The most valuable feature is the NMS because that's the core of the system. Without the NMS, the other tools aren't that usable. 

The SMP and the xStats, which is for flat file integration, are both useful for integrating the various metrics that the device provides to monitor the performance of those systems.

It's also important that the solution’s collection abilities cover multiple vendors’ equipment because we have multiple vendors. For each device type, we typically have two vendors, minimum, so that we're not tied down to one vendor. That means we need to have similar monitoring capabilities on those various vendors, which SevOne is able to provide.

The solution’s out-of-the-box reports and workflows for automatically helping us understand what is normal and what is abnormal in our network is very important. That's the whole purpose for using this tool: to pick up anomalies before the customers call us up about them, whether they are internal or external customers.

SevOne has rich API capabilities, giving us the flexibility to control what we collect and customize the collection, creation, and manipulation of metrics as necessary. 

Any solution can provide the out-of-the-box capability to collect SNMP. But the ability to combine various metrics and apply logical or mathematical operators to yield a new metric offers an enhancement we can't get with a vanilla solution. For instance, we're monitoring our network interfaces not only by utilization but also by QoS packet drops, so we know whether the network traffic is being impacted because the utilization's high.

The data collection capabilities are pretty broad for time series data. The out-of-the-box capabilities are extensive in terms of anything that's not agent-based, SNMP collection, and AWS API integrations. You can also create your own integration with it and feed it deferred data. It'll take the data and process it the same way it does anything else. It automatically baselines every indicator that's collected. We can trigger anomaly-based or threshold-based alerts off the data. Everything's kept for up to a year with raw data.  

SevOne gives us real-time insights into network performance. Collection and visualization are almost immediate. There's no aggregation delay while it calculates things and rolls them up. It pretty much displays the data as you collect it. We trigger alarms off of important events and generate events up to our manager of managers, which creates incidents.

We collect WiFi data in abundance down to individual stations that are connecting to our access points. That can be tracked throughout the day, so you can determine where a user's been connected in order to troubleshoot. You can identify the specific access point they're on. We pull in everything the cloud watch is collecting. We ingest it, display it, look at historical patterns, and do anomaly-based checks and threshold alerts on the data. 

The data collection is pretty broad in our case. In the former company that I worked for, we had 350 wireless controllers over 14,000 access points. They actually rewrote the collector for WiFi so that they could scale up and finish the collection within a polling cycle. They're also very responsive about updates and adapting the product to demand.

SevOne's base dashboard which comes with the network performance management cluster is easy to use. It's easy to create graphs and leverage them, but there's a lot more power available underneath. If you understand the principles of grouping and creating custom indicators, you can take the product to advanced levels. The base out-of-the-box functionality is pretty easy to use. The data insights product that sits on top of it provides BI-type functionality. It's no harder or easier to use than other BI tools. It's designed to work with SevOne, so once the connection's been set up and you're pulling the data in, you apply the SevOne groups that you've already created. It's fairly easy to create reusable dashboards. Right now, we run probably about 180 dashboards that my team has customized for various groups.

The device support is pretty extensive. SevOne has continued to expand device support since the IBM acquisition. I can certify a new device type within 10 business days. If there is a device that's not supported natively, you can collect the MIT files, do an SNMP walk on the device, and send that to SevOne. They'll return the appropriate drivers to install on my system to support it, so I can get the out-of-the-box building functionality out of it. I would say it's pretty extensive. It's vendor agnostic. As long as the vendor has SNMP, API, or some other means of collecting data, we can usually figure something out.

It's quick and easy to set up reporting and get it running. Reporting is based on how you group devices together, so there's only so much you can do with SevOne's out-of-the-box reporting because they don't know your network. For instance, we have colo facilities separate from my various sites. I have manufacturing sites that are separated, so we group them together in reports. SevOne wouldn't have a way to know how to do that. So the reporting that's available quickly helps to get the job done, but there's more sophisticated reporting with a little bit of time you can develop that provides more value.

SevOne’s data collection functionality is very good. From a collection point of view, we pull SNMP data, which is simple. It is easy to manipulate the pull in the estate. It is really simple compared to some of the other products that we have used. However, for deferred data, i.e., things that we import or don't pull directly, we tend to have a preplanned integration. So, its Universal Collector is really useful.

I don't know that we use it, in earnest, but SevOne does give us real-time insights into our network performance. We set thresholds on certain connections that are important to us. Should they trend towards an issue, then our capacity planning team is made aware of it.

SevOne is excellent for transforming raw network performance data into actionable insights. Our capacity planning team has been very pleased with the transition to SevOne because we previously hadn't used Data Insights, which is really good.

It uses a baseline. So, it uses the last six weeks of data. It has days of the week and weeks of the month understanding of network volumetric data. This is good because it can show us things that are out of the baseline. However, it isn't better than anything else I have used from a baseline point of view.

It is really easy to integrate our network performance data with our ITSM. The API is straightforward.

The modeling and reporting features in Data Insight are good.

The visualization and the control we have over what we can see in the reporting are very good. It is also easy to use.

