The main benefit of using SevOne is the fact that we can pull in a new vendor rapidly. With the changing technologies, we can get a new vendor certified and monitored in our system faster than before. With our previous system, we had to wait for them to put it into the upgrade. It could have been months before we would actually monitor new equipment. Now, we can monitor within 10 days. 

Also, with the xStats, we're able to monitor non-SNMP data from various vendors.

SevOne provides us with continuous analytics of our network and that gives us an idea of the health of our network, where our weaknesses are, and what needs to be fixed.

In most cases, SevOne enables us to detect network performance issues faster and before they impact end-users. We've had situations where new issues have come up and we have actually used that to create a new threshold to alert us the next time. But overall, it helps us with early detection.

When it comes to having a complete view of our network performance, I would rate it very highly. It's the key piece of equipment that we use for monitoring our performance.

We get the most benefit from SevOne's ability to forecast capacity planning trends. We can look at growth in particular values and combine them to see how they interact with each other to improve our accuracy. We don't just base things on a single metric. 

If I'm looking at CPU, I'm also looking at queue length. The new company we work with is incredibly lean, so we've done a massive amount of work between SevOne and our other products to reduce the number of alerts that go out. It's not a matter of just filtering—it's also about making the network work smarter.  With SevOne, we're able to combine things and provide information out of the same platform. For example, if I have high utilization taking place, I see the packet drops in my critical applications by looking at QLS.

I can also look at net flow to tell if their backups run during business hours when they shouldn't. If I combine all that into an incident, my network team knows exactly what's happening when they get it. They can resolve the issue rather than being flooded with tickets that are caused by the utilization exceeding a specific percentage. We get those day in and day out. 

The network is sized to run near capacity, so we get the maximum use of the bandwidth. That also means it'll fluctuate over the threshold periodically and generate alarms, but we're able to combine it with additional data to tell us whether it's a problem or not. We don't need to raise incidents because the utilization went over the capacity anymore. The reason for the high utilization can be identified, so we can make better decisions on what to alert on. SevOne makes our support teams more productive. 

We use SevOne with virtualized next-gen network services because we run Cisco ACI, and we're on AWS and Azure. We can monitor network components on all these platforms. The company is in the middle of a transition because we spun off another company. We started on the cloud, so we never migrated from legacy into the cloud. It's a little different, but we are using it to manage the cloud environment. From a practical perspective, SevOne would give you the ability though to do both, so you don't need to change tools if you move from one to the other. 

SevOne has the ability to transform raw network performance data into actionable insights. Like most products in the network management space, SevOne doesn't have this capability out of the box because networks vary. However, it has the tools to customize it and adjust it as you go along. You get a solid platform that collects information and displays everything you would generally need to see. You can make it more effective by utilizing the data, API, and customization capabilities within the product. 

SevOne looks at indicators. In SevOne's terminology, a "device" is like a router or a switch. An "object" might be a CPU or an interface. It monitors the utilization or dropped packets on an interface. With each of those indicators, the smallest measurement is the baseline, and they do a baseline on everything. The baseline is based on a polling interval over a period of time. That information lets you review and see what's normal.  

They don't aggregate. They keep a year's worth of raw data, so I can do comparisons and see what occurred last month in this particular time period, like the end of the month or fiscal year. I can look at those networks and switches involved in those systems and see how they were performing at any given time each month back to a year ago. I can also set up alerts based on anomalies. I can look for standard deviations or numerical values above or below a threshold.

For example, let's say I'm expecting a certain amount of utilization. If it drops below that baseline, we get alerts that something isn't normal. We combine this in our upper management systems where we apply AI. The manager of managers gives us background information, so the AI can predetermine what might happen next.

We combine anomaly checks with static thresholds. We'll raise an incident for a static threshold breach, but we'll also have the anomaly data so the AI learns what happened before the breach took place. That way it can predict when it will happen again. It's good as a data collector and for feeding the other systems where we apply a bit more intelligence to the data.

We use the alerting function based on the standard deviation of our network health. When it is beyond the threshold, an alarm is generated and a support ticket is automatically created using the ServiceNow integration. This improves the way our organization functions because we know what we need to upgrade or what issues are in need of attention before they become a problem. It helps us with troubleshooting, as well.

