IBM SevOne Network Performance Management (NPM) Primary Use Case

BB
Sr. Network Engineer at a comms service provider with 10,001+ employees

We have quite a few use cases for the SevOne NMS. It's mainly for performance management by our different network teams and we also do performance management of our external customers. That means we offer businesses and schools and others access to a Comcast device for their site to give them internet, or site-to-site connectivity. We also monitor our Comcast Digital Voice in SevOne NMS. For the external customers and the Comcast Digital Voice, we're inputting flat file data into SevOne so that we can get the metrics for that flat file data and provide it to those customers. We're doing SMP and what they call xStats. 

With SevOne DI we allow our external customers to log in and get a report for their data. We give them a subset of the data that we collect so that they can see that we're staying within our SLAs.

I mainly focus on the thresholding capability of SevOne. We configure thresholds on the performance metrics and they send us alerts so that the NOC is alerted about the systems that are having issues. I maintain SevOne and I give the customers what they want. They're the ones who let me know if there's an issue. They're the ones monitoring the health of our network. We have various NOCs, depending on the device type, and they're the ones that will let me know if something needs to be modified or tweaked to enhance that performance management.

We have a SevOne NMS cluster that is also attached to a SevOne Data Insight cluster, and the SevOne NMS system is also sending out the SDB to a set of servers that we maintain for customers for rural data.

We're using the 300K which we've licensed to 200K and we're on version 5.7.22 of the NMS and 3.0 on the SDI.

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JB
Associate Director at a wellness & fitness company with 10,001+ employees

Generally speaking, we use SevOne as a central data collector for network components, routers, switches, load balancers, WiFi, and SDN. We also use it for server databases, cloud integration, and all the scenarios where we collect information.

SevOne produces a number of solutions for carriers and enterprises. The ones we use right now are software-defined networks, which are similar to Cisco ACI. We also use the WiFi solution to support Cisco WiFi and some other vendors. There's also a SevOne product for SD-WAN that we'll probably deploy in the next year. SevOne provides resources to come in and set those up. The solutions are basically visualizations and sometimes custom collections that combine the data insights product with SevOne NPM.

The two solutions provide a series of dashboards that give you insight into how your environment's working. We have full visibility into the health of Cisco ACI, including what's running on it, errors, performance, etc. It's the same with WiFi. We can track every access point, look at each connected station, and see the various metrics relevant to each connection. SevOne ensures everything is configured and operating properly.

SevOne monitors multiple technologies from different vendors. We're primarily a Cisco network, but Cisco has adopted some technologies from other vendors, and we've had no problem incorporating them. We also do F5 and other standard vendors that everybody uses. We manage everything on the network and infrastructure with SevOne. We have integrations with numerous products, third-party applications, and data from external sources. SevOne is fairly flexible as long as we can bring the information back into the system.

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GL
Principal Network Engineer at a comms service provider with 10,001+ employees

We are a large enterprise and provider. We use the solution to monitor and capacity plan our network.

We also use it for our cable modem estate. We have about 6 to 7 million customers who aggregate onto devices. We monitor those devices with SevOne NPM on a separate cluster. We also have a customer-facing cluster that we are about to install.

It is our strategic performance monitoring tool. So, it is the only thing that we use to monitor our internal network, which is huge. We plan to extend it and replace our network performance monitoring tool, which is another IBM tool and currently a big customer-facing system. We planned for another fairly large cluster of about 20 virtual machines.

We have both physical and virtual appliances onsite. We don't currently use the cloud.

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Buyer's Guide
IBM SevOne Network Performance Management (NPM)
March 2024
Learn what your peers think about IBM SevOne Network Performance Management (NPM). Get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions. Updated: March 2024.
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AD
Network Tool Manager at a financial services firm with 10,001+ employees

We are primarily using SevOne to monitor bandwidth utilization. We also use it for proactive monitoring of the CPU, memory, and other resources. Our main goal is to monitor the network health and proactively upgrade before any issues occur.

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WV
Sr. System Manager at ATOS

We're using SevOne to monitor our network infrastructure. We provide monitoring services and performance capacity management for network gear, including routers, switches, wireless controllers, firewalls, and load balancers, to name a few. We have various manufacturers and different device models that we leverage the solution to monitor in our organization.