The integration with ServiceNow is very good. We have set it up to create support tickets automatically after receiving an alert from SevOne.

The user guide is pretty detailed and easy to understand. If there is something that I don't know or understand then I go to the user guide and just need one click to get the page that I'm searching for, which describes the window that I'm on. The guide makes it easy to find resources and figure out problems on our own. Only if we cannot find the answer in the guide do we contact technical support.

Integrating SevOne with our other tools is pretty easy. The API documents are pretty good and it's easy to understand the functions that they have if we need to use them. This integration has helped with collaboration between support teams and specifically, the integration with NLI and ServiceNow is helpful for troubleshooting and proactive change. Overall, it is not too difficult to integrate.

For me, the most valuable feature of SevOne is the capability to monitor any device that has SNMP availability. We can pick up any KPIs that we need, regardless of the model, type, or manufacturer. As long as the device is able to respond to SNMP, we have a way to put our SevOne hooks into the device to capture some KPI data.

One of the solution's biggest strengths is its capacity management performance, with out-of-the-box reports through NMS, as well as its ability to collect NetFlow-related data from devices. The collection of network performance and flow data is important because we have many critical business applications. Whenever there is slow processing or slow response from these applications, the first thing that the user community will look at is the network. They'll wonder, "What's going on with the network? Why are we getting a slow response?" Having those capacity-management KPIs around the components that make up that application helps greatly to narrow down where the root cause is when there is an incident.

It's also very critical that SevOne's collection abilities cover multiple vendors' equipment. Depending on the business unit's needs, it may have a combination of many manufacturers. It's very critical for us to be able to have that flexibility and not to have to worry about a specific manufacturer.

There is also support for software-defined and streaming telemetry-based networks, and we are starting to do a little bit more on that side. That's the direction in which everyone is going: telemetry and data science around the collection of the data, and proactively identifying an issue based on data models. Telemetry, and the ability to capture data in that format, is going to be a big push.

In addition, SevOne's out-of-the-box reports and workflows for automatically helping us understand what is normal and what is abnormal in our network are very comprehensive. One of the things that we like about the reports and the data we see is that, over time, we are able to create a baseline and look at it versus the actual data points. We are very quickly able to see any deviations from that baseline. It's very useful for us.

Those reports definitely speed up the solution's time-to-value. We have business timelines to deliver on. The ability to quickly onboard devices from different manufacturers and collect KPI data, and being able to leverage some of the out-of-the-box reports fairly quickly to look at the performance data, is very important to us.

We are also able to create our own reports. As a matter of fact, we allow many of our telecom engineers to come into the tool and build and customize the reports they need for their specific use cases. It's not only easy to make those reports available, but our user community can be the creators of their own reports. It's easy to use for them. The learning curve is not big. Anybody can start picking and choosing how they want to visualize the data.

For example, right now, we're working from home. There's been a lot of importance around our load balances, for how people connect remotely through our network. Being able to monitor the behavior, the active users, and any drop in users has been key. We have a custom report that we built around each of the load balancers that people come through from their homes, regardless of the users' locations. We can see the trends of active users, and how many users are dropped down. We leverage that report to communicate to our executive team how well we're providing remote workers access to the network.

And as you run some of these reports, like the health summary of the devices, you are also able to drill down to the specific KPIs of certain components. You can have a bird's-eye view, and then drill down all the way to the specific item in that report.

Finally, the solution's dashboard is very important, especially as we do capacity management analysis and as we project the growth of the organization. It helps us understand how certain devices are being utilized. That data is very important for us.

The product just does what it says on the box. We came from two very complicated tools that were hard to get to do the very basics. SevOne does the basics very well. It's a no-fuss solution. It's easy to configure and administer. I have a small team. I don't need a lot of people to run it. It scales very well. It meets performance and collection demands. It just ticks all my boxes and therefore gives me very good SNMP collection capability.

The comprehensiveness of this solution's collection of network performance and flow data is one of the basics in the field for what it does. It meets all of our needs. So for all those areas, for the most straightforward collection capabilities, right up to NetFlow and even telemetry, it meets all those demands. Not only just basic or fundamental SNMP collection capability, but the product also supports what we need for the future with telemetry streaming. So it's very comprehensive.

It is very important to us that it provides that. We need to be doing the fundamentals but we also need to have an eye on the future because SNMP is not going to be here for that long. It will tend to drop off over the next five to ten years. And so we still need to do that, but we need an eye on the future for streaming as well. That's something that SevOne has put investment into ensuring their product can support it. It's pretty critical.

Its collection abilities cover multiple vendors' equipment. I don't think we've had an issue with any equipment that we haven't been able to interface to and collect data. We have quite a heterogeneous environment here. We have a lot of different kits. We haven't had any issues interfacing with our different equipment. So it's very flexible.

It's important to us because, like a lot of telcos, while we may be small on a world stage, we still have made various investment choices over the years, so we have a lot of different network technologies. We've got to be able to talk to Juniper, Nokia devices, and Cisco devices. That was one of the criteria when we were looking at assessing our options in the space, and one of the reasons why we went with SevOne, in addition to the other benefits as well.