The out of the box reports and workflows are pretty good and they meet our requirements well. Using Data Insight, we can create variables, filtering, and good visualizations. The reporting has improved with Data Insight over NMS.

SevOne brings together its analytics reports and workflows in a single dashboard, and we are able to create a dashboard that contains many tabs and links. From this one dashboard, we can go to other reports and pages.

For DI, it's very easy and clear. For NMS, it is simple, but the visuals are not as pretty as they are with DI, and some of the functionality is missing. There is also a difference in the way that DI exports files, versus NMS.

We have been able to detect issues faster using SevOne, although it depends on how we set up the alerts. When we create them according to the threshold or any of the status change options, it automatically notifies whoever is watching over those devices. It is quite flexible in the way that we can configure alerts.

The alerting has saved us time because the operations team can see them act immediately. Also, an incident ticket is created automatically. We used to have to manually check to see which devices were either having issues, or we could reasonably expect was going to have an issue, and then create a ticket manually. Using SevOne, all of this manual work has been automated.

We haven't done the automation for every case yet but if each was done, we would likely save between 60% and 70% of the time required for each task.

SevOne provides us with continuous, real-time analytics of our network. Over the long term, the data is aggregated. This is helpful because we can see the history of our network. For example, we can see the state of the network before a problem occurs, as well as how and when it happened. For troubleshooting, it's very useful that we can go back and see how our network was doing.

We do not have a complete view of our network using SevOne because we are not using all of the features. Unfortunately, I don't really know all of the functions because we have a limited license and limited resources. This means that we have to combine with other tools that can watch the flow and other characteristics in our environment. Although I cannot speak for all of the features, I can say that it is meeting our requirements to this point and so far, we are happy with it.

We've been able to expand our service with this tool, without the need for additional tools. In addition to being able to monitor network devices, the tool is capable of monitoring server-type devices as well. That means we didn't have to get a separate tool to monitor servers. We're able to ingest system log information and create alert policies on it. Overall, end-to-end, it is very flexible, enabling us to leverage the lessons learned and apply them to all the different component gear, whether it's server gear or database gear. One of the benefits is that we've been able to leverage one tool to do a lot of things.

SevOne also enables us to integrate our network performance management data across our ITSM and business decision-making tools. One component of SevOne is called Data Bus and that allows us to stream and share performance data from SevOne with external applications. We have some use case scenarios where we are sharing the performance metrics being captured in SevOne with other applications in the business. Integrating the network data with other solutions wasn't difficult. The way it works is that we're streaming the database, and small JSON payloads, into a Kafka Messaging Cluster, where external applications can just subscribe to that topic, download the data, and use those metrics as needed.

When it comes to detecting network performance issues faster, the tool is very capable. Being able to set up alerts and policies based on baselines, and deviation from baselines, is pretty good, without our having to set hard thresholds on a performance item. We have discovered things that way. Since leveraging SevOne, we see most of the outages or pre-outages in an alert from SevOne, and we can dispatch to troubleshoot the issue. We depend on it a lot at this point.

It does the out-of-the-box reports and workflows to automatically help to understand what is normal or abnormal in our network. We need to see the Data Insight option to get some more of the smart features to the package. We don't have that option but for a baseline and comparisons, it's sufficient for what we need at Spark. And the capacity we use it in is more to do the collection, so we run other analytics over the data as well. The primary benefit is that we have good collection capability, which is what it gives us.

That is critically important to us. It underpins customer reports, which are contractual obligations, but we also use it for billing data. We must have accurate billing data for some of our wholesale customers. It's critical in that regard. We are so confident in SevOne that we even use it for billing.

The solution's out-of-the-box reports generally help to speed up its time to value. It's quite straightforward to get it to generate reports out-of-the-box. We have teams that use it and like that style of the interface. Even though it's an older interface, they can set up things whenever they want with whatever metrics they need to look at. It's very easy to use.

SevOne brings together its analytics reports and workflows in a single dashboard. It's required to have the Data Insight package to properly do that, which we don't have, but the product does offer that. It would require further investment from us to leverage that but it does do it quite well. We're set up in a Splunk shop. So it's very similar in terms of what you can do with Splunk visualizations but just does it much faster and more near real-time.

