RE: SevOne Monitoring

[Tony McKay]

All,
I've been using SevOne for 3 years, and I can confirm some of your 
suspicions around element licensing, in that you will consume more element 
counts than you allowed in your budget.  It does provide a very granular way of 
omitting objects from discovery through regex.  It is not a single pane of 
glass solution, in that fault management is not its forte.  This platform is 
for performance measurement and management primarily.  A good example of this 
is that out of the box, it cannot throw an alert if an interface goes down.  
You have to programmatically build each alert based on an SNMP polled value, so 
there is a long lead time before you can bring it into production.  Compared to 
other similar products out there, price per license seems to be pretty steep, 
since it include the hardware, but you also will continue to pay 18% 
maintenance year over year.

I'm available for any one-on-one discussions you might have about the 
platform offline.


Tony McKay
tony.mc...@rittercommunications.com

-The boundary to your comfort zone fades a little each time you cross it.  
Raise your limits by pushing them.

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-Original Message-
From: NANOG [mailto:nanog-boun...@nanog.org] On Behalf Of Chad Myers
Sent: Wednesday, December 02, 2015 4:00 PM
To: Naslund, Steve
Cc: nanog@nanog.org
Subject: [BULK] Re: SevOne Monitoring

I took a look at SevOne back when you could download a free, 500-element 
version of it when I was looking for something to deal with Netflow.  I'd heard 
of it prior but nothing from the website seemed overly appealing.  Actually 
-using- the product though it was wonderful seeing a tool built to 
automatically deal with a lot of the things that are fairly routine but are 
time consuming to deal with.  Automatic filtering of what is monitored based on 
user customizable rules.  For example:  Junos device? Ignore all file systems 
that are mounted from /dev/md*, ignore pim([de])|lsi|gre|ipip|dsc interfaces, 
and so on.  If an interface is set to admin-down automatically prevent alarms 
from it.  Then don't alarm on it being down.  If it later changes so it isn't 
admin-down then start monitoring & alerting on it again automatically.

As Steven pointed out though the pricing model escalates rapidly since they do 
it by each individual object.  If using netflow, each netflow interface is 
considered 100 elements if I remember correctly.  Even if I ignored netflow, a 
single EX8216 would consume a few thousand elements or more if I wanted to 
monitor all of the interfaces in the chassis.  Just looking at it for lab usage 
over ~12 Juniper devices, if I wanted to get full monitoring over all devices, 
without netflow/sflow, it was a few hundred thousand elements.  When I try to 
extrapolate that to our production environment with thousands of network 
devices I can't even imagine what the element count and subsequent cost would 
be.  When comparing against similar tools the cost is simply outrageous due to 
the licensing.  And I just realized that it actually becomes more cost 
effective to have an internal development team dedicated to writing & 
maintaining custom network monitoring tools when compared to licensing costs 
like this.

Independent of that, I'm miffed that the free, 500-element version I was using 
for home and lab use is no longer usable.  It says the license is valid until 
sometime in 2031, but won't actually let me beyond that point until I upload an 
updated license file.  Can't even do a reinstall since the original license 
file is only valid for a few weeks before it expires.  I keep forgetting to 
contact support about it when I'm at home but since they completely removed the 
free version I'm doubtful that they will provide an updated license file.

So yeah, fantastic tool, not as pretty as Solarwinds, but it gets really 
expensive, really fast.  And when talking with them I got the impression that 
the licensing was per year versus a one-time license cost and then recurring 
maintenance cost for support & software updates; the above licensing behavior 
in the free version supports that impression.  I don't know if that is correct 
though as I didn't think to ask while I was talking with them.

-Chad


On Nov 25, 2015, at 12:04 PM, "Naslund, Steve" <snasl...@medline.com> wrote:

> I looked at SevOne and liked the product a lot.  One thing we found was that 
> the pricing model escalates pretty rapidly because they count every OBJECT 
> you monitor, not every device.  So if I am looking at Bytes In, Bytes Out, 
> Errors In, etc on a single interface those are all counted as a separate 
> OBJECT against your license count.  You really have to be more se

Re: SevOne Monitoring

[Chad Myers]

I took a look at SevOne back when you could download a free, 500-element 
version of it when I was looking for something to deal with Netflow.  I'd heard 
of it prior but nothing from the website seemed overly appealing.  Actually 
-using- the product though it was wonderful seeing a tool built to 
automatically deal with a lot of the things that are fairly routine but are 
time consuming to deal with.  Automatic filtering of what is monitored based on 
user customizable rules.  For example:  Junos device? Ignore all file systems 
that are mounted from /dev/md*, ignore pim([de])|lsi|gre|ipip|dsc interfaces, 
and so on.  If an interface is set to admin-down automatically prevent alarms 
from it.  Then don't alarm on it being down.  If it later changes so it isn't 
admin-down then start monitoring & alerting on it again automatically.

