Netreo Review

IT operations are becoming more complex by the day due to remote working practices, hybrid work environments, cloud adoption, and other related factors. As a result, being in control of your IT operations is not easy.

This is where tools like Netreo come in handy, as it helps to stay on top of your performance at all times. Read on as we talk about what Netreo is, its features, pros and cons, and how it can benefit your organization.

Let's start with the basics first.

What is Netreo?

Netreo is a comprehensive full-stack and AIOps monitoring platform that handles performance and application monitoring for your networks, infrastructure, and applications. This platform provides comprehensive visibility into the availability and performance of devices, infrastructure, and the network that supports them. With this real-time information, you can quickly identify the gaps and bottlenecks and fix them at the earliest.

Netreo also works well in heterogeneous and constantly evolving environments, thanks to its integration with more than 350 different services and third-party tools. Plus, its intuitive dashboard provides a glimpse into the health of your networks and also helps with decision-making and capacity planning.

Moving on, let's take a detailed look into Netreo's features.

Netreo Features

Some of the salient features of Netreo are as follows.

• Cloud Monitoring Netreo specializes in monitoring cloud applications and provides a ton of information related to their performance. Some handy metrics include availability, response time, performance, compliance with Service Level Agreements, and more. Using this information, you can get a better understanding of where your cloud applications stand currently, and accordingly, you can take measures to help reach your goals.
• Incident Management The incident management component continuously scans your entire stack to identify any gaps and vulnerabilities that may be present in them. It uses a wide range of techniques such as root cause analysis, rule-based correlation, and automatic escalation to ensure that the identified gaps are fixed. In turn, plugging in the gaps can help to avoid major security incidents.
• Virtualization Management Managing virtualization is not easy and this is why Netreo provides detailed information in real-time about your clusters, resource pools, host systems, and the applications that run on them. When you combine this real-time information with historical data, you can understand the changes in performance. Based on their impact, you can identify the root cause, and strive to make the necessary changes to improve resource optimization and performance.
• Email Monitoring Email servers are another critical resource you must monitor, as any downtimes and outages can have serious repercussions for your organization. The email monitoring module of Netreo provides a detailed view of your email monitoring environments like Microsoft Exchange, Google Suite, and Office 365. You can view the performance of your mail servers in a single dashboard to gain a better understanding of synthetic transactions, server usage, and more.
• Configuration Management Netreo's configuration management provides a streamlined look into your configuration changes on a timeline. You can see who made what changes and when to a configuration to gain a better understanding of its impact on your overall operations. Note that Netreo's configuration management is context-aware, so it can work well for any type of configuration.
• Traffic Monitoring Traffic monitoring helps to identify problems in your network like latency, bandwidth-hogging, and more. It also helps to identify any potential attacks, especially flood-based attacks like Denial of Service (DoS). Netreo supports many flow analysis technologies like Netflow and sFlow that will gather the necessary metrics to provide a complete picture.
• Server Management Netreo can monitor different types of servers and report their performance. You can even configure Netreo to alert you in case any of the values deviate greatly from the established baseline values. Netreo supports the following server types: Windows, Linux, Solaris, OS/400, and Z/OS.
• Automatic Mapping Understanding the sublime connections that exist in your network is the biggest challenge from a  troubleshooting standpoint, and this is one of the key areas where Netreo can help. It can provide a visual representation of your environment using minimal configuration and maintenance. Such a visual look can help to easily identify the not-so-evident dependencies and connections.
• Web Application Monitoring Netreo can monitor any web application's performance using its advanced measurement and visualization tools. In particular, the Web Application Response Time (ART) monitor provides a glimpse of user experience and slowdowns, along with the necessary information to identify the source of the issue.

Thus, these are some of the important features of Netreo that can help you to have a highly productive and optimized environment.

Next, let's look at some of the pros and cons of this tool.

Pros and Cons of Netreo

Before buying a tool, it's important to understand its pros and cons, so you can make an informed decision about Netreo's overall fit in your infrastructure.

With these pros and cons in mind, let's understand the likely impact of Netreo on your organization.

Impact of Netreo

As an admin/decision-maker of your organization, it's important you evaluate the capabilities of a tool and its likely impact on your organization. Ascertain the value it generates in terms of tangible and intangible benefits and compare it with the cost to better understand its Return on Investment (ROI). To ease this comparison process, here is the likely impact of Netreo on your organization.

