I prefer physicals, but virtual systems work if they have the capacity that SevOne recommends. You can't undersize the systems.

We don't do flow data here, although one group tested it in the past but they never purchased it. But it's nice to be able, within 10 days or less, to recertify a new device. That's one of the reasons we picked SevOne years ago. And we can modify those certifications at any time, ourselves, and that is something we do.

Overall, for what we're using it for it's very solid.

I rate SevOne NPM eight out of ten in terms of the core functions and how the solution performs them. There's some room for growth in there, but they seem to be on the right track. We're anxious to see where they go with it with the recent acquisitions.

I would recommend the product, but not the use of physical appliances.

The SevOne data that we extract isn't used by default. It is more just historical data rather than reactive operational data. So, it is like, "Look what happened yesterday-type thing," rather than how we must react to a situation.

We don't currently use Data Insight, but it looks great.

I would rate the solution as eight out of 10.

We are not using all of the features of SevOne. For example, we are not using Net Flow at this time. We are still deciding on what we should do with the data that is being produced by SevOne. For example, we are working on how to manage the users' access because it depends on the visibility that is needed. We don't want everybody to see everything.

To accomplish this, we have to use both NMS and DI creatively to control what users can see and what they cannot. User management is a bit complicated, although I think that most devices are like that.

Essentially, we're trying to combine NMS and DI to meet our requirements. We want to configure it so that some people are very restricted to certain areas that they can view, which is something that we now control using the reporting. They do not have access to NMS, but on DI, they have access only to only a specific report. The problem with doing this is that we have more work to do when we define the role to the user. With their restrictions, they are unable to create a report, so it needs to be provided by us and then we need to give them permission to build it.

I understand that some organizations will not need to have this level of detail for user access control, and for them, the user management page is pretty easy to understand. This is an advantage. However, we need to have a greater level of granularity, so simplicity is a disadvantage. It's both.

My advice for anybody who is implementing SevOne is that before deciding whether the licensing is object-based or device-based, you really need to know what you want to monitor and estimate the number of licenses that you need. This is something that is really important in the beginning and I think that it's something that we made a mistake on. Of course, it is possible to purchase additional licenses later but depending on which model you choose, you really need to think and count how many devices or how many objects you want to monitor. It is also important to understand how SevOne counts objects, before purchasing the license.

In summary, for our requirement, SevOne does pretty much what we ask and does it very well. It is easy to use, the guide is very clear, detailed, and easy to understand, and the support is great. We are not using all of the functions but overall, the out-of-the-box service and customer support are very good. I am not familiar with the other tools in the same space so I am comparing functionality against different solutions. However, I can say that their customer service is outstanding compared to other vendors.

I would rate this solution a nine out of ten.

My advice is to have a good architecture review with SevOne to understand what your business needs are. Make sure that you are deploying the SevOne collectors as close to the network gear as possible, so you have the metrics with no latency over the network.

The ease of use of the dashboard has improved, now that they've introduced Data Insight, which is their new visualization reporting engine. That is a little bit more user-friendly. They've made good progress with Data Insight to make things even easier.

SevOne is an eight out of 10. They do a lot of things very well, but there are some areas that need some improvements and they're aware of them. They're working on them for future releases. Every tool has a niche environment, but there's no Holy Grail or perfect tool out there.

Overall, we feel SevOne is well-positioned. It's a very strong tool. What I like about them is the support structure. Being able to collaborate with them, when we need some additional services or recommendations on the tool, is helpful. It's a tool that positions us very well to provide immediate service and meet the needs of the business.

We haven't done too much with software-defined, but we have certainly looked at the telemetry capabilities, and it does support those. While it doesn't support all of our technology in that space, it does support two-thirds of what we need to do and the other options to support telemetry. Another kit we have is something that we can work with SevOne to do, which is an offer they've made to us. It's quite good.

Support is very key, and with all of our vendors, we want to have good technologies, good function, and capability, but we want to have a good relationship with the supplier, and SevOne has made a lot of changes organizationally and consolidated back to the US. Despite all of those changes and acquisitions, they've still maintained an excellent relationship with us. I only had an update from the COO earlier in the week, telling us where things were going. You don't get too many suppliers that make an effort to reach out in that capacity, which is really good.