The dashboard is very straightforward. It is quite streamlined. The legacy UI is not as flashy as it could be, but that's not where their product's going. It's in the data insights, which is far more beneficial for most users.

We have dashboards, but we tend to be event or exception-driven. So the dashboards are there if triage teams or customers need to look at reporting for historic purposes. It does have a fit for customers more so than us operationally because we will use exception or event-driven data if we're looking at performance and other issues.

We find that the reporting is particularly valuable in terms of not only communicating with our peer teams but also with the executives. This is an excellent feature that we didn't have before.

The reporting and workflows absolutely help us to understand what is normal and what is abnormal in our network. Out of the box, it's immediately going to highlight things that you didn't know were there. For example, we have a large retail fleet of stores, and they have a network connection, but they also have a backup LTE connection. This means that if their landline fails, they switch over to a wireless network, and continue to work that way.

Before SevOne, we were largely blind to when those switch-overs took place. But with SevOne, there's a report that comes right out of the box called The Top End. Which, if every morning you run it, it's going to tell you where your top utilized points are. For me, it was interfaces. Having it pointing out the top-utilized interfaces quickly allowed me to find those stores that had switched over to LTE because the bandwidth used on an LTE connection is many times higher, percentage-wise, than what you're going to see on a landline.

If you're looking at something and all of a sudden there is a store that's at 1,000% capacity, it is pretty obvious that it has switched over to LTE. At that point, you could address that operationally. But prior to that, you might not know, and there could be stores running on LTE. Then if that LTE failed, they would be dead in the water instead of it switching over to a backup. Ideally, the primary will be fixed while it's running on the backup. However, if you don't know it's broken, you can't react to it.

The out of the box reports have helped speed up time to value for us. As soon as you open the box, you're going to get insights into your network, just based on the content that is going to slap you in the face. In our case, with the LTEs, you knew immediately what was happening by using the Data Insight. This system comes with a lot of canned reports and dashboards that are already built-in, and all you have to do is plug your data into it. It's going to tell you a lot.

We're using one for building dashboards for other parts of the business. The organization has a retail business and a big media business. The media business includes radio stations, television stations, and other sites like that, which are not necessarily offices, and not necessarily data centers. They run on the corporate network, but they're a separate part of the business per se. So, being able to just take an out of the box report, or an out of the box dashboard, and plug the retail hosts into it, or the retail data into it, allowed us to spin-off a separate dashboard that the retail support center can use in their own monitoring of their business.

The retail SevOne Data Insight dashboard allows them to do their own monitoring. I am the operation's manager, so I'm the one who's responding to the alerts, but it keeps them in the loop. It gives them that insight, and that ability to look around and see things for themselves, rather than always having to engage the network team just to ask a question.

Now that we have done that for retail, we're going to do the same things for other parts of the organization. They will be able to see for themselves that the Data Insight is amazing, and it comes with so many different canned reports that you can just plug a device group in, or an object group in, or even a single device, depending on how you have things organized. From there, it will give you a professional-looking, informative, and usable out-of-the-box report that you could look at immediately with a minimum configuration of your instance and immediately gain those crucial insights as an operations manager.

We have also made use of the ability to customize reports. When we started using SevOne only, the NMS, we had to build a lot of that ourselves. What we create is reusable so if I build a report, I can share it with colleagues and they can avail themselves of it. But, you have to create that workflow within your team. Data Insight sort of fixes that, but the important part is that we created a lot of our own custom reports and we still do.

Ultimately, I'd like to get to a place where we are the report creators, in operations. That way, people would come to us with requirements and we would build their reports. This would allow for a bit more control in terms of who's doing what and how things are set up in SevOne. There's a lot of value in that because you can build it for your customer, which I think is the greatest advantage.

Every customer has a different requirement. Whether you're talking to an executive, another technical team, or to an engineering group, they're all looking for a different insight from the data. Having those custom reports and the ability to build one from scratch, depending on who your customer is, and who your audience is, and what they're looking for, has made things a lot easier operationally. I can set up a report that goes to a team every morning so that they can see what the last 24 hours look like from a network performance standpoint. This way, if they're having some kind of problem with their application, they can see with their own eyes that there have been no changes to the network side.

The presentment might be a report that comes in a PDF format or a dashboard that we've built for them. On a dashboard, they can choose to look at data in real-time or go back a year, for example. It depends on how it has been set up. In any case, the offering of SevOne plus Data Insight is a huge advantage in that sense. It means that you can really provide the data that people want in a way that they can understand and consume. It can be tailored to that audience, which will vary between entities such as executives and technical teams.

The ease of building custom reports depends on your background. If you have any kind of an IT background and you use these kinds of tools, it's pretty straightforward. We've had some training on SevOne, but we were also using it prior to training. So, it's intuitive in that sense, if you understand and have used these kinds of tools in the past.