As Steven pointed out though the pricing model escalates rapidly since they do 
it by each individual object.  If using netflow, each netflow interface is 
considered 100 elements if I remember correctly.  Even if I ignored netflow, a 
single EX8216 would consume a few thousand elements or more if I wanted to 
monitor all of the interfaces in the chassis.  Just looking at it for lab usage 
over ~12 Juniper devices, if I wanted to get full monitoring over all devices, 
without netflow/sflow, it was a few hundred thousand elements.  When I try to 
extrapolate that to our production environment with thousands of network 
devices I can't even imagine what the element count and subsequent cost would 
be.  When comparing against similar tools the cost is simply outrageous due to 
the licensing.  And I just realized that it actually becomes more cost 
effective to have an internal development team dedicated to writing & 
maintaining custom network monitoring tools when compared to licensing costs 
like this.

Independent of that, I'm miffed that the free, 500-element version I was using 
for home and lab use is no longer usable.  It says the license is valid until 
sometime in 2031, but won't actually let me beyond that point until I upload an 
updated license file.  Can't even do a reinstall since the original license 
file is only valid for a few weeks before it expires.  I keep forgetting to 
contact support about it when I'm at home but since they completely removed the 
free version I'm doubtful that they will provide an updated license file.

So yeah, fantastic tool, not as pretty as Solarwinds, but it gets really 
expensive, really fast.  And when talking with them I got the impression that 
the licensing was per year versus a one-time license cost and then recurring 
maintenance cost for support & software updates; the above licensing behavior 
in the free version supports that impression.  I don't know if that is correct 
though as I didn't think to ask while I was talking with them.

-Chad


On Nov 25, 2015, at 12:04 PM, "Naslund, Steve" <snasl...@medline.com> wrote:

> I looked at SevOne and liked the product a lot.  One thing we found was that 
> the pricing model escalates pretty rapidly because they count every OBJECT 
> you monitor, not every device.  So if I am looking at Bytes In, Bytes Out, 
> Errors In, etc on a single interface those are all counted as a separate 
> OBJECT against your license count.  You really have to be more selective 
> about what you want to see which to me is really inconvenient because often 
> you don't know what SNMP object you want to look at until a problem surfaces. 
>  One of the strengths I really liked was the trending capability that helps 
> you predict capacity issues before you hit them.
>
> Summary:  Good product, real expensive in wide deployment.
>
> Steven Naslund
> Chicago IL
>
> -Original Message-
> From: NANOG [mailto:nanog-boun...@nanog.org] On Behalf Of Paul Stewart
> Sent: Wednesday, November 25, 2015 2:55 AM
> To: 'NANOG'
> Subject: SevOne Monitoring
>
> Hey folks.
>
>
>
> Looking for feedback from actual customers on SevOne for network monitoring . 
> anyone using them and willing to share thoughts online/offline?
>
>
>
> They have an appealing system for network monitoring and considering it as a 
> replacement to Solarwinds.
>
>
>
> Cheers,
>
> Paul
>
>
>
>
>




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RE: SevOne Monitoring

[Naslund, Steve]

I looked at SevOne and liked the product a lot.  One thing we found was that 
the pricing model escalates pretty rapidly because they count every OBJECT you 
monitor, not every device.  So if I am looking at Bytes In, Bytes Out, Errors 
In, etc on a single interface those are all counted as a separate OBJECT 
against your license count.  You really have to be more selective about what 
you want to see which to me is really inconvenient because often you don't know 
what SNMP object you want to look at until a problem surfaces.  One of the 
strengths I really liked was the trending capability that helps you predict 
capacity issues before you hit them.

Summary:  Good product, real expensive in wide deployment.

Steven Naslund
Chicago IL

-Original Message-
From: NANOG [mailto:nanog-boun...@nanog.org] On Behalf Of Paul Stewart
Sent: Wednesday, November 25, 2015 2:55 AM
To: 'NANOG'
Subject: SevOne Monitoring

Hey folks.

 

Looking for feedback from actual customers on SevOne for network monitoring . 
anyone using them and willing to share thoughts online/offline?

 

They have an appealing system for network monitoring and considering it as a 
replacement to Solarwinds. 

 

Cheers,

Paul

 

 

Re: SevOne Monitoring

[Mike Lyon]

Can Observium alert on SNMP traps? I seem to remember that it couldn't do
that...