It provides continuous analytics of our network. The old adage is that you can't manage what you're not measuring. SevOne gives us the capability to measure the things that are important to us. We need that otherwise our operations teams are blind and we can't deliver the value to our customers who have expectations around having a whole bunch of these reports made available to them. It's very critical.

It enables us to integrate our network performance management data across our ITSM and business decision-making tools. We have ServiceNow, so we integrate our network performance alerts up into ServiceNow. It's pretty standard.

It's really straightforward to integrate the network data with these solutions. Our integration architecture is reasonably good to leverage and so we easily integrate. We haven't had any problems with it.

We use SevOne in a troubleshooting capacity for some teams, but I would say the predominant use is more to give those teams a decent quality time series chart at the right level of granularity. They need to be able to troubleshoot and support any work internally and with customers as well. Our internet links, for example, are all monitored at one-minute intervals, which is an absolute minimum requirement. If we have any disruption in internet services in New Zealand, then everyone is impacted. SevOne gives us that level of granularity, which those operational teams use all the time. They're heavily reliant on it.

The integration of network data with our ITSM helps to improve collaboration between operations and support teams. It's just a means of managing the incident, and SevOne provides a source of those, but we don't try to overload our operations teams with spurious alerts based on SevOne. It's only specific criteria that will trigger a ticket for them. It does help our business operations and functionality, but we don't go crazy about how we set it up.

It offers a complete view of our network performance. We have quite an expensive environment and a lot of different technologies. We do use it to give us views across each of the separate technology domains, whether it's a customer network or our core. We don't tend to tie everything together in an end-to-end view because of the way our network is configured, but for the views that we need across the various technology domains, it does a good job at that.

We are enabled to detect network performance issues faster and before they impact end-users. We don't necessarily get full advantage out of it in that regard, because performance alerts are a lot harder to manage than hard volts or up-down problems, but the tool does give us that data. Whether we choose to use it all the time or not is a different question.

We don't use much of the flow data but other than that, the data it collects is very comprehensive. It's as comprehensive as you want it to be. You can glance over the surface, or you can dig really deep. It all depends on how you configure it out of the box, including what you want to look at and what you want to measure.

Having this depth is really important if you want to get ahead of the problems and head them off before they become customer-impacting. One of the things that happened in our organization was when the pandemic hit, a lot of our customers also went to work from home. Consequently, it drove a lot of traffic volume onto our customer-facing networks. Having SevOne in place prior to that identified a lot of critical choke points that weren't necessarily identified by other traditional monitoring techniques. Other vendors weren't picking them up.

I am not responsible for the customer-facing networks but I know that when we installed SevOne and got it working on some of them, it identified a lot of choke points, and it led us to fix a lot of capacity issues before the pandemic hit. This allowed us to continue to do business in a big BAU fashion as opposed to reacting to a crisis. We were ready for it because, in part, SevOne helped us to find those problems before they became critical. When people went home to work, and all that traffic volume hit our network, we had already rectified the problems.

SevOne's collection abilities cover multiple vendor's equipment, which absolutely is important to us. On my network specifically, we have a vast number of different platforms, more so than most. That's probably reflective of our corporate network, so things become somewhat less standard over time. As a result, SevOne's ability to work with just about any vendor's equipment was definitely valuable for us. The other networks in the organization are a bit more uniform but ours had a lot of different platforms, different kinds of load balancers, different kinds of switches, and there are many different kinds of firewalls. There is no question that this flexibility and compatibility were important.

SevOne can certainly bring together its analytics, reports, and workflows in a single dashboard. For example, the Data Insight overlay is great, and it comes with a lot of built-in dashboards and reports that have that analysis already included. You can take something like that and you can edit it to repurpose it to your needs, or you can use it as an app to build something for yourself. It also drills down really nicely. You start at a general level and then you can drill down to the specifics. You can start with a group, you can drill down to a device, you can get down to an interface, and so on. It's a good tool in that sense because you can look at it with as much detail as you like.

It's pretty easy to use. It's intuitive and menu-driven. It's got the familiar menu across the top as well, that you can tab through. If you know how to use a mouse and a keyboard, you're not going to be lost. But again, with a bit of training and a bit of insight from the developers of the platform, it can really unleash a lot of new ideas and new abilities, but right out of the box, it's pretty easy to use and pretty easy to figure out.