Also, if you have any kind of GUI experience, it's pretty straightforward. It's got the menus across the top and you can drill down to the different applications, or use cases. We found it pretty insightful, but that said, the official training that you can get from SevOne will definitely enhance your ability to do that stuff. They bring a lot of insight when they show you what you can do. It's pretty simple to do the basics, to get something done with it. But the training does obviously enhance that ability.

Essentially, you will get better with the training but you can do it without.

The ability to close alarming gaps in real-time is helpful because when you're running a big network, you sometimes don't know that you have an alarming gap until you have a fall, and that's how you find these things. SevOne allowed us to quickly, in real-time almost, close those alarming gaps because we run the SevOne instance ourselves in a hands-on fashion. As such, we can quickly set up new traps, or new alarming on interfaces where it wasn't before, in order to capture data that we weren't necessarily capturing before. We found that really useful, and as an operations team, it allowed us to take our fate into our own hands. We now have the ability to fix things in real-time ourselves, in terms of alarming and closing those kinds of gaps.

The system provides us with continuous network analytics, and we have it set in five-minute increments that go back for one year. The comprehensiveness of the analytics makes our operations easier. For instance, it frees us up in so far as it keeps other teams out of our hair because we can quickly provide them with the data they need. When issues arise, the team with the best data tends to win the standoff, and SevOne can really arm you well.

For example, when teams are saying that there are network issues, you can quickly show that there are not. It is like the Mean Time to Innocence concept, but it also gives you confidence in your network because you can see the performance statistics and the Delta change over time with your own eyes. It's a great little tool.

The completeness of the view of network performance is as complete as you make it. Of course, there are limitations based on licensing. In the beginning, we had to pick and choose where we spent those licenses. We have since solved that problem by purchasing more.

The feature that I have found most valuable is the scale-up and scale-down. The scale-up is an operation where the CPU boosts-up and then the memory will boost-up. That works awesomely. But the problem is when you do the case analysis, like a price analysis. Let's say you have the price. When you go to market, it picks up the cheapest rate or maybe coupons. If Azure sometimes give us a very great deal, then the Turbonomics doesn't kick in to evaluate that price. So that evaluation is always an issue that comes up. They cannot do that. They always have differences in the price. They never get those things right. That could be answered with no problem for the cloud.

Among the most valuable features are the detailed data and performance metrics that are stored in the database. It's implemented well, enabling us to access that data over long periods of time.

Also, the event notification helps us understand the health and state of our network.

In addition, on a scale of one to 10, SevOne's data collection functionality is a nine, because of the redundancy and high-availability design of the data storage, and because of the integrity and choice of the database.

It also gives us the closest thing to real-time insight into network performance that we have, with just a 10-second delay. It's very important for us to know the health of the infrastructure very quickly. SevOne has a feature called its High-Frequency Poller. Standard polling is every 300 seconds, but using that feature I have been able to cut that to 10 seconds, giving us the ability to know about a network event no more than 10 seconds after it happens. That helps us to detect network performance issues faster.

And the dashboard is very easy to use. I do a monthly lunch and learn and everybody who joins always learns something. And they always compliment the solution on how easy it is to catch onto and use the tool.

In terms of SevOne's device support for giving us a complete view of network performance, it supports more network monitoring protocols than we support. It is a great tool with support for almost everything we need.

Another useful feature is that SevOne helps us to understand what is normal and what is not normal across our multi-vendor network. Most of the NMS objects are designed in a hierarchical order. There is a standard interface that is universal. However, below that, there is a sub-interface with object types for multiple vendors. So all the objects or metrics are aggregated to a universal object type. It is very easy to identify performance across multiple vendors. And where there are differences, SevOne has a cross-object calculation tool, where you can bring in the same kind of metrics for different vendors and the calculator is able to aggregate multiple objects from them into one object.

It's also easy to integrate SevOne network performance data with your ITSM. It's easy to configure and manage trap destinations, and that's what we use inside SevOne. It's very easy to manage, easy to maintain, and easy to edit. It's a top-down approach where you can configure it for the whole infrastructure cluster, or you can configure it by device groups below the cluster.

We are using the basic NMS product, and we use it with DNC pretty heavily. These basic monitoring aspects are the building blocks for performance management, which is key for any organization. It is important to do network monitoring and capacity planning, which SevOne is very good at.

The Data Bus feature allows us to share data with other consumers, such as other teams in the company.

One of the most valuable features is the graphs, which you can build instantly. I have used some open-source platforms in the past, but they are not as good. With SevOne, the sampling in the graph can be every few seconds, not just every few minutes, and that's really helpful. It's really fast.

In addition, its data collection functionality is really good. The solution also has a lot of built-in templates, and those are not available with open-source solutions. They help us build graphs or reports out of the data that is collected. That's really helpful for us. 

And we love the SevOne dashboard for monitoring network performance. We mostly work from home now, but when we were in the office we had a big, dedicated TV monitor and had a dashboard on it with all the graphs. Every now and then we would look at it to make sure there were no alarms. The dashboard in SevOne is really useful.

• UI for administration
• Ease of use
• One price, use as we need, and no add-ons to pay for
• We can leverage JMX extensively as well
• Flow collection allows us to avoid having to use a packet-capture product often.
• The cluster of the solution allows ease of access for our users all over the country and world.

