self-configure, and manage alerts through their console. We don't even need to log into the server to fix a problem.

One of the best aspects of Geneos is that it has a broad scope and can cover a lot of use cases. You can write your own scripts to monitor really specific things. And the rules that you can put in place can be quite complex for the alerts. Those two things are quite good.

The biggest benefit of Geneos is the fact that we can clearly see, if we have an alert, where that alert has come from. We can see the data around that alert and anything that might be relevant is also shown. We can very easily right-click and see why we've received that alert. That's the best part about it, that you've got all the data there with the alerting. It's the usability that it provides. It's not really the real-time data, you can get that everywhere, but rather the fact that it pulls all of those other pieces together.

Also, the Netprobe that is deployed on each of the application servers is very lightweight. That is another of the great benefits of Geneos.

The log file monitoring is probably what we use most extensively, especially the FKM sampler. That would be the one we utilize the most for scraping log files and looking for our messages.

In terms of the solution's real-time data, it's great. I can't say enough about it. I've evaluated many other products, including Nagios, because everyone wants to use stuff that's cheap — ITRS is very expensive — as well as Check_MK and some stuff from HPE, and nothing provides a solution like ITRS does. It's definitely the best solution that I've used, as far as real-time monitoring goes. You immediately get a pop up if something is broken. It's easy to see what's broken and what's not. 

The filtering in the Active Console is exceptional. Depending on the user base, some people don't want to see server-level errors, so we have filters set up in the Managed Entities view, which allow us to filter out things that certain groups don't want to see, while allowing them to see other things. It's a great real-time monitoring solution. And you can draw graphs immediately, right from the Active Console, whether they're current graphs or historical graphs.

It also provides lightweight data collection. We have numerous metrics being logged to the database. As an example, in Europe we have the MiFID requirements where time-tracking on all the servers has to be logged to a database. At any point, regulators can come in and say that they want to see that data. We use ITRS for tracking that. We do the same in the US for a FINRA requirement where we're tracking NTP. We log all the NTP data, the offset drift to say, "Okay, you're off from this stratum." That gets dumped into the database. We then have a weekly report that runs and which is put into long-term storage for seven years. It definitely is good for doing that.

One of the most valuable features is that it can be configured by non-developers. It doesn't require development expertise to configure it. 

The Geneos monitoring solution is a mature industry standard monitoring solution, and is present in over 90% of the invest banks in the city. There are many reasons why it is the professional's tool of choice.

• The NetProbe carries over 100 samplers which are capable of monitoring hardware, OS, and the application layer.
• The NetProbe is a very light weight process typically uses around 0.3%CPU as it is written in C/C++ so no fear of it hogging your low latency machine resources.
• When it comes to custom monitoring the probe offers an easy to use open interface known as a toolkit sampler which is very simple to use or for more sophistication and control there is also an API.
• It is cross platform and will work on many different types of architecture such as Solaris, Linux, HPUX, AIX, and Windows.

ITRS can define rules to alert when certain parameters that you monitor breach a threshold. Rules can be configured to fire recovery actions automatically to clear the alert. However, if the alert persists for an extended period, then it has the capability to fire multiple levels of escalation email or actions.

It also has powerful visualization features to develop dashboards to display in big screens and share it via Webslinger (a web server that allows dashboards to be accessed via web browsers). It can log metrics (values) into a reporting database and generate historical charts for trend analysis. The Toolkit plugin can run scripts for custom monitoring requirements that cannot be implemented using standard plugins. There are features to suppress alerts for time-period - Snooze, as ITRS call it - or change the value/severity of the parameter.

There are a number of things that you can do directly from ITRS active console without logging into the server. Processes can be restarted and you can open log files directly from active console. It also has a built-in scheduler that can run tasks (commands that you configure) on multiple targets. The active time feature enables you to apply different rules at different times. It also helps to disable alerts during non-business hours (eliminates noise).

The tool is highly customizable and can be tailored to your requirements. Dashboards can be created if needed and database logging can be enabled for analyzing trends and monitoring performance.

It enables us to monitor application processes, to do log-monitoring on a 24/7 basis, to do server-level monitoring - all the hardware parameters - as well as monitor connectivity across applications to the interfaces.

