We are committed and excited to partner with our community to develop a better product. The Ideas section in The Watch is the best place for you to share your ideas and discuss them with other community members and Centreon staff. There has been too many places in the past where those conversations happened and we wanted to review all ideas from a single location to see if there is a demand or to further investigate them. 

We will also engage with everyone about their ideas to understand your use cases and help us decide whether we want to pursue an idea.

Before you submit an idea

Search (please)

We hope you have checked if someone already submitted an idea like yours. We would like to avoid duplicates and let you spend your time searching and completing existing ideas instead of writing one from scratch.

Describe your idea with as much detail as possible

The richer your description, the more likely we and others will immediately know what you mean (and the higher the chances someone will vote for your idea). 

This is the type of information we would like you to describe:

• Persona (is it for a Centreon administrator, an operator, an IT manager?)

• Problem to solve (what business problem are you trying to solve?)

• Expected outcome (if this was delivered, what benefits would you get?)

• Potential solutions (any solution you might suggest for this problem)

Sometimes a screenshot or wireframe can say more than a million words.  

One idea at a time

Please do not submit multiple ideas in one topic. Otherwise, it becomes messy and nobody knows which feature people who voted actually want to be implemented. Submitting ideas is free, so don't hold back to submit multiple ideas.

What is the process we use to evaluate ideas?

When you submit a new idea, it will have the New status. Within 2 weeks the product team will have a look at your idea, and possibly ask you some more questions to make sure we understand the idea. After the first review, we will change the status of the idea to reflect our plans with it.

An idea will get one of the following states:

• Discussion Ongoing - The idea has been reviewed and is open for discussion and voting. We are not ready yet to decide whether we want to do something with it and need more information from the author/community feedback/votes. It can also mean that this idea does not fit our product strategy at the moment, but is something we might look at later.

• Needs Votes - We think the idea might be of interest but that needs to be confirmed through more votes and comments from community members

• In Backlog - The idea has raised interest from the product team and has been added to the engineering backlog. 

• Planned - The idea is planned for an upcoming release or actively being built by product engineering.

• Delivered - The idea has been implemented and is available.

• Declined - We reviewed the idea and we know we won’t build it any time soon. This could be because of the complexity of the idea, the value it might return, or the fact that the idea is not aligned with our product strategy.

• Duplicate - Idea is duplicate we will merge the topics.

Ideation Review

We will review all open ideas to re-evaluate their status on a regular basis. 

We choose to leave ideas open as long as we still believe this might be something we pick up in the future. Expect us to comment on your idea once more if it is being reviewed by us.

F.A.Q.

What happens when Centreon picks up something (status: Planned)?  This means that we have started working on this idea and you should expect an update. We will share dedicated updates in the topic.

What happens when Centreon declines an idea (status: Declined)? When an idea receives this status, it can have several reasons (which we will communicate):

• This is not a good fit with our product vision: we prefer to focus time on delivering our vision.

• Technical limitations: an improvement might have technical dependencies we need to resolve before we can pick it up (e.g. performance).

• Return on investment: We get a lot of very good suggestions here. Unfortunately sometimes, the time which needs to be invested to realize an idea might be too high compared to the actual gain, or it is simply that we could implement other, more meaningful/requested improvements at the same time.

We hope that you are not demotivated when one of your ideas receives this status. We probably even liked your idea as well! And who knows, it could very well be that the reason for refusal might be reverted in the future!?

How many ideas are actually being implemented? It’s very hard to predict how many ideas will be implemented when, but it’s important to understand that posting an idea on the board does not come with a guaranteed delivery. The ideation board is a tool we use to manage and communicate with users about ideas, and better understand your challenges with the product. Next to the ideation platform, our team has many other sources for possible new feature ideas (but The Watch is our favourite!)

Your opinion

We are curious to hear your feedback on our ideation module and processes.

• Would you like us to handle things differently in regards to ideation?

• Do you have best practices for ideation which you would like us to do as well? Is there something you do with ideation which we are missing?

• Did we fail to review your idea?

• Did you have a hard time finding an idea? Flag it to us!

Of course any other feedback or criticism is all welcome, after all we want you to keep submitting ideas!