SevOne's Data Appliance, unlimited scalability, and fast-forwarding are the most distinctive features. In particular, our customers like the Data Appliance because they don't need to install anything. 

Once you deploy, you can configure the IT elements and start monitoring the network or server right away. With fast-forwarding, you only need to configure one device to the lever or the server to the second level. It's amazing. The new reporting dashboard is also a lot easier to use.

The modules and the performance management reports that come with data insights are two of the most valuable features. I also find the reports for Wi-Fi, Netflow, LAN, and WAN for monitoring to be very good. 

I've found Data Insight to be the most valuable for mining the data that the tool collects.

Without data insights, it's really hard to mine the data out of the NMS tool. Data Insight makes it more flexible.

The network data collection has been very flexible for us. It's been thorough in areas that were lacking. They have a team that I've worked with to add other pieces to it. So if it's missing something out-of-the-box, they work with me to add it. I was able to collect that data. It's not perfect, but it's pretty thorough.

The ability to assess the comprehensiveness of the solution's collection network is important. I wish they had some things in there that they don't for us to sunset some of our homegrown tools, but it's not a showstopper.

Its collection abilities cover multiple vendors' equipment but that's lower on our priority list for our deployment. We mainly have one vendor for the majority of our environment but we do have some others, so it is nice having the ability to look at other vendors.

The out-of-the-box reports and workflows for automatically helping to understand what is normal and what is abnormal in our network are very poor if you only have NMS and that is the only portion of step one that you own. DI makes things a lot better. 

DI actually lets you get to the data in a way that is easy to view without DI getting the data out of NMS. NMS is great at harvesting the data and storing the data, but it's terrible at giving managerial style views to see the data, as well as reporting is hard to mine the data in the reports. It's a very old-school feeling. DI puts a modern view on top of the tool, allowing you to get to the data in a cleaner fashion and faster data mining.

We use its ability to edit and customize out-of-the-box reports. It's been easy to edit, but I've run into some bugs. I'm focused solely on DI because NMS reporting is not very good. DI is a newer tool for them. I've run into several bugs that have slowed me down. It's easy to use other than I've run into the occasional bug that has caused problems.

I've given the firewall team reports that only look at their gear versus NOC is able to see all gear. I have done team-specific views. 

It provides continuous analytics of our network. I find it helpful, and I believe other people on my team find it helpful to be able to see all of the stats in a single tool. They can see an alert and then they can see the stats for the gear that was associated with that alert. I think that is very helpful.

It is pretty much a tool which provides all the data sources. You can integrate with multiple other platforms, like SD-WAN. They also do integration and offer the app data. Therefore, you can pull data from many other sources that can be used for visualization and analysis purposes. Also, they have Data Insight, which calls the SevOne API and gets the data in real-time. This is an additional model that gives a direct view into the metrics and imports critical KPIs.

We have a dedicated SevOne appliance for the data flow. The overall comprehensiveness of the data is good. There are no false statuses. Whatever it reports, that pretty much matches the actual device performance.

SevOne provides support for all universal connectors. They internally work with other data sources to get features implemented. We have an SD-WAN implementation and use other app data to monitor performance. If you pull that data into one centralized location, that is very useful for management.

The solution supports software-defined networks. This is required in terms of analyzing any sort of integration or performance issues, which are all very critical metrics.

The out-of-the-box reports help out and have a good design, which provide us with more value. We can import/export them. You can save a report based on your requirements. You can build some templates, and using those templates, you can then build multiple reports. So, their template option is really helping us out a lot. We use the reports out-of-the-box most of the time. We are not customizing them as of now. 

The dashboard is all based on the object indicator and different devices. They have a hierarchy where users create a report and select the required indicators to pull out some data. It is all pretty straightforward and flexible.

We have an integration with ITSM event management, ticket creation, and alerting. It provides good options in terms of REST API and SOAP API. You can follow the trap to the destination whenever there is an alleged violation. They have multiple options for integrating with any other ticketing tool as well as event mapping tools.

Data Insight reporting tool is the most valuable feature. They came up with it a couple of years ago. The most pleasing factor is the dark theme. You don't have a white background. It has templates that you can create for all kinds of reports that you can hit on the fly. It has a much better printing of the reports. If you want to send PDFs to people, the reports are actually decent. Whereas for years, the old architecture of the PDFs was rubbish and even our customers said, "We have to manipulate your PDFs because they all have bad margin breaks. SevOne fixed that a couple of years ago with the new Data Insight. It's fantastic. I would say the reporting of the new Data Insight is my favorite feature. 

We also have the Wifi Controller feature and we're starting to turn that up. That's going to be nice because we're going to be able to monitor wifi. Our group used to monitor wifi, about 10 years ago, maybe even longer, and then they took it away and gave it to Cisco Prime LAN. And they come to find out that Cisco Prime wasn't monitoring it as well as they thought. So we got some quotes from SevOne for a wifi solution, and now we're implementing that. We're excited about the wifi solution.