Using SevOne has enabled us to detect network performance issues faster, and before they impact end-users. You can just look at the capacity, and the ability to identify those interfaces that are being over-utilized, over time. Whether you're looking at the last weekend or the last week, or the last month, finding over-utilized links is important. It allows you to either offload that traffic somewhere else or augment that capacity. Importantly, SevOne allows you to get ahead of that. You can anticipate reaching a capacity issue in advance of it impacting your customers.

Another thing to consider is that we have a very large WAN. Canada is a big country, so my network end-to-end is from coast to coast. With such a large network, having real-time information on those links and how they're being utilized, or whether they are up or down, allows us to find and address issues before they become serious problems. You know, if you have two links and one's a primary and one's a backup, and your backup goes down, SevOne helps you understand that there is a gap and that you can get that addressed before the primary fails and you find yourself in an outage situation.

These are the ways that we use it on a daily basis. I am in operations but I know that in our engineering teams, they do the capacity planning and the network planning, so they use it too. You can easily set up a threshold, as well, to alert you when certain links get over-utilized or become highly utilized. Again, you can get ahead of the impacts and ahead of the customer complaints.

In 2020, we went for 11 months on my network without a major incident. We didn't have even one P1 or P2 incident, which is something that we'd never done before, and I credit SevOne with that success. A lot of the issues that we found and fixed with SevOne, prior to going into the pandemic mode of working, may have caused us problems. Our ability to detect and address issues ahead of time, which included monitoring, capacity planning, reviewing those numbers regularly, and paying attention to the alerts of critical links when the pressure increased in terms of capacity, allowed us to stay ahead instead of being purely reactive. It's been a godsend and has brought us 11 months of stability, the likes of which I'd never seen before in 15 years with the company.

In terms of speed, SevOne makes it so that we're faster than the NOC. As a company, we're supposed to rely on the NOC to find these faults, get the alarms, and respond. That's how it works with the other networks in the company, generally speaking. But with us, because we're so deeply integrated with SevOne, we tend to know these things immediately, or within five minutes of something happening on the network because of our chosen five-minute interval.

The bottom line is that it's five minutes or less before the operations group is alerted to a critical situation on the network. Whether it is a hardware fault or something else, we know the issue and the impact of it almost immediately. We find ourselves informing the NOC, "By the way, this happened and you guys should get organized because there's something coming." This means that as an operations manager, I'm quicker on the draw than the NOC, which puts me ahead of most networks.

In terms of how SevOne improved the client's overall functioning, they reduced the cost analysis for the people. They are not good with the forecasting. They have their own capacity performance management teams that can now rely on this tool. The other benefit they are getting is that they don't have live support. If any issue comes up, like a performance issue, then the VMs are going to scale up automatically, and it is the same as in Azure. In Azure, the problem is that it is going up and down. It's a problem. When you have the SQL Server, there is the issue that we cannot do that with it.

Sometimes we have a lockup. If you have a lockup of the VM in Azure, the scale-up and down won't work. So the benefit you're getting is that we have a maintenance window, and in that maintenance window we tell everybody that we're going to scale-up or scale-down these VMs, any of these issues, and we have the maintenance time to do that. That's the benefit they're getting on that certain time. But it is not doing it automatically because in Azure there is always an issue with that. As for the VMware environment on-prem, you can do it. It does it automatically.

SevOne is like a Swiss Army Knife. Because of the architecture and its redundancy, when we acquire a new customer and we are figuring out the optimal monitoring solution for them, we can quickly—within a couple of hours—bring in and start monitoring their devices and showing them data with SevOne. We can monitor CPU, memory, bandwidth utilization, errors, and high octet counts. That is very important for our infrastructure and our business.

And SevOne has helped with the planning of transitioning of our network services. It helped us to know how many objects were involved and what was needed, and let us understand how it was going to impact the installation we had, with respect to installing and using the Universal Collector. We were also able to identify the growth needed for our current infrastructure and to secure and install the licenses. It helped us expand the clusters that we have to support the planned growth.

In addition, the solution enables us to take any network metric and convert it to an insight into what's going on, without having to use a bunch of tools or manually determine things. SevOne's ability to convert that information into insights saves us time and gives us a one-stop-shop.