The ITRS dashboards monitor real-time data. There are two processes. One is that it reads from files via netprobes that are installed on all the servers. They read the respective online files which are updated every two seconds and then display the online data. The second process is that the dashboards are updated through scripts. ITRS servers run scripts and collect all the data. That is how real-time monitoring is done.

It also provides integration with ticketing tools. Whenever there is an alert, ITRS can directly open a ticket in a particular ticketing tool.

We can also view the logs from the time of an alert and back, or at ten minutes before the alerts, or two hours or one day before the alert.

We are also able to shift all the rules from one server to another.

And recently, we have started using automated actions when there are critical alerts.

The primary ability is to monitor systems in real-time. Many alternative monitoring systems use a polling system – so a short incident that occurs for a couple of seconds or less and resolves (such as a line outage or data gap). The small outage could have major consequences. Having to wait up to 60 seconds for the message can also mean valuable time is lost in resolving the issue.

The ITRS development team constantly works to make plug-ins and samplers, ensuring that when I implement new technologies – servers/black box solutions etc. minimal development has be done on my side. We can simply download the specifically written plug-in to the gateway and deploy the probe to the new technology. This ‘off the shelf’ approach beats onsite resources developing solutions that already exist.

Dashboards & auto execution – a few years ago the staff supporting our systems would have multiple windows open into various server applications. Not any longer. We have created powerful dashboards which on one screen shows every part of the system we need to see, going into the end applications is a rare occurrence and only for senior third line team members. Auto execution provides the ability to fix issues from the monitoring system. This allows us to have Geneos monitoring and incident management as our ‘core skillset’ – knowing how to support hundreds of applications via only needing to know one. Training is now far easier and staff can support more apps.

We support various versions of view the software at various institutions. The latest version is compatible with Linux/Solaris and SPARC. The probes (which deploy on end user systems) work on most OS including Windows. Consoles to the gateway to view status are Windows based and also various web based tools use modern versions of browsers such as IE, Chrome and Firefox.

Geneos is very easy to use. They have an interesting dashboard and the app's console is very easy to understand.

It's also easy to implement. The implementation of Geneos is very easy and interesting. It's not complicated. It's very quick to implement. The installation is very easy. There are many topics about ITRS Geneos that explain more about the features of the function of Geneos. 

The architecture is very comprehensive.

It provides us with real-time data. We use the dashboard, we can remotely monitor the services, and we can reach the data, the percentage of CPU and memory with real-time monitoring.

We previously used Nagios. It would take us thirty minutes to get an alert. With Geneos, you can use the access time so we can monitor the analysis and we can receive the analysis when we want and with what we want, every 15 minutes or 10 minutes. With access time it is a very good way to monitor the alerts, to receive analysis. We also get alerts based on real-time data. 

As a user its UI is very easy to understand, nice to look at, organised easily, and also very quick at alerting. This makes it stand out above its competitors, which in my experience are slow and ugly.

As a company looking to onboard, its capacity to monitor just about anything from Unix log files and processes to database memory, and even run queries and provide results. It can be used as a one stop shop for all your monitoring needs if you understand how to utilise it to its fullest extent.

The ability to logically normalize data gathered from multiple types of sources via pre-built plugins is extremely powerful. This functionality, coupled with the ability to import custom data via the Toolkit plugin allows Geneos to be leveraged to monitor every system in the enterprise. The use of Attributes within the enterprise facilitates very flexible grouping and viewing of this information. Enterprise scalability is also an important feature of Geneos. This is very important as gathering enterprise data metrics is only the first piece of managing the system.

Software is continually updated with enhancements - normally client requests - every couple of months. Due to the maturity of the product, this means the software is feature rich and targeted at the modern environment.

We're able to highly customize the integration of custom developed monitoring samplers.

The visualization layer and the config editor (with host of out of the box plugins) that makes setting up monitoring on any application quickly and efficiently covering infrastructure and more detailed monitoring points like middleware, messaging and database.

• Custom script toolkits
• Data aggregation
• Alerting rules to emails
• System APIs

• Excellent set of plug-ins for the financial industry.
• Easy to extend and to incorporate existing monitoring scripts/programs.
• Publishing monitoring data to many users is simple due to webservers included in Geneos.
• Attribute-based viewing tree allows different views of your data for different purposes/users.
• Very good maintainability due to groups/types: very effective build and change of configuration.