We have not done too much in the way of customization. We haven't really needed to. The product is fully featured enough to meet all of our needs in any performance area but it does have options to do that if we needed it, we just haven't had a demand for it.

My advice would be to take the time to plan out what you need and just validate that it'll work with the technologies in your environment. I would also probably go with the Data Insight module from day one. I wouldn't use the native interface within the product. So plan for that as part of any deployment, and then you'll get a lot more value upfront.

SevOne is one of the biggest strategic investments we've made. It just works. It just does what we want with no fuss about it. SevOne is built on open-source technologies. If I had a bigger team, I could have written my own, but we didn't. So it was convenient to buy an off-the-shelf solution like SevOne because we knew it would just work and tick all those boxes and we'd get the value straight away, and for very little license outlay compared to what we were paying. It was a bit of a no-brainer.

I would rate SevOne a nine out of ten. To make it a perfect ten, it should be free. They're almost at a perfect ten. The only thing that worries me with SevOne is that they were acquired by Turbonomic and now by IBM. The only reason I bumped them down a point is because IBM now owns them and in an ironic twist, we exited IBM four years ago and now we're back with them owning the product we moved to. My concerns are not the technology, I think they have a good technology future, but it's more around the vendor who they're owned by now that that causes me concern.

Overall, I'm pretty happy with this product and how it's used day-to-day.

SevOne is a product that can integrate network performance management across ITSM and business decision-making tools, although that is not something that we have implemented. That said, the data that it produces is very insightful for that type of planning. Capacity planning and engineering are examples of that. I'm fairly certain that it will enhance your decision-making, although it may depend on how you want to set that up. Specifically, you might want it to do that automatically with some kind of an API call between SevOne and another tool, or instead, just provide the metrics to feed into that decision-making process.

There is definitely a culture of continuous improvement with SevOne. With every code upgrade, there's a quality of life improvement and there are customer suggestions that get worked into it. As a company, they're definitely open to working with us, as well as others, to make things better and to bring about those customer asks.

The biggest lesson that I have learned from using this product is that whatever I thought I knew about my network, I was wrong. When we turned it on, it immediately highlighted a lot of issues that we did not know about. That goes for my network and it goes for the others as well. It is an eye-opener when you first start seeing the metrics come out of it.

My advice for anybody who is considering SevOne is not to hesitate. You will be amazed by what you learn about your network. You will be amazed by what you thought you knew but isn't true about your network. It will give you a level of confidence in your network to allow you to focus on other things, like making your network better as opposed to constantly fighting a losing battle against the challenges that can sometimes consume an operations team.

Being able to produce the data in a pleasing and understanding way really stops a lot of the burn, or the churn, that happens to operations, where you waste a lot of time chasing things that aren't there. It has really helped us in that sense. It saves a lot of time and a lot of frustration. It allows us to produce the data, and then move on to the next thing.

It also frees up my guys a lot, to search for those problems that they can find and identify ahead of time, and then fix. It gets you out of that reactive mode as an operations manager, where you're constantly reacting to incidents.

Suddenly, you have that time for preventative maintenance, where instead of reacting to incidents, you can actually go out and find these problems using SevOne. You can make use of the performance analytics and see things coming down the pipe before they become impacting and get them fixed. As an operations manager, that's invaluable. You're going to get a lot of value out of it with very little effort on your part and, the more effort you put into it, the more value you get out.

In summary, SevOne solves a lot of problems for me. Not only has it allowed me to see my network in a way that I hadn't seen before in terms of performance, but it allows me to communicate with my peer teams, and my executives get that data constantly. Especially during COVID, it was very helpful. That said, nothing is perfect, and there is always room for improvement.

I would rate this solution a nine out of ten.

If you're asking for technical comments, then I can describe it in detail, but this is more general. For example, the IT operation can continue working the way it is, but they have to integrate SevOne into their environment. How do they want to do it? We don't know. It all depends on the different clients.