The integration of SevOne data with our ITSM has saved a lot of time with SevOne being the source of truth for most network device states in the organization. We're able to aggregate alerts, as the ITSM tools aggregate notifications from other vendors in our infrastructure. And SevOne's ability to clear itself when a condition is retired, and to notify the ITSM tools, is very helpful. It helps with automation as well. For example, when a router interface goes down and SevOne notifies the ITSM tool, it equally notifies the tool to retire the alarm and clear it when the interface goes back up. That is great. The ITSM integration has also helped to automate the creation of tickets for customers and internal groups.

SevOne provides a comprehensive view of network performance data. It supports multi-vendors out of the box, which is very good. In 90% of the cases, new devices are plug-and-play, so when a new version comes out then SevOne has support for it out of the box. This is the case with either network monitoring or NetFlow data. In the worst-case scenario, they have an open framework that we can use as the next step. It helps us to get it up and monitored fairly quickly.

The ability to support multiple vendors' equipment is very important. In fact, it is one of our top priorities because this compatibility saves us time and money, as we are able to get new equipment set up quickly and without much effort. That's a key thing for us.

I'm not able to quantify our savings in terms of monetary value but in an ideal scenario, we save two weeks of time. When we add a device, we get data out of the monitoring points. Nine times out of ten, SevOne works immediately. In the exceptions, we reach out to the vendor to clarify what they need from an SNMP point of view. After that, we take it up with the SevOne certification team. With any new vendor that comes up, SevOne provides a 10-day SLA for the free certification. That's a pretty good saving.

It is very important to us that SevOne supports streaming telemetry-based networks. As with any other company, our network is evolving and we are moving towards telemetry. We are in a pre-discussion phase with SevOne to use the telemetric components so hopefully, in the near future, we will have it in our product suite.

We do have SDN but as of today, not with SevOne. That is something that we have aspirations for and will look to in the future.

The out-of-the-box reports and workflows help us to understand what is normal and what is abnormal in our network, and this helps to speed up time-to-value. This is one of SevOne's strong points as I compare them with other vendors that I have seen over the years.

SevOne gives us the ability to edit and customize the out-of-the-box reports and we do that quite a lot. We take what SevOne has provided and we change it to fit our needs. For example, when vendors change their versions and release, we fine-tune them to accommodate these things.

It is fairly easy to customize the out-of-the-box reports, although one needs to have a bit of knowledge to do that. I see it as any other product, but there are some limitations to it. There are complex structures from certain vendors such as Cisco that are not easily supported. For instance, Alcatel-Lucent provides multiple SNMP profiles but that cannot be supported in SevOne. This had to be accomplished using other means. It is cases such as this that highlight why you need to have the knowledge but once you have that, it's fairly straightforward.

Cisco is a vendor that we have had to customize reports for. With respect to temperature monitoring or CPU reporting, some of the out-of-the-box reports don't fit that specific vendor version, so we had to modify them to use the latest MIB and SNMP OID.

We use SevOne for high-frequency polling, where we can quickly flip it on and the network operations team is able to easily troubleshoot issues.

SevOne has enabled us to integrate our network performance management data across our ITSM and business decision-making tools. All of the data that we collect is also shared with other consumers, instead of just retaining it and reporting it. This is done via the Data Bus, which is running over the open-source product, Kafka.

This was fairly easy to deploy and then open using the various device groups and object groups. Once it is open, data can be sent to other consumers. There is no need to do a lot of work. You just quickly enable the component and open it.

These integrations are key to our organization, where there are a lot of users and a high need for the data. For instance, capacity planning. A bit of analytics outside of SevOne has also been implemented, taking the data from different areas including ITSM, network inventory, configuration management, et cetera.

This performance data is key, and having such integration means that we get value out of SevOne fairly quickly. We don't need to invest time and money developing in-house products or looking for other solutions. Of course, the SevOne database component comes with a cost, but it's directly related to what the business needs.

SevOne helps us to detect network performance issues in advance of them impacting end-users through proactive alerting. The monitoring system contains threshold policies that have been configured using the dynamic thresholding approach. Specifically, it looks at a few cases to develop a baseline and calculate the standard deviation. If there is any breach or any high utilization in the specific service of a network, SevOne will provide alerts according to the severity level. It will go to our ITSM and then out to the operational users who will keep an eye on it.