• Highly Customizable One of the biggest advantages of Netreo is that it's highly customizable. All the features can be installed into your existing infrastructure as a virtual service, or they can be installed on a physical device. Just depends on what you want. Regardless of which deployment option you choose, you'll have in-depth visibility and information for strategic decision-making.
• Easy to Use Another key highlight of Netreo is its ease of use. When compared to many monitoring platforms, Netreo's dashboard is intuitive and easy to navigate. Also, it requires no Java plugins, clients, or agents, so there's no hassle of additional installations. However, you may need some help on the configuration aspect because you must get this right to make the most of what Netreo offers.
• Comprehensive Monitoring Netreo can be your single tool for monitoring a wide range of aspects within your infrastructure such as cloud resources, web applications, incidents, emails, traffic patterns, servers, and more. Also, when you have information about multiple aspects within the same dashboard, you can better identify the patterns and connections. Needless to say, such in-depth understanding can ease your troubleshooting process and can provide the insights you need to make important decisions related to budgeting, capacity planning, resource utilization, etc.
• Uses Standards and APIs As mentioned earlier, Netreo doesn't use agents for monitoring, so no hassles about installing additional clients or agents. Instead, it uses the existing standards and vendor-specific technologies and APIs to collect data, analyze them, and generate the necessary reports. The advantage of using such standards and APIs is that Netreo can seamlessly monitor any network-connected device or application, regardless of whether they are hosted locally, in private clouds, or the public cloud infrastructure.
• Automation Netreo automates many mission-critical tasks like outage reports, root-cause analysis, etc., to reduce the time and effort needed for such operations. With automation, you can focus more on the critical aspects of your business as you can be assured that the tool will identify and report anomalies. More importantly, the cumbersome task of generating reports can be automated with Netreo. It is a self-contained module that gathers statistics from various devices and compiles related information like bandwidth, errors, CPU, memory usage, etc. In this sense, these statistics can be converted into usable information that will add more value to your organization.
• Mapping Mapping is a critical, yet overlooked, aspect of monitoring. When you bring together disparate devices, operations, and information, you can gain new perspectives that, in turn, can help you to make better decisions. Netreo provides this mapping for you on multiple fronts. For example, it can plot the location of your geographic locations and add relevant information about status, availability, performance, etc. With this mapping, you can instantly identify the poor-performing geographies and can work towards improving their performance. Similarly, you can get topological maps and even personalized data maps for one or more locations. All these maps can come in handy to identify gaps, so you can fix them at the earliest.
• Data Collection and Analytics Netreo can gather the metrics of any device that's SNMP compliant. Typically, it collects information like CPU, memory usage, disk I/O, network errors, bandwidth utilization, latency, and more. It further analyzes this data to provide meaningful insights about the health and performance of different devices. Accordingly, you can take the necessary steps for improving the performance of these devices. In Windows devices, it uses WMI or PowerShell for data collection while in a VMware environment, it connects to the VCenter API to identify new hosts, devices, and data stores. In Linux devices, Netreo uses SNMP and also collects additional information like Swap utilization, process status, disk usage per mount point, and more.
• Configuration Changes Configuration changes, both intentional and accidental, can have a huge impact on your organization. To avoid any negative repercussions of configuration changes, Netreo monitors the configuration changes over a timeline, per device, or user. Such information can be invaluable if you want to identify the root cause of issues, and can also come in handy to thwart insider threats. The advantage of Netreo is that it's context-aware, so you will get alerts and notifications for only those situations that are relevant to you. This way, you'll not be flooded with notifications and alarms that mean little to you.
• Advanced Web Monitoring Netreo has advanced web monitoring capabilities that come with four unique monitoring layers. You can use more or more of these layer monitoring, depending on your requirements, and at no additional cost to you. Here are the four levels to give you an idea of what Netreo can do for your web applications. Level 1 monitors the availability of web server processes, level 2 retrieves a page from the web server and checks for its validity, level 3 validates for the presence of a specific string in the retrieved web page, while level 4 is a detailed and scripted web interaction that validates the content of the entire page respectively. Plus, level 4 also monitors page load performance, DNS and TCP benchmarks, and more. In this sense, Netreo's web monitoring capabilities are thorough.

The above discussion clearly shows that Netreo can offer a ton of benefits for your organization, and can help you to be on top of all that's happening in your network.

Before we end, here's a quick look at Netreo's pricing.

Pricing

Netreo has two pricing editions: Professional and Ultimate.

• The Professional edition starts at $6/resource/month, billed annually. This plan supports a minimum of 100 users and a maximum of 10,000 users and can be deployed as SaaS or on-premises.
• The Ultimate edition can support unlimited users, and it is also a highly customizable and scalable platform that works well for hybrid IT work environments. Contact the sales team for a demo.

Final Words

To conclude, Netreo is a comprehensive monitoring tool that can help you to stay on top of every aspect of your infrastructure and operations, so you can quickly identify and mitigate issues before they impact your wider organization. It is also simple to use and works well across multiple environments, thereby making it a must-have tool in your monitoring arsenal.

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