I use a lot of tools, actually. Here are the things I can recommend about Turbonomics: Scale-up, scale-down. But again, for reporting purposes, sorry, no recommendation there. The customizations are very hard. The person doing it has to be very good at analytics and has to be very good in all languages, like C-Sharp, unless you want to use the Python tool. I don't know if the Python evokes the scripts in it. I think it does, but it's very, very hard. You need a developer to write the customized reports for whatever you're looking for. If a regular person were using Turbonomics, like admin folks, they wouldn't be able to do that, unless they are a programmer.

They have to make it better for reporting. That's the first thing. Also the discount, like I mentioned about the Azure discount. It would be good if they could just get the number right.

On a scale of one to ten, I am neutral because it is not too good and not too bad. I would give SevOne a five.

In order to make it a 10, they would have to get their staff members highly active and focused on the customer's issues, and just focused on the product, on saving money. On-prem, they need to focus more on the Azure side of the house and cloud. The need to improve their internal technical knowledge and expertise. They need to hire really top-notch folks in Turbonomics.

Locate a SevOne sales engineer in your region and identify which products you need, in the suite of NMS tools, for the problems you're trying to solve. Work toward a proof of concept to realize the value, and usually, you'll easily see the benefits after going through those steps.

The biggest lesson I have learned from using SevOne is its ability to support SNMP, ICMP, and different data across objects, and to support custom objects. There is no limit to solving any problem because it supports custom and non-standard networking protocols. It's amazing, and SevOne makes it very easy to do that. It makes it hard to look at other vendors if they don't have all these capabilities.

We combine our analytics reports but we don't use SevOne in that case. We have data that comes from a non-SevOne system, we take the data feed and we have a reporting layer on top of it. Sometimes, this process takes data from SevOne and helps to provide a high-level service dashboard view. However, we do not use a SevOne dashboard to display it. Rather, we rely on the reports. 

At this time, we don't directly integrate with ITSM but we have aspirations to involve SevOne in the whole ITSM process. Ideally, any information that has been collected for ITSM can be accessed by SevOne. Also, it's a bi-directional take on the idea, where ITSM can share in the data collected by SevOne.

My advice for anybody who is considering this product is to test it, hands-on, before jumping to a conclusion about whether to implement it. It is important to compare products from other vendors to see how they perform.

Unfortunately, you have to try SevOne using different components that include the basic NMS plus Data Insight, to get a really good feel of how it collects the data and presents it. I'm confident that at the end of the evaluation, SevOne will stand out in that space.

I would rate this solution a nine out of ten.

I would definitely recommend the product.

Monitoring is the key to being successful. Without a monitoring platform, you don't know what happened yesterday and what things look like right now. With a monitoring platform and the graphs, you can go back four weeks or two months and look at the patterns. Without a monitoring platform you are blind.

They should speak to other customers to understand how it was implemented and used. Think about best practices on the server/network side so standards and processes can be established at the start to prevent rework later.

I rate SevOne Network Performance Manager seven out of 10. The support is excellent, but the features are average. 

I am impressed with their LAN side, WAN side on the Wi-Fi domains, but  the SD WAN has room to improve.

If not for SD WAN, you can blindly use SevOne as a solution.

I would rate SevOne Network Data Platform an 8 out of 10.

My advice would be to plan exactly what you're trying to get before you do the deployment and do as much research as you can before you go through the week-long training session that they give you with the initial purchase. There was a week-long training that we got as part of the initial purchase, but the training came before we even had the tool onsite. So I was not able to ask questions intelligently.

With flexibility comes complexity, and the other is going to be management. See everything that SevOne can do, they are going to ask for a lot. So you need to get management understanding what the tool can do with what you have deployed right now. Don't promise them the world. Filter down what management's expectations are.

I would rate SevOne a seven out of ten.

It is a very simple, flexible tool with an easy graphical user interface. This is a great tool for having all the SNMP and ICMP reporting in one place. There are a lot of integrations for this tool.

They offer good monitoring and reporting.

I would rate SevOne as a nine out of 10.

My advice would be to read the PDFs they have and then look at the videos on YouTube. That's what I do. I'm not a voracious reader, but I go to YouTube a lot. 

I would rate SevOne a nine out of ten.

Clearly outline what needs to be monitored from SevOne and what you aim for your organization. I don’t recommend monitoring everything.

Please engage the SevOne SME’s. It will make the implementation easier in many aspects.