If we did not have this tool, we would be virtually blind. We wouldn't know what's going on with all the servers. We would end up having to rely on someone calling us and saying, "Hey, this thing is not working." Then we would have to deep dive into the problem to find out what was broken. Having SevOne monitoring all these different aspects of our platform really helps. Based on the graphs, we are already aware that something might break and what might happen. We are not blind anymore. It is one of the most important systems we have in our environment for monitoring devices.

We usually look at a 24-hour graph. If the graph was around 2K yesterday, and it's about 1K today, then we obviously and immediately know there is something wrong.

We are able to monitor our multi-vendor network switches, including Juniper, and Cisco, as well as our BroadWorks systems.

We also use SevOne to integrate network performance data with business decision-making tools. One of the tasks we were recently assigned was to figure out our user growth and to make sure we have enough resources for that growth. It was so easy for us to look at the SevOne graph and figure out what our users' patterns are and how they will shape up in the future. We came up with an estimate for every month over the next few years. It helped us figure out what kind of resources we are looking at. If the graph tells us a server is reaching its peak, we know we need to build new servers and add them to our platform.

And while we don't really heavily use the network, it helps us figure out which gateway is using most of the traffic.

We have closed monitoring gaps and consolidated multiple point solutions from varying vendors as our company has handled mergers and acquisitions.

We have extensive visibility into the performance and tuning of our java via JMX. Historically, we had JVM’s crash, and had no idea why. Now we know and can tune accordingly via data from SevOne.

Historically, before SevOne, we had constant server crashes and locks due to storage volumes filling up. That rarely happens now.

SevOne NPM helps our customers detect performance issues faster. The solution has a polling engine to check the normal behavior of a given device in an area. It helps the operations team, but you need to configure it properly. It all depends on the implementation engineer, and the operations team must fine-tune the monitoring policy. Once it's properly configured, SevOne will help you address some issues right away. 

Without the solution, the operations team would need to manually check each device when something goes wrong. With SevOne installed, we get the alert right away, so you can say that it cuts the troubleshooting time by one to three hours, depending on the situation. If you properly configure the policy, you can proactively address potential performance issues before a failure occurs.

SevOne has multiple out-of-the-box options for reporting. They have the old reporting portal and the new one. The new reporting portal has more out-of-the-box functionality, and it looks great. It helps the customer gain visibility into the network.

The out-of-the-box reports helped speed up its time to value. It's very important to make the tool usable, so you can prove to management that money was spent wisely.

SevOne has improved my organization by taking us to a single pane of glass for alerting on the network reports. For NOC, they only have a single pane of glass they have to look at.

It can be very thorough and very complete if you buy all of the appropriate modules and you have enough licenses to cover all the gear on your network. Some of the niceness is the flexibility of the tool and what you can do, but some of the complexity is due to that flexibility. The tool can be very complex depending on what you want to do, but that complexity makes it flexible to see things in different ways.

It enables us to detect network performance issues faster and before they impact users. Looking at IP SLA metrics and seeing that something has exceeded the baseline before users actually call up and say that there's a problem.

We are not building the reports. We just give the reports some basic things. It's kind of self-service for the engineers. They have access to the tool and build their own reports based on their requirements. So, they explore whatever is available out-of-the-box, like the performance report, topology, or any other kinds of alerting reports. Nowadays, they have started concentrating more on Data Insight.

Whenever there is an outage, the first thing they will do is come into SevOne and do security data analysis. They will then contact the next level (the support groups) for troubleshooting. We also get a deep dive into which host is consuming more data and utilizing what protocols. These are all NetFlow, so it is all pretty helpful. It's helping with the day-to-day operations. We have a separate team who consumes the data for the operational analysis. Whenever they do root cause analysis, they look into the data.

SevOne offers multiple integrations. They also have their own collectors and have business partnerships with other enterprise-owned companies, like NetApp. They have efficient integration which comes with the existing support, and we have been working with SevOne to implement it.

Sometimes, there are multiple issues outside of our network, but we have visibility into that kind of data.

