Likelihood to Recommend NETSCOUT nGeniusONE is a great network performance monitoring tool as it helps to trace the path of packet and to identify the exact place where the packet is loss. It is well suited in scenarios where the organization have large network and they need continuous monitoring because loss of connectivity may lead to serious financial loss in sectors like banking, hospitals. The network performance and connectivity needs to be stable for proper execution of transactions, bookings, data transfer and other critical task. Performance monitoring of large enterprise is a big task and doing that manually requires very much effort, but with NETSCOUT nGeniusONE it becomes easy. It is not well suited in scenarios where there is small network and they can survive if any link flaps for small duration of time.
Read full review Solarwinds NPM is well suited for medium to large networks, it may be a bit heavy for the SOHO environment as most of the tools and reports are designed for monitoring KPIs which may not be critical for a small shop. NPM can handle large networks with several sites and mixed technologies ranging from networks, server systems