I would advise evaluating it thoroughly to make sure it is right for your network, and it meets your administrative needs. This should be a major or key element of your decision process.

SevOne supports software-defined and streaming telemetry-based networks, but we are not using any of that. I've also not customized out-of-the-box reports. I've only created custom reports for various customer groups that are consuming the data.

I would rate SevOne Network Data Platform a nine out of 10.

I would rate the solution a nine out of ten.

Definitely go for it. The interface is user-friendly, and it provides so many reports and alerts. It gives you a good, total package. And the support team is also very cooperative.

I can't think of very much that the solution lacks. Everything looks okay to me.

SevOne is capable of bringing together its analytics reports and workflows in a single dashboard, although I don't actively use that specific dashboard. The stuff that I use with SevOne is very specific to a need at the moment and as such, I don't require the use of a collapsed view. In my world, it's hard to summarize everything in one place. Everything is going to be compartmentalized, so I have multiple dashboards with different data. It isn't that I don't want to use a single pane of glass but it just doesn't serve any purpose for what I need on a daily basis.

Overall, this is a good product and we had a really good relationship with the vendor. When it all started, I had a pretty basic need that I was unable to get any support internally for. We had spoken with them before, and at that initial time, I had some internal obstructions to bringing them onboard. The problems were not financially related and over time, as usual, things changed and the obstructions were gone. Once that happened, I was given the opportunity and the power to develop my own tooling suite for my team, and SevOne was a pretty easy discussion at that point in time.

The relationship continued to be a really good one up until a couple of years ago, when we were growing and of course, they wanted in on that, but their pricing was not adapting to what we were seeing in the market. They were still doing pricing from 2013 when we bought in. Naturally, anytime I expand tool usage, it works in my best interest to make sure that what I'm using is still the best implementation for not only the cost but also, the scalability at the time.

The biggest lesson that I have learned from using SevOne is that leveraging your platforms to do more work in place of a human, isn't always a bad thing. A lot of people think that you're just trying to replace humans with automation and software. What it really boils down to is that you're enabling those humans to do something else that is more important. It's not a function of eliminating jobs. It's letting the humans work on more important, complex items, and let the software and the automation do what they can to contribute to that equation.

It's not that it's necessarily been a challenge or an obstacle for me, but it is important to consider it when explaining the process. When you explain to someone that we're changing this process because SevOne can now do a certain aspect of it, with human involvement starting somewhere further down the line, you have to be able to sell that as an improvement to the process. Ultimately, it's allowing that human to focus on other things that have previously been neglected.

This problem of automating a task that is historically done by a human has been a lesson that I've learned with SevOne. The reality is that you have to let automation do what it can, and let humans do the more important engineering work. Getting away from that stigma and letting the software do its job and really focusing on releasing that, allowing the humans to do the more technical and engineering-level work, is really an act in cost-savings and from a Human Resourcing standpoint, you're getting more bang for your buck out of it. You don't want to pay people a lot of money an hour to sit there and say that red is bad and green is good. If you can get away from that, you're going to be more efficient.

I would rate this solution a seven out of ten.

• The grouping capability is very simple and a very important issue in terms of system reporting capability. You should do your homework carefully so you will have a flexible reporting tool in the future.
• Enabling baseline functionality: We decided not to enable it at the beginning and very quickly decided to change our minds. It is a very useful mechanism for data comparison (today’s traffic to the week’s traffic, to weeks before at the same time, and so on).
• Report preparation: It depends on the agreement, but SevOne is ready to prepare some predefined report at initial integration. Let them do this to save you time, but it requires some time to think about your expectations.
• In SevOne, you pay mainly per object. Do not enable all object pooling by default. In a case with 10,000 devices, if you decide not to pool ICMP (not to ping devices to check availability), you can save 10,000 objects, and save real money. (We did so and we do not regret that decision, but it depends on the particular expectations of the company implementing the product.)
• The same as disabling ICMP pooling, you can decide to disable memory and CPU monitoring (if it is not necessary). Money that again stays in your pocket.

The platform is as flexible as an open source system can be. It has a very useful end user GUI interface, which means working with the system is very easy and intuitive.