SevOne also enables us to detect network performance issues faster and before they impact end-users. We were monitoring the load balancers on our backstage passes for access to the network. And we can see, it went from around 3% to around 75% over a couple-of-week period where they had to send in all the remote access and change everything. SevOne really did a number for us, during the pandemic, of isolating which load balances were overloaded with users working from home. So that right there, was worth its weight in gold, because the management created all these reports for load balancers, for access for remote workers, and that's all they focused on, for a couple of months. So that was nice.

It has saved at least 50% because if we're just using ping and a couple of other tools, you can't really see that, all these devices went down at the same time, that segment, or that peer.

Given the ease of access to the information in a few clicks, the user base of the product has increased tremendously. As the word of mouth spread, the increased reachability of this for the performance reporting space within our organisation increased.

On any outage, SevOne is pretty quick to send an alert. We've got an operations center that consumes the alert and sends it to the device owners so that they can minimize the time of impact of that alert. Such outages happen at least once a month, and whenever there is a real outage, SevOne is the one to detect it.

The comprehensiveness of SevOne's collection of network performance and flow data is very good. For NetFlow, I would rate it a 10 out of 10 because it collects everything that NetFlow delivers. You can also customize the reports to show only what you'd like to see or what your customers would like to see. For network monitoring, I would rate it a nine out of 10 because you can collect all the information and slice and dice that information in whatever manner you feel necessary to consume that data. We've got an operations team that subscribes only to the alerts. So, we've got tier two and tier three people who are looking at reports, and they slice and dice those reports however they like.

Its collection abilities across multiple vendors' equipment are really good. If we don't have an SNMP OID for a particular vendor, the only thing that the architects at my company need to do is to supply us the SNMP OIDs and/or MIBs. We send these to SevOne, and they certify it. We can then install it in the SevOne system, and it'll start monitoring that equipment. Its collection abilities are important because we've got multiple vendors in the network, and each specialty, such as a firewall or a router, has different collection needs. We're able to meet these specific collection needs based on the device types.

For our operations, the dashboard is very important because that's how our customers are making day-to-day and long-term strategic decisions, for six months to a year, about their network. We're not using any reports for capacity planning as such, but this is an idea that is going to be put in place shortly.

It provides continuous analytics of the network, which helps our customers in making smarter decisions and ensuring that things are up and running.

In terms of the integration of network performance management data with our ITSM tool, we don't have a direct integration with ServiceNow. We have integrated SevOne with Netcool, and Netcool is integrated with ServiceNow. It is pretty easy to integrate. We've got people on our team who are responsible for Netcool, and if we want to define a new policy or alert, we show them what alert we're sending over, and they integrate it in a matter of a couple of hours.

One of the benefits is its ability to transform raw network performance data into actionable insights. That's one of the keys for us. When something goes above a threshold, we can see it in the alerts and take action. Likewise, we can see graphs and reports and we can judge what to do before something goes wrong.

Some of the teams that are using our graphs from SevOne, and the capacity team that uses the data it generates, are able to make decisions before something bad happens.

We use SevOne to monitor a multi-vendor network. We have a lot of different kinds of devices in our scenario. We have Cisco switches and network devices from various vendors. The alerting and reports that we can generate help us see if something is not the way it should be.

SevOne has enabled us to integrate network performance management data across ITSM and our business decision-making tools, predominantly through the ServiceNow platform. We also did a Salesforce implementation where SevOne leveraged Salesforce to determine if a circuit was production versus non-production. Essentially, this distinction implies whether we should care about it, or not.

The integration with Salesforce was pretty easy, where most of the work was on the Salesforce side. It was probably one of the simpler integrations that we did for the platform.

The comprehensiveness of SevOne in terms of collecting network performance and flow data, when we started using this in 2013, was very limited. It was developed predominantly for a Cisco network and I'm a hundred percent Juniper. As such, it required a lot of work to get the platform to not only understand it but to speak in terms of Juniper MIB files, and even the nomenclature. For a Cisco network, it would have been a situation where you opened the box, plugged it in, and walked away. With Juniper, it was very much not that.

At this point, our collection capabilities are limited to just Juniper equipment. This is restricted by the tool that we have, which only covers Juniper networks.

With respect to streaming telemetry, we do not have it implemented. We were working with them to try and understand what they could do in this regard, but I do not believe that they supported streaming telemetry at the time.

