[186186] in North American Network Operators' Group
RE: SevOne Monitoring
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Tony McKay)
Thu Dec 3 14:56:02 2015
X-Original-To: nanog@nanog.org
From: Tony McKay <Tony.McKay@RitterCommunications.com>
To: Chad Myers <Chad.Myers@theice.com>
Date: Thu, 3 Dec 2015 18:35:38 +0000
In-Reply-To: <48DDB6F6-D755-439F-B7A8-C4B609417E26@theice.com>
Cc: "nanog@nanog.org" <nanog@nanog.org>
Errors-To: nanog-bounces@nanog.org
All,
I've been using SevOne for 3 years, and I can confirm some of your suspici=
ons 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 om=
itting objects from discovery through regex. It is not a single pane of gl=
ass solution, in that fault management is not its forte. This platform is =
for performance measurement and management primarily. A good example of th=
is is that out of the box, it cannot throw an alert if an interface goes do=
wn. 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 plat=
form offline.
Tony McKay
Tony.mckay@rittercommunications.com
-The boundary to your comfort zone fades a little each time you cross it. =
Raise your limits by pushing them.
This electronic mail transmission may contain confidential or privileged in=
formation. If you believe that you have received this message in error, ple=
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-----Original Message-----
From: NANOG [mailto:nanog-bounces@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 ve=
rsion of it when I was looking for something to deal with Netflow. I'd hea=
rd of it prior but nothing from the website seemed overly appealing. Actua=
lly -using- the product though it was wonderful seeing a tool built to auto=
matically deal with a lot of the things that are fairly routine but are tim=
e consuming to deal with. Automatic filtering of what is monitored based o=
n user customizable rules. For example: Junos device? Ignore all file sys=
tems that are mounted from /dev/md*, ignore pim([de])|lsi|gre|ipip|dsc inte=
rfaces, and so on. If an interface is set to admin-down automatically prev=
ent alarms from it. Then don't alarm on it being down. If it later change=
s so it isn't admin-down then start monitoring & alerting on it again autom=
atically.
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 net=
flow, a single EX8216 would consume a few thousand elements or more if I wa=
nted to monitor all of the interfaces in the chassis. Just looking at it f=
or lab usage over ~12 Juniper devices, if I wanted to get full monitoring o=
ver all devices, without netflow/sflow, it was a few hundred thousand eleme=
nts. When I try to extrapolate that to our production environment with tho=
usands of network devices I can't even imagine what the element count and s=
ubsequent cost would be. When comparing against similar tools the cost is =
simply outrageous due to the licensing. And I just realized that it actual=
ly becomes more cost effective to have an internal development team dedicat=
ed to writing & maintaining custom network monitoring tools when compared t=
o licensing costs like this.
Independent of that, I'm miffed that the free, 500-element version I was us=
ing 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 orig=
inal 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 comp=
letely removed the free version I'm doubtful that they will provide an upda=
ted license file.
So yeah, fantastic tool, not as pretty as Solarwinds, but it gets really ex=
pensive, 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 recurri=
ng maintenance cost for support & software updates; the above licensing beh=
avior in the free version supports that impression. I don't know if that i=
s 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" <SNaslund@medline.com> wrote=
:
> I looked at SevOne and liked the product a lot. One thing we found was t=
hat the pricing model escalates pretty rapidly because they count every OBJ=
ECT you monitor, not every device. So if I am looking at Bytes In, Bytes O=
ut, Errors In, etc on a single interface those are all counted as a separat=
e 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 surfac=
es. One of the strengths I really liked was the trending capability that h=
elps 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-bounces@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 monitori=
ng . anyone using them and willing to share thoughts online/offline?
>
>
>
> They have an appealing system for network monitoring and considering it a=
s a replacement to Solarwinds.
>
>
>
> Cheers,
>
> Paul
>
>
>
>
>
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