We also use NetFlow and Databus. It's not that new, maybe five years old. But everybody's starting to get on board where we just send our raw data to scientists. They correlate all the data into how they want to report on it. Those are a few of the new things that we like to use.

I would rate the comprehensiveness of SevOne's collection of network performance and flow data a ten out of ten. I've used Concord and eHealth before this. I used HP OpenView for 15 years. Right now, SevOne is top-notch for me because it's an all-in-one package, and it's easy for the operator to learn. If I can learn it, anybody can learn it. But it has a lot of features underneath that. I am one of the admins, but we have some really top-notch programmers that go in and get that in-depth data. I operate as an admin, I help people out, create policies, and everything. But when it comes to the in-depth stuff, I leave that to the scripters. I'd rather just click on the GUIs and let somebody else scrub through the comments.

It's extremely important that SevOne's collection abilities cover multiple vendors' equipment. We have F5 Firewalls, Palo Alto load-balancers, intrusion protection devices, ClearPass servers, Aruba, we got it all. SevOne has a good process. We also like the certification where we get the MIBs and the OIDs from the customer or the vendor. And they say, "We'd like to monitor this CPU key performance indicator." Or "These HC octets and the interfaces. If it's above 80% we want an alert."

With the vendors, we just take a new vendor like Aruba, they'll want to monitor the fan speed or whatever, we'll take that OID and send it to SevOne. Their certification team is top-notch. They have a 10-day turnaround, but for us, they always provide it quicker. We tell the customer 10 days but we sometimes tell the customer too, that they're always quicker. And they always are.

The process is easy. As long as the homework is done ahead of time, either by us or the vendor, we just provide SevOne with the OIDs, they provide us with a file, and we import it into SevOne. We apply it to the right vendor and all our key performance indicators are there. It's wonderful.

We're also just starting to monitor software-defined and streaming telemetry-based networks in our environment. We got a new manager and he's been pushing it. He loves SevOne. We use Data Bus, NetFlow, and we're doing the telemetry stuff. I don't really understand it, but we're working with some scientists on ride controls, to send them that data. When they started doing this, I told them "You better get some sharp people down here." And they did. 

The manager is a great manager. He's holding everybody's hands to the fire, and I got a bunch of burn marks on my hands. But we're getting progress. SevOne was great, but we weren't taking it to the next level. And other people were coming up with other tools, saying "This tool does this." And we said, "Well, SevOne does that, if you want us to do a proof of concept." So we've been doing all these proof of concepts.

In the old days, reports had nice baselines and stuff that we could use for deviations. With the new Data Insight reporting tool, now we have percentiles that we could have in the old ones, but when you had a reporting tool that wasn't that good, you're not real excited about baselines and stuff.

With Data Insight, we can see baselines and deviations. We can decide how many deviations we want to view. We can do percentiles. We can do time over time, and the graphing in which you can separate the graphs. Data Insight is a game-changer for reporting. 

You can look at the reports and it's just a picture, so your brain can say, "Whoa, that's out of normal. There's the baseline and there's somebody making a backup in the middle of the day or something." So, the out-of-the-box reporting is very nice. Every time they upgrade us, they upgrade Data Insight and they add more templates that their team has decided that the crews could use out there. They're great. I always see the new templates and I just copy it all over to my environment and change the names so people don't see.

The dashboards are fantastic. I don't use them as much as I should. I just started creating some. I'm doing it in the new Data Insights. You can customize it to your customers. We don't do much of that because we don't have a big enough crew to manage all the users out there, there are hundreds of users. And if we had to be their reporting gurus, we'd be hung up all day long, just clicking on reports for people. 

I love the dashboards because you can put it all in the front. You can have heat maps on the CPU. If you want it to have a dashboard for all of F5 you could just have the dashboard for F5 and say, "Hey, we're having CPU problems. I just want a heat map. Show me something red that I can click on and go troubleshoot." It's so nice.

• Quick response on reports
• User interface
• Scalability of the monitoring
• Reliability

Its ability to monitor practically any type of network device via SNMP is most valuable. This is the main functionality that we're using. If a network device exposes a metric, such as interface utilization, SevOne will monitor it for us.

The reporting is very good in SevOne. We have static thresholds that are defined by our architects. They give these static thresholds to us, and we implement the alerting policies based on those static thresholds. We also have the capability of doing base-lining or deviation from normal or mean, but we haven't implemented that in our network. 

The out-of-the-box reports are of quality, and they would get you up to speed faster than having to build custom reports. I wasn't here when the reports were created, so I haven't, as such, used the out-of-the-box reports.

We are able to use SevOne's analytics, reports, and workflows in a single dashboard. Its dashboard is very easy to use and put together. It is also really easy to understand. If I had to give it a grade, I would give it an eight out of 10.

I like the tool’s scalability and real-time reports. Earlier, we struggled to give real-time reports to clients. I also like the tool’s deployment model where we can deploy it either on-premises or in-house. We don’t have to carry the data all over the globe. Also, I am impressed with the tool's flow reporting and Wi-Fi.