We provide customer internet access services and the 95th percentile is our target. Every month, we prepare a detailed report per customer that shows the current percentile value (does it exceed 95 or not), and we have to prepare detailed traffic reports that show the real traffic graph in the last month.

All of this was done manually. With SevOne, this process is fully automated and the reports can be sent directly to business customers (after a simple verification performed by another colleague).

Based on some metrics, we have policies that will raise issues and tickets internally, in case thresholds are being crossed. 

We have benefited mainly from the use of the dashboard interface. It makes the network visually interesting for people who are not in the network. A lot of people are not network techies who understand streams in the network. Based on location, we have streams coming in and out. They can see visually when there is some problem. They don't need to understand all the network technology behind it to be able to understand if everything is working well or if there is a problem. 

The visualization doesn't remain in the network. It is available for everyone in production management, etc.

In 2002, my company was using Tivoli and I was totally frustrated in our inability to see anything. The first thing we fixed was storage and only got around to monitoring in 2008, which was a mess. We had trouble keeping our agents running and had 5 actions for every 125.

Now, we have about 125 actions as opposed to 125 phone calls of issues, increasing our proactive measures hundred-fold. We also began providing rich detailed data to our customer on system performance to the point that they had to change their processes and level of transparency.

We're blowing away our competition.

• SevOne threshold monitoring alerts help to improve our network monitoring.
• Procedures in troubleshooting were built on predefined SevOne reports.

We are able to alert the correct application owners, as well as troubleshoot problems quicker, leading to less downtime.

It help us to monitor a large variety of network devices and servers from our customers.

We had multiple systems when I first got here. We use SevOne to stabilize our system and standardize our operations around it. It's simple enough for me to hire administrative-level employees who can function in a capable manner. And I save money, too, because I can hire less-expensive employees who don't need to have high levels of education and a lot of training.

We've also been able to move away from having a dozen systems, databases and collections station. I've got a distributed architecture now based on an appliance. I also have less things to have to patch if there's an issue.

It provides us with more data to be informed of the traffic on our network.

It detects trends in metrics that prevent saturation, high temperatures in data centers, and provides visibility into the fantastic elements that help make the verification of real-time events.

With previous platforms we had to manually add and remove devices. With this solution, it's all automatic – all auto discovery and deletion, which is amazing. It gives us visibility that we didn’t have before.

I can't, I arrived in the last days of the project, just to make reports.

We are able to see or alert on issues a lot faster.

We are actually using it for commercial use. We can see where customers are disconnecting and their orders failing, which results in us continuing to bill them and having to reimburse them. SevOne enables us to look at the data and see that the customer has disconnected so we can stop billing and reimbursing them. We also can discover outages before the customer complains.

It's given us the ability to accommodate our company's entire global network infrastructure (routers, switches, load balancers, firewalls, etc.) and provide historical trending analytics for interfaces and network traffic and general production graphing and reporting over a chosen time period.

The graphing function can be tailored for all levels of management reporting.

Also, the ability of the product to integrate into other vendor management platforms to allow the polling and alerting streams to be maintained.

It allows us to see metrics and immediately map to who is causing an issue so we can react faster. It improves our mean time to resolution.

It diagnoses and separates network issues from application issues based on flow analysis.

Delegate some of the networking monitoring work to SevOne.

The reporting capabilities provided important metrics and data that helped in the oversight of our system, network, and overall IT infrastructure, both in terms of applications and hardware.

Ability to monitor wide variety of systems with one tool eliminated the need to have many different tools to monitor our infrastructure.

This is a new tool for our company. This project is the first one on which we're using this tool.

Previously, we used a customized MRTG solution. Graph generation was painfully slow. With SevOne, we are able to generate graphs and reports quickly.

Ease of use enables us to troubleshoot quickly and reduce MTTR.

Dashboards display important info which provides the NOC insight to the network and applications.

We integrate heavily to SevOne via API. This allows us to tie our customer performance metrics data to our customer portal, so it is a self-service function.

The capacity graphs are used by several groups within Comcast to monitor the health of the network.

The tool has given a great visibility of what is going on our network and has helped to troubleshoot network-related issues quickly and accurately.

It's become an integral part of our monitoring and real-time network analysis.

One example is in the way you have information of the status of each component of each device in your network.