Our deployment of SevOne is mostly virtualized. We have gone completely virtual in our environment. We have SevOne deployed in different regions of the world: the U.S., Hong Kong for Asia, as well as in London for Europe. 

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GP
DevOps Manager at Spark New Zealand

We use it pretty extensively for all of our network performance management needs. It's monitoring Spark core and network performance. It's managing our managed-data customers' equipment on site, and it's also used to look after monitoring our internet links as well. We use it for any performance-related stats or information of that type. It has the capability for that.

It's all on-premise at the moment. We don't have the Data Insight component of the SevOne offering at this stage. We're still looking at that, but we predominantly use the platform to give us collection capability, and we'll use the data and visualize it on other platforms as well. So we have engineers that can use the data directly or natively in the tool, or we'll take the data or the collections and use those for other purposes, including billing.

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SM
Manager of REN Operations at Rogers Communications

We primarily use SevOne for performance management. We're managing an internal corporate network for a large Canadian telco. This includes the data centers, the branch offices, media locations, retail stores, and all of those kinds of connections. We use it obviously to monitor performance, and we also use it to do some performance alarming, and things like that.

We use it extensively to help us communicate with other teams, and with executives so that we can present valuable network data in a pleasing way. It's also accurate, easy to read, and easy to digest for non-network teams, executives, and others.

It was very successful during the pandemic because there was a lot of focus on things like capacity, work from home, and VPN capabilities. It really allowed us to highlight those metrics very easily, and communicate that up to the executives on a daily basis in the early days of the pandemic. It helped to bring that sense of wellbeing that we were not in any danger in terms of system capacity, or things like that. When everybody was sent to work from home, a lot of companies tipped over because they weren't prepared for it, but we didn't have that problem.

SevOne was initially installed on a VM on my network, and then another network within the organization implemented it a couple of years later. As the value was identified and other parts of the organization began consuming it, other networks began implementing it.

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MD
Sr, IT Engineer

Our client who is using SevOne is a large client, it's big. We have to create multiple instances to support their infrastructure on the platform because they are very huge and are on-prem as well as on the cloud. Because Turbonomics is unlimited, they can do certain VM levels. I think you can do 11,000. You can collect 11,000 metrics from the VMs and you cannot go above that number. So let's say if you have 9,000 VMs, you can handle it, but sometimes you become busy and you're doing a lot of collections, or if you start collecting the processes' metrics, that is going to be a problem for you down the line. So we have about eight instances to support the platform on-prem and I think 11 or 12 on the cloud.

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JO
Lead Engineer, Monitoring Tools Team at Lumen

We use it for network firewalls, routing, and switch monitoring, including performance monitoring and triggering of alerts.

We have it in our internal cloud. It's an on-premises solution.

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AP
Solution Architect at a media company with 10,001+ employees

SevOne is used mainly for network monitoring. In my company, there are different services that include mobile data, voice, and broadband. SevOne is being used across all of these three services, and it also covers our corporate network.

SevOne is also being used for business reporting and capacity planning.

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YC
Senior Voice Engineer at Access4

We are a VoIP company and we use Cisco BroadWorks as our voice platform. SevOne monitors all the servers, the uptime, the bandwidth being used,  and everything else. It also monitors the trap that it gets from these servers.

It's running on VMware.

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DT
Consulting Manager at a tech services company with 11-50 employees

We are a system integrator, so we help the customers implement SevOne NPM and provide first-line support. When the customers have issues, they call us first, and we open a ticket for them if they need SevOne support.

Most of my customers are in banking and finance, so they are more conservative. Some of them are in a period of transitioning their infrastructure to the cloud, but they still have an on-prem solution. In the next few years, some customers may transition to virtualized or nextgen network services, but not at this moment. Some telco customers still have the on-prem appliance to monitor the circuit server-level connectivity or for NPRs.

There are three typical use cases. First, most of our customers use the SevOne platform for network performance monitoring, including network devices and connectivity. Customers like the high availability, unlimited scalability, and fast-forwarding. 

The second use case is to provide a central platform for infrastructure monitoring, including the network server and some application monitoring. About 60 percent of our customers use it for this. The third is for server monitoring only.