On Wed, Nov 25, 2015 at 12:59 PM, James Greig  wrote:

> Depending on what you're after observium might be worth looking into. I
> run solarwinds, paessler and observium but neither are as clear and as
> useful for monitoring network as observium ( My opinion only of course )
>
> Kind regards
>
> James Greig
>
> > On 25 Nov 2015, at 08:54, Paul Stewart  wrote:
> >
> > Hey folks.
> >
> >
> >
> > Looking for feedback from actual customers on SevOne for network
> monitoring
> > . anyone using them and willing to share thoughts online/offline?
> >
> >
> >
> > They have an appealing system for network monitoring and considering it
> as a
> > replacement to Solarwinds.
> >
> >
> >
> > Cheers,
> >
> > Paul
> >
> >
> >
> >
> >
>



-- 
Mike Lyon
408-621-4826
mike.l...@gmail.com

http://www.linkedin.com/in/mlyon

Re: SevOne Monitoring

[Mike Lyon]

Shucks.


On Wed, Nov 25, 2015 at 4:03 PM, James Greig  wrote:

> No, as far as I know that's work in progress at the moment.  The alert
> system works well for anything polled though but depends how often you're
> polling
>
> James Greig
>
> On 25 Nov 2015, at 23:49, Mike Lyon  wrote:
>
> Can Observium alert on SNMP traps? I seem to remember that it couldn't do
> that...
>
> On Wed, Nov 25, 2015 at 12:59 PM, James Greig  wrote:
>
>> Depending on what you're after observium might be worth looking into. I
>> run solarwinds, paessler and observium but neither are as clear and as
>> useful for monitoring network as observium ( My opinion only of course )
>>
>> Kind regards
>>
>> James Greig
>>
>> > On 25 Nov 2015, at 08:54, Paul Stewart  wrote:
>> >
>> > Hey folks.
>> >
>> >
>> >
>> > Looking for feedback from actual customers on SevOne for network
>> monitoring
>> > . anyone using them and willing to share thoughts online/offline?
>> >
>> >
>> >
>> > They have an appealing system for network monitoring and considering it
>> as a
>> > replacement to Solarwinds.
>> >
>> >
>> >
>> > Cheers,
>> >
>> > Paul
>> >
>> >
>> >
>> >
>> >
>>
>
>
>
> --
> Mike Lyon
> 408-621-4826
> mike.l...@gmail.com
>
> http://www.linkedin.com/in/mlyon
>
>
>
>


-- 
Mike Lyon
408-621-4826
mike.l...@gmail.com

http://www.linkedin.com/in/mlyon

Re: SevOne Monitoring

[James Greig]

Depending on what you're after observium might be worth looking into. I run 
solarwinds, paessler and observium but neither are as clear and as useful for 
monitoring network as observium ( My opinion only of course )

Kind regards

James Greig 

> On 25 Nov 2015, at 08:54, Paul Stewart  wrote:
> 
> Hey folks.
> 
> 
> 
> Looking for feedback from actual customers on SevOne for network monitoring
> . anyone using them and willing to share thoughts online/offline?
> 
> 
> 
> They have an appealing system for network monitoring and considering it as a
> replacement to Solarwinds. 
> 
> 
> 
> Cheers,
> 
> Paul
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 

Re: SevOne Monitoring

[James Greig]

No, as far as I know that's work in progress at the moment.  The alert system 
works well for anything polled though but depends how often you're polling

James Greig

> On 25 Nov 2015, at 23:49, Mike Lyon  wrote:
> 
> Can Observium alert on SNMP traps? I seem to remember that it couldn't do 
> that...
> 
>> On Wed, Nov 25, 2015 at 12:59 PM, James Greig  wrote:
>> Depending on what you're after observium might be worth looking into. I run 
>> solarwinds, paessler and observium but neither are as clear and as useful 
>> for monitoring network as observium ( My opinion only of course )
>> 
>> Kind regards
>> 
>> James Greig
>> 
>> > On 25 Nov 2015, at 08:54, Paul Stewart  wrote:
>> >
>> > Hey folks.
>> >
>> >
>> >
>> > Looking for feedback from actual customers on SevOne for network monitoring
>> > . anyone using them and willing to share thoughts online/offline?
>> >
>> >
>> >
>> > They have an appealing system for network monitoring and considering it as 
>> > a
>> > replacement to Solarwinds.
>> >
>> >
>> >
>> > Cheers,
>> >
>> > Paul
>> >
>> >
>> >
>> >
>> >
> 
> 
> 
> -- 
> Mike Lyon
> 408-621-4826
> mike.l...@gmail.com
> 
> http://www.linkedin.com/in/mlyon
> 
> 
> 

SevOne Monitoring

[Paul Stewart]

Hey folks.

 

Looking for feedback from actual customers on SevOne for network monitoring
. anyone using them and willing to share thoughts online/offline?

 

They have an appealing system for network monitoring and considering it as a
replacement to Solarwinds. 

 

Cheers,

Paul