You have to try it. The first step may be a bit harsh because of the layout. It's an older type of layout, but it works. Once you find your way with it, it is quite easy and straightforward. But, at first, it's not always easy to handle. But, it is a good tool that works nicely. So far, we don't regret it.

We need to master the system to be able to fully grasp what can be done. It is not for every end user who wants to go into the system and start monitoring whatever they want. They need to be able to grasp some content before that. Without training or previous knowledge, it is not always easy to grasp every concept behind the solution. It is a monitoring system so it's not a system where you click, then drag and drop.

I know they support telemetry. But the device on the end user side needs to be able to send telemetry information, which is not something we can do yet. We don't have enough devices doing telemetry to really use that feature to its greatest potential. So, this is something we have on our roadmap, and probably we will dig into it in a couple of months or years when our infrastructure is evolving in that direction.

Telemetry is something that we would like to invest some more time with, because it is different from having just simple SNMP polling, which is heavy on the system. It puts on a lot of overload based on the frequency of polling. By default, it takes five minutes. We want to have something with a frequency smaller than five minutes and maybe pause every 10 seconds, and SNMP can do it, but it puts a lot of overhead on the system. With telemetry, the big advantage of telemetry is a constant stream of information. There is no overhead. We just have a constant flatline of internal usage. We don't have huge peaks. We have fast information, close to real-time. We should have closer to real time monitoring in the future, instead of just being passive and waiting. There is still a ways to go for telemetry, but most infrastructure is capable of doing it.

Nothing is perfect. I would rate it a solid seven (out of 10) because a lot of points could be improved. I have a long list of small tweaks and customization that can be brought to the system. We give some of them to the customer support, but we are not their only clients. So, they go through prioritizing all their processes. Sometimes, our propositions are refused. It is a good system, but there is still some room for big improvements.

I would advise someone to test drive the product and see if it's what you need. I've recommended many people to use this product because it deploys so easily.

By default the tool provides a lot, you need to focus on your needs, adding something else later is usually no problem.

As with anything, if you want this to succeed, have a plan and focus; the product has many great features, so don’t get distracted. It’s easy to want to show everyone what you can do with the product. We focused on basic monitoring first and since then expanded to the other offerings of the product.

It's a good option, particularly because of SevOne's support.

Make sure it's compatible with the networking devices you have. I think they had a code bug that is now corrected because we haven’t had any problems with our devices and the application in a while. I assume they fixed this issue – but check that it interacts with the network appliances you have.

It is a very efficient and highly recommended solution. Its stability is great and gives you a great view of all the elements of your organization. Also, the ability to publish charts on websites is one of the things that are used.

You have to know what you're looking for – we knew exactly what we were looking for and basically if you know that it's much easier to find a solution that meets your needs. Stick to your guns – don’t settle. We did not settle.

Although it is a very good monitoring tool, it can be confusing when you try to add devices and they don’t appear correctly. Then you need to check SID on the SevOne database. There it does not display when the error pops up.

Test it out in your environment – it all depends on your environment, but it fits very well for ours.

Evaluate and research to ensure your requirements are met.

I would say spend the time to learn the product so you can fully leverage it – theres a lot to the product. If you push the solution, it can solve a lot of problems.

It is a very good product, easy to stand up, and a good tool for network engineers.

Make sure you have good, clear requirements for what you want SevOne to do. If you do, then it will do the job very well. If not, you should consider something else.

If you want one tool for everything this should not be considered. For example, if you want to monitor logs, if you want to monitor URLs, that is not possible from SevOne.

If you only monitor networks, if you want to monitor appliances, you can go with this application. It's good to go with SevOne because the creation of thresholds, of policies, the grouping of servers, that is easy.

One other thing. This is mainly a web console, it's not like any appliance application that you have to go into some server and open an application. That kind of thing is not there. 

For performance monitoring, give SevOne a shot.

To get the best value, find a good partner to work with who has experience from more than one product vendor. Then, you can get a second opinion and comparisons.

SevOne is a good product and I would recommend it.

If you need a solution for network performance, this is a very good option.

My overall comment is that it's a nice tool for monitoring and managing devices.

Not all solutions fit all problems. Also, if you are an MSP, SevOne can’t be federated for clients.