• Reports
  
• Alerting

These are the most valuable features for us because the customers in our company primarily want to see performance and usage graphs, and they are always concerned with the alerts.

Another useful feature is that SevOne gives you real-time insights into your network performance. It polls every five minutes. That is important for our customers because there are some network teams that are always monitoring their networks. There is an option for setting the polling frequency to less than five minutes. That means you can monitor your infrastructure faster and we do that for some of our devices.

And the data collection functionality, using SNMP protocol, is good. It's doing its job.

The most valuable feature as of late has been the API integration with ServiceNow. Honestly, the biggest bang for the buck I've got out of SevOne has been this development. The bi-directional integration with ServiceNow has saved me a lot of money in man-hours, over the course of the last few years.

I don't have an exact figure for how much money I have saved, but I can say that it's hundreds of thousands of dollars. What it comes down to is when you're able to automate the console work with the ticketing system, you're saving people from copying and pasting, and other such menial tasks. For example, you are able to auto-populate tickets, update tickets, change the status of tickets, and also do verification to see if something is valid. You can make determinations such as whether there is a ticket currently open or whether there was a ticket previously open. Automating things like that, so a human no longer has to do them, can save hours a day per human per shift.

The out of the box reports and workflows are very sufficient for helping to understand what's normal and abnormal in the network. Out of the box, the reports were certainly there and even though it didn't necessarily understand Juniper, the minute we turned it on, we had a bunch of data. In fact, there was a lot of data that we had never previously seen before on the backbone, made available to us just by virtue of turning it on. It just needed to be cleaned up and polished.

We were aware of the reporting when we decided to implement SevOne, as we had done a lot of pre-sales work with them to make sure we knew what to expect out of the box. Even if we needed to do a lot of customization, it was certainly expected, and that's what we saw. It was important to us because we needed to immediately show some sort of value with all of the work that we'd invested over the course of the implementation. I needed to show almost a day-one value, and that certainly did help.

With respect to customization, the reports themselves didn't take too much effort. We have had a resident SevOne engineer help manage the platform and tend to those apps throughout the entire implementation of SevOne. From my standpoint, it was simply a case of asking the resident engineer for what I needed or what I expected, and whether it was a function of hours or days. Shortly after, I would have exactly what I needed.

An example of how we have customized reporting is the top talking report. It is important because we have a lot of customers that are very bandwidth-intensive. This report is for aggregate bandwidth and it is from a trap-generation standpoint.

I also have a performance metric where we monitor a specific group of circuits that are notorious for having capacity issues with customers. Essentially, it is a top talker traffic graph where I get the top ten circuits for the past 24 hours, and it's a live graph. I get it as a report, but I can also watch it in real-time.

SevOne provides continuous analytics of our network and it's important because if you're in a network where you're polling every three minutes or every five minutes, then you could be missing important events. There's a lot of stuff happening and it can be very damaging in a matter of seconds. If you're not polling or collecting data to absorb that frequency or that duration, then you're not doing anything. You're completely overlooking the important stuff. Being able to see in some form or another, not always in the graph, but being able to see that real-time activity and have it called out to a human is exceptionally important. Again, it doesn't need to be a graph, but that's one of the things we leverage SevOne for.

With respect to giving us a complete view of our network performance, it's been very good. I don't know how many times a week I have a STEM vice president come to me and ask me what's going on with the backbone or how the backbone is performing with a certain world event or corporate event. Whatever it may be, I can get a very good visual summary, very quickly, just by virtue of logging in. It's just a matter of making sure that you have the right graph. You have to tell SevOne what you need and have it presented to you in the right way. Otherwise, it doesn't know. Once you accomplish that, it's immediate.

SevOne has enabled us to detect network performance issues faster, and before they impact end-users. It is very good at capturing those events, documenting them, opening a ticket, and letting a human know about them. There is a definite ability of proactiveness with the tool.

If I consider where we were in 2013, it could take several hours or days to detect events in some cases. I have examples of catastrophic events happening that we never even knew about, that SevOne is able to capture. I estimate that we are 60% faster on average at capturing and actioning events, hopefully proactively.

• Flexible architecture: You can extend the system and its capacity by attaching another cluster pair.
• Very intuitive management interface: Adding and discovering new devices is a very simple process.
• Very useful and flexible end-user GUI interface: Reports or statistics can be prepared by a person who has no knowledge of performance monitoring.
• Automatic reporting: You can very quickly prepare a report to be periodically sent to recipients.
• Very fast reporting engine: Even very complex reports are generated in seconds.
• Many predefined Top-N reports are available out-of-the-box.
• Grouping capability: Each device can be assigned to many groups, which means you can report any interesting network factors according to the multiple group allocation.
• Baseline: The functionality that allow us to monitor a particular factor (like throughput or CPU load) based on some historical data (the value of the factor at similar period of day should be more or less the same)
• Virtualization of network elements: Many physical interfaces that exist on different physical devices can be aggregated as a single logical device with many logical interfaces. This is very useful functionality for network operators.
• Trend analysis: The system predicts the value of the traffic in the future based on existing behavior.

