It helps us to assess application information to provide analytics, but the product is not instrumenting for very deep level application inspection
We had some applications which were on-premise and wanted to assess them before deciding to move them to the cloud. RISC Networks falls into the area of application discoveries, so that is what we used it for.
We have been using for an engagement for the last three months.
How has it helped my organization?
When we go to a customer's environment, there may be a lot of servers, and we have absolutely no clue what is there on those servers. All we know is there are some applications, but we don't know what state they are in. So, we need to know about the compute, storage, networking, infrastructure, etc., and RISC Networks helps us to assess this and come up with some sort of data. They also run some sort of analytics on top, which gives recommendations. That is where it helps.
What is most valuable?
The valuable feature of RISC Networks would be detecting application stack dependencies. If there are applications spread across front servers, it has a way of writing the data.
What needs improvement?
They are a bit weaker in areas where we have run to external REST services. This part is provided in our code. Applications, like AppDynamics and Dynatrace are much better because they instrument their code. If they could add this feature, the product would be better.
The major issue that I had with this product is that it is not instrumenting. Hence, I can't do a very deep level application inspection.
For how long have I used the solution?
Less than one year.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
The stability is nice. I have had no issues with it.
We don't put stress on it. It is like an agent which runs in the background. Thus, there is nothing more that we need to do.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
We installed it on a few machines, and it did work well. We haven't tried it on a huge scale.
Our customer had around 50 servers.
How is customer service and technical support?
They did do a demo for us in the beginning and provided us a type of a sandbox for the demo. This was more of a sales demo, so it was good from that perspective, but it was not a deep dive technical demo.
Technical support was prompt the time that we contacted them. It took a couple days for them to respond to us.
How was the initial setup?
The deployment is not difficult on the AWS environment. There is a bit of a learning curve as with any product, but it is not super complex. They have pretty good tutorials and review demos.
What was our ROI?
This product would provide better ROI for larger environments.
What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?
The licensing was bought by the customer.
Which other solutions did I evaluate?
We considered AWS Application Discovery Service. We also talked to ATA devices.
We went with RISC Networks because we had a license of them. In addition, AWS Application Discovery Service only does a VMware or Hyper-V evaluation. This was a physical service, which they don't support.
This product came directly from the customer. ATA devices were not very independent products because they were bought out by Cisco. It was considered that there might be a bit of a bias because of that.
What other advice do I have?
Our on-premise version is a hybrid. It has a cloud part that it relies on and uses AWS Cloud software as part of it.
- Leave a Comment |
- 1 comment |
- Mark review as helpful
From a portfolio perspective, it has allowed us to validate what servers and applications we have
The primary use case is migrating the existing work load. Therefore, we use it to analyze our application portfolio for migrating us to AWS.
How has it helped my organization?
It identified integrations between applications that we didn't know about. It saved us a lot of hassle from that perspective, because we knew about them upfront. As opposed to migrating the applications, then finding out the integrated applications either had to be rolled back or would need some extra work.
What is most valuable?
* It gives us extra visibility that we didn't already have around how our applications are integrated with one another.
* From a portfolio perspective, it has allowed us to validate what servers and applications we have.
* It has helped us with our migration exercises.
What needs improvement?
It seemed to take a relatively long time to implement, which surprised me. I thought it would be quicker.
The initial deployment and installation does require skilled resources. I was hoping it would be easier to do, and that some of our own team could do it, but we had to engage some professional services team members to do it for us. We would have liked to have done the initial deployment and installation in-house.
While it worked well for our use case, I get the impression that it doesn't support every workload. If people are using other platforms, they might not integrate as well into this solution.
For how long have I used the solution?
Less than one year.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
Sometimes it can be a bit slow, but overall, it works pretty well.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
It is easy to scale.
How is customer service and technical support?
I haven't used the technical support.
How was the initial setup?
The integration and configuration through the AWS environment was a bit difficult.
What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?
We are using the paid version of the product, which we purchased on the AWS Marketplace. We just put it on the local CIOs credit card. That was the easiest way for us to do it, and we wanted to get it up and running quickly. So, we put it down as a regular working operating expense.
It is expensive, but we can justify it. It would definitely be an expensive option in night time to run it continually. We decided to make a purchase just to help us with this migration. However, in the long-term, I don't know if we'll use it because of the cost.
Which other solutions did I evaluate?
The product was recommended by AWS, so we went with it and didn't do much of a pre-evaluation. We decided to try it and see how it worked out.
I would recommend to others to look around at other options as well to do a comparison. That is something we obviously didn't do.
What other advice do I have?
We are very happy with it.
showing 1 - 2