• Dashboards
• Processes
• FKM
• Disk

These alerts proactively help manage the enterprise operational risk.

Real-time monitoring of market data components on an enterprise environment is the most valuable feature of Active Console and Gateway. The built-in plug-ins allow administrators to easily configure monitoring components for market data systems such as Thomson Reuters Enterprise Platform and SRLabs Wombat (formerly NYSE). The interface is easy to use when interrogating monitored systems, viewing and graphing historical values, and performing Gateway configuration updates. Script generated output can be modularly added to allow greater insight if built-in plug-ins are not available.

ITRS Active Console has helped us monitor servers and set thresholds for different metrics. It is easy to setup and works with different kinds of servers. It also helps you execute shell scripts as response to alerts.

• Breach predictor
• Compute Engine
• Reporting
• Dashboards

Customizable Dashboard to display real time business flow monitoring. This is extremely useful to operations as well as business user. Not only monitor health but capacity and performance at a glance.

Cater well to Capitals market trading environment. From on exchange order latency to client RFQ type of multi-stages tracking. Geneos is able to provide the tools to capture data in (near) real-time.

Highly customizable. It’s ability to ingest metrics on a given format allow users to create highly customized scripts/tools tailored to their monitoring needs.

• Toolkits
• Compute engine

In my experience, being able to monitor our databases is a valuable feature as we can create our own queries and aren't reliant on the in-built ones.

In my experience, the integration interfaces/plug-ins are most valuable as these help us maintain seamless integration with our systems.

The ability to build integrations to tools that are not monitored out of the box is the most valuable feature.

The clean and colorful UI and easy to use options like snooze and active times. Previously, we had monitoring tools which had complicated UI's and the screen looked very dull. Also as an end user, we hardly had control over alerts triggering from the tool that had to reach to our Dev, or so called CATE teams to snooze an alert. But now with different level of user controls we can do it from the tool itself.

Geneos enables customized aggregate views and alerts for both related and disparate components. This flexibility and insight facilitates proactive and prompt causation analysis. Simply put, you can easily see everything at once. If there’s an issue, you’ll know why within seconds, rather than spend precious time trying to find out.

This is the most amazing monitoring tool I've ever worked with, because it allows you to monitor a lot of things and also to address the issue and assign it to someone so everyone will know it's being investigated.

The monitoring of queues which helps us to stay ahead of issues and fix them before users start complaining.

The dashboard is a valuable feature.

ITRS uses SNMP to communicate with our devices as well as SNMP net probes installed on our servers. ITRS’s use of SNMP provides a lot of valuable information from the device without affecting performance.

The Toolkit module which allows flexible scripts to be created and inserted into Geneos without having to log onto the server.

• Scalable
• Fast
• Extremely customizable
• Reliable and powerful
• Tons of default modules which are available out of the box

Real-time log monitoring with desktop alerts is valuable as it tells us immediately when there is an issue.

• Complete End-to End monitoring of Apps and infra

• Key performance metrics to identify and reduce transaction latencies

The ability to monitor our different Windows and Linux servers in real time, simultaneously, as well as the ability to provide some configurations and event viewing. Being able to monitor what was happening, what errors and what warnings were appearing in real time was hugely beneficial. I worked on a trading floor, and these servers were crucial to business continuity.

The following features of the product are the most valuable to me:

• Ability to see in real time the state of our server estate.
• Ability to monitor logs for potential issues to prevent app outages before problems get a chance to arise. That's invaluable for our teams in a fast-paced trading environment.

Geneos automatically sends email notifications when any batch job fails, the database is down or the website is down. It is automatically monitoring everything and reduces manual effort.

The critical alerts are valuable.

This tool allows one to analyse, integrate and customize as per the systems and allows you to set your own rules.

• Active Console
• Gateway
• Webslinger
• OpenAPI
• Geneos netprobe

• Real time monitoring
• Possibility to develop custom scripts to fit your own solution
• Simple interface
• Ability to manage dissimilar systems
• Reporting

• Simplicity
• Number of users
• Supports a lot of technologies
• Easy to build a monitoring solution
• It has a multiple platform support