Avocent Data Center Planner, from Vertiv (formerly Emerson Network Power) is software solution providing a visual infrastructure planning and management tool within Vertiv’s strategic framework for data center optimization. Data Center Planner is designed to provide accurate and complete information about device and equipment locations, as well as current capacities and projected growth.
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BMC Helix Continuous Optimization
Score 10.0 out of 10
N/A
A cloud-based solution for continuous IT resource management and service assurance. BMC Helix Continuous Optimization uses intelligence and predictive analytics to manage IT resources and applications including those based on Kubernetes and pods, microservices, containers, and multi-cloud services.
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Datadog
Score 8.6 out of 10
N/A
Datadog is a monitoring service for IT, Dev and Ops teams who write and run applications at scale, and want to turn the massive amounts of data produced by their apps, tools and services into actionable insight.
$18
per month per host
Pricing
Avocent Data Center Planner
BMC Helix Continuous Optimization
Datadog
Editions & Modules
No answers on this topic
No answers on this topic
Log Management
$1.27
per month (billed annually) per host
Infrastructure
$15.00
per month (billed annually) per host
Standard
$18
per month per host
Enterprise
$27
per month per host
DevSecOps Pro
$27
per month per host
APM
$31.00
per month (billed annually) per host
DevSecOps Enterprise
$41
per month per host
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
Avocent Data Center Planner
BMC Helix Continuous Optimization
Datadog
Free Trial
No
No
Yes
Free/Freemium Version
No
No
Yes
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
No
No
No
Entry-level Setup Fee
No setup fee
No setup fee
Optional
Additional Details
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Discount available for annual pricing. Multi-Year/Volume discounts available (500+ hosts/mo).
In general, BMC Helix Optimize has a set of tools that are quite advanced compared to other technologies in the same field. Especially the visual representations and the flexibility when building rules to control the spend are some of the most useful functionalities that work …
Avocent Data Center Planner is well suited in helping us to capacity plan our data center, increase operations efficiency and keep track of available patch and switch ports. We are able to visually view wherein our data centers are underutilized and more importantly over-utilized. We can also follow the path of the cross-connects from one object to another visually providing us another troubleshooting tool in our datacenter. Previously we had Excel spreadsheets with this information and it's can be confusing to follow compared to a visual representation that Avocent Data Center Planner provides.
Based on what we have experienced, BMC Helix Optimize is a good choice for businesses that already have other BMC tools, such as BMC Helix Operations Management or BMC Helix Cloud Cost, due to the integrated capabilities that can be leveraged. Besides, it is a great tool for visual analysis of costs associated with operations.
Datadog may be better suited for teams that have a more out-of-the-box infrastructure, on the primary platforms Datadog supports. You may also have better results if you have a bigger team dedicated to devops and/or a bigger budget. We found that trying to adapt it to our use case (small team, .NET on AWS Fargate) wasn't feasible. We continually ran into roadblocks that required us to dig through documentation (and at times, having to figure out some documentation was wrong), go back and forth with support, and in my opinion, waste money on excessive and unintended usages due to opaque pricing models and inaccurate usage reports, as well as broken/non-functional rate sampling controls.
Avocent Data Center Planner gave us an overview of our data center without the need to be physically there to perform an audit.
We can visually map out and trace the cross-connect a device or server is using without a need of remote hands to trace the cable.
It provides us the ability to capacity plan our data center. Giving us the ability to see what space is under or over-utilized and formulate a plan to adjust to correct it.
The thing which Datadog does really well, one of them are its broad range of services integrations and features which makes it one step observability solution for all. We can monitor all types of our application, infrastructure, hosts, databases etc with Datadog.
Its custom dashboard feature which helps us to visualize the data in a better way . It supports different types of charts through those charts we can create our dashboard more attractive.
Its AI powered alerting capability though that we can easily identify the root cause and also it has a low noise alerting capability which means it correlated the similar type of issues.
The library of objects we can use in Avocent Data Center Planner needs to be expanded. There are times the server object we need is not available in the library.
A more efficient way to connect objects together. It's way too easy to delete a connection mapping, a dialogue box asking if the connection should be deleted would be nice. I've accidentally deleted a connection before and it's annoying that I need to redo it.
The ability to import diagrams into Avocent Data Center Planner would be nice. We have Visio diagram of racks and to utilize that instead of recreating it would help speed up the build in of a datacenter in the product.
Alert windows cause lag in notifications (e.g. if the alert window is X errors in 1 hour, we won't get alerted until the end of the 1 hour range)
I would appreciate more supportive examples for how to filter and view metrics in the explorer
I would like a more clear interface for metrics that are missing in a time frame, rather than only showing tags/etc. for metrics that were collected within the currently viewed time frame
There are so many features that it can be hard to figure out where you need to go for your own use case. For example, RUM monitoring us buried in a "Digital Experience" sidebar setting when this is one of our key use cases that I sometimes struggle to find in the application. It appears that ECS + Fargate monitoring was recently released which is great because we had to build a lambda reporting solution for ephemeral task monitoring. But this new feature was never on my radar until I starting clicking around the application.
The support team usually gets it right. We did have a rather complicate issue setting up monitoring on a domain controller. However, they are usually responsive and helpful over chat. The downside would be I don’t think they have any phone support. If that is important to you this might not be a good fit.
Avocent Data Center Planner was far and away better than utilizing Microsoft Visio to manage our data center infrastructure. It provides us a centralized location for all information about our data center from the location of racks, to the devices in them, the device connections, etc. While Microsoft Visio can emulate the rack and device piece of Avocent Data Center Planner, it can't replicate its ability to provide the device connections. We have previously used Excel for that. Having one place for all of that information is also a plus for Avocent Data Center Planner, increasing the efficiency of our data center operations compared to using Microsoft Visio.
In general, BMC Helix Optimize has a set of tools that are quite advanced compared to other technologies in the same field. Especially the visual representations and the flexibility when building rules to control the spend are some of the most useful functionalities that work quite well, usually better than in the rest of the tools.
Our logs are very important, and Datadog manages them exceptionally well. We frequently use Datadog services for our investigations. Use case: Monitor your apps, infrastructure, APIs, and user experience.
Key features:
Logs, metrics, and APM (Application Performance Monitoring)
Real-time alerting and dashboards
Supports Kubernetes, AWS, GCP, and other integrations
RUM (Real User Monitoring) and Synthetics
✅ Best for backend, server, and distributed systems monitoring.
A positive ROI on Avocent Data Center Planner allows us to improve our infrastructure planning by giving a visual representation of our data center so we can see where we can set up new equipment in the future.
Another positive ROI is, we can visualize wherein our data center we are either over-utilized or underutilized increasing the efficiency of our operations.
A further positive ROI is the complete record of device connections eliminated the need for remote hands to trace patch connections for troubleshooting purposes.
Finally having one place to view information on our data center is also a positive ROI. This has increased our operations' ability to manage our data center.
A negative ROI is the amount of time required to set up Avocent Data Center Planner. We had to start from scratch and recreate the Visio diagrams we already had.