We don't use all the features so far because we are just using the product that was there without supervision for one year. So, with a couple of colleagues, we are doing a lot of work to put everything back on track. We know that SevOne can do a lot, in terms of hitting some baselines, especially with their new visualization software, SevOne Data Insight (DI). This gives a new perspective in terms of dashboarding. It is something more dynamic and flexible than the previous version.  

There are different types of reports based on the metrics that we want to monitor and check.

The most valuable feature is that we can draw reports with the historic value of data. So, we can see if there is a trend in the past or if something has been changing over the past couple of weeks. When we have an incident, we need to go back to the occurrence of this incident some time in the future. We can see if it is something that happens regularly or not.

Data coming from our system to SevOne needs to be comprehensive. This is the way SevOne works around data flows. So far, it has been good.

They support software-defined networks as part of another module. They have their main module, which is called NMS, then they have other side software which complements the main architecture. They also support software-defined networks, like Cisco ACI. 

The fact that it's agentless. With agents, you only see what you instrument and what you tell it to look at. With SevOne, I have complete infrastructure visibility and can see anything on the network.

It's given us the ability to create various real-time network performance reports and distribute them to any colleague who can access these reports immediately. They can access them any time without needing their own user account to the system.

• Alerting
• Graphing

The most valuable features for us are the huge number of network devices it can monitor. It has a lot of useful features, not only the basic things like measurements of CPU, disk, and memory, but it also has the ability to measure net flow.

Also, we've found their good support to be valuable.

The most valuable feature for us is its flexibility to handle different systems and different functions. We use it for networking, service systems, PDU's, and anything that's available for SO&P.

Slow Data and SNMP Data help us figure out who is talking to whom and for how long from a network-traffic perspective.

SevOne is a great solution because it is fully scaleable.

Since 2009, it's been important in the company to identify areas of opportunity and prevent events that affect the services of the company. It has the potential to find more than 300 computers at once, and this is when you have multiple devices, and it gives great speed for each metric values in time.

• It provides accurate data, which is critical.
• I also like the very quick reporting, as I can pull up graphs and charts very quickly.
• Real time reporting – one-minute polling, as opposed to fifteen-minute polling, so that’s fifteen times better. If we had better equipment I think we could do it even quicker.

The reports and the graphics. With this tool it is interesting to show the info to the client and explain where the traffic is.

Instant graphs, high frequency polling and the ability to create reports on the fly are the most valuable features we currently use.

• The ease of device certification – self-certify or have SevOne certify devices for me.
• Stability has been pretty good for us over the years – it’s a pretty stable platform.

There are several valuable feature, but the ones most useful for us are:

• Capacity monitoring/reporting and graphing
• Netflow stats gathering
• Infrastructure availability monitoring

• Scalability
• Speed
• Integration of performance and flow data

• Near real-time raw data availability for two years for analysis
• Scalability of architecture
• Ease of build
• Installation of virtual appliances

It has several features, but the ones most valuable to us are--

• Basic Network monitoring;
• Reporting (performance metrics, third-party data, status maps, device configuration, etc.);
• Scalability (monitor devices and metrics, and maintain speed); and
• It's Linux-based.

We currently use SevOne for monitoring our entire infrastructure, including Network Switches, Router, VPN Sites, Servers, SAN, Databases, Connectivity to ISP, etc.

This product is able to monitor a lot of different products within on tool.

As an IT Manager this tool helps me sleep better knowing that SevOne is my eyes and ears watching the entire infrastructure.

It's a great solution for highlighting and discovering useful information regarding our network's elements.  There is a cheaper solution available,  but in general, SevOne is a good solution for analyzing network information. It's also very easy to use.

It is inexpensive compared to other monitoring tools and it provides agentless monitoring, where we don't need any kind of installation of servers. SevOne has a feature which is a policy browser. We just assign the policy and it will automatically apply it to all the servers, and it will create the thresholds as well for each and every server.

The automation feature is good because if your CMDB is OK and it is already in sync, then the automation part is good to go. Auto-closure of the ticketed issue is resolved and ticket will auto-close, which is very helpful.

Very quick graph generation.

SevOne excels at gathering performance metrics and then making them quickly accessible in ways that I want to view them.

Setting alerts and thresholds is easy and reliable.

The data remains granular--not rolled up into averages--so viewing past metrics maintains the same detail as current data.

The platform easily scales to monitor millions of objects.

Scalability. I have never had to worry about how to handle really big environments.

SevOne's ability to report metrics on specific objects very quickly. Whether it is a week, a month, or a a year's worth of data points, SevOne has improved by leveraging short-term vs. long-term memory to provide necessary statistics so we can alleviate network impacts quickly.

The capacity to monitor our network is the most important feature to me.

The features we are seeing the greatest benefit from are the enhanced reporting, net-flow data collection, and the data retention.

The features I find most valuable are--

• Availability (provides continuous monitoring without loss of functions), and
• Performance management (takes data for troubleshooting and reporting network issues)

The monitoring of the network is very customizable. That is its unique feature.