The use cases are a bit different. In the old days, IBM, HP, BMC, and Microsoft required customers to deploy agents in the server to monitor them. However, the servers used SNMP. And although there are advantages to using SNMP to monitor the server, customers prefer to use a server platform for monitoring. Most of the use cases fall in the first category. The second accounts for maybe 12 percent, and 10 percent of customers only use SevOne for server monitoring.

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Hareesh Agaram - PeerSpot reviewer
Tranformation Programmes and Global Config Hub Lead at BT - British Telecom

Our company provides managed services to our global customers for our networks. We also sell our WAN networks and provide managed services on the LAN network. We use SevOne to look at the performance management of the networks that we sell to our customers including routers, switches, and network links as they go up and down. We have installed more than 100,000 devices on the non-SD WAN side of SevOne.

We can determine the performance utilization with metrics of the devices including fan speed, temperature, and other generic health checkups. If the utilization is high we raise an alarm in our ticket managing system and then our service desk can start looking into them.

We use SevOne quite extensively. We use all the modules extensively both internally and externally with our customers. They log in and use SevOne to access the tools.

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EP
Network Engineer at a manufacturing company with 10,001+ employees

Our primary use cases are for network alerting and reporting.

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BS
Network monitoring engineer at a computer software company with 10,001+ employees

This is mainly used for network performance monitoring and availability alerting. Also, we are using SevOne to help with the troubleshooting of any issue. For example, whenever there is a service outage, we have a look into the graphing data. Mainly, we are using the SNMP data and NetFlow. Other than that, we are using the ICMP availability, which is just an availability check. These are the major areas that we have been pulling.

It is a physical box installed in our data centers.

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SP
Network Analyst at a computer software company with 10,001+ employees

We use SevOne to manage about 10,000 network devices on our system. We monitor those devices with all the performance data, run reports, and see alerts. We have a manager of managers that sits above SevOne that actually displays all of our alerts, does some correlation and other things. We also provide some maps and reporting.

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AP
SevOne Admin at a financial services firm with 10,001+ employees

We are using this solution for monitoring the network for performance and availability. We have about 25 SevOne peers that are monitoring almost 8,000 devices. These devices include routers, switches, firewalls, etc.

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Hareesh Agaram - PeerSpot reviewer
Tranformation Programmes and Global Config Hub Lead at BT - British Telecom

We use the solution for performance and capacity management reports. The product gives us flow data that helps us determine the top users. We also use the solution for LAN, WAN, and Wi-Fi.

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GS
Professional II Service Delivery Coordinator at a computer software company with 10,001+ employees

Sometimes we get requests that a customer needs CPU or disk or memory performance or utilization graphs. We add those servers or devices into the tool and then we can generate the graphs and provide them to the customer.

Customers also ask us to create alerts. The tool generates alerts for CPU utilization when it is close to, for example, 90 percent utilized.

It is deployed directly on servers as well as on virtual machines.

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TK
Senior Manager of Global Network at a retailer with 10,001+ employees

My use case at the initial startup was very simple. I had a carrier, which was a backbone globally implemented, and I needed a monitoring solution. The type of solution I needed had to capture SNMP traps, poll my equipment, perform traffic analysis, deal with historical data, and things like that. This requirement has remained constant through the entire seven years of implementation with them.

At the end of the month, we're ending our relationship with this vendor for a variety of different reasons. Among the problems is the pricing model that they have, although a lot of it has to do with the fact that their virtualization solution isn't compatible with our Kubernetes environment.

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SD
Network Engineer at a financial services firm with 1,001-5,000 employees

We use it to look into performances in our system and different dedicated environments. We try to draw graphs that represent what we have in terms of time response, bandwidth, and input and output across all our data centers to see if the load balance is correct. We have some traffic flows that say if the traffic is dropping and being taken by another data center. There are a lot of reports all around about different points of our architecture.

It is deployed as a physical appliance on-premises. So, we have the SevOne appliance in our data center.

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EB
Analyst of Budgets and Financial and Administrative Information at a tech services company with 1,001-5,000 employees

We use SevOne to display all the information from Cisco IP SLA regarding the delay, voice quality, etc.

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Buyer's Guide
IBM SevOne Network Performance Management (NPM)
March 2024
Learn what your peers think about IBM SevOne Network Performance Management (NPM). Get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions. Updated: March 2024.
768,246 professionals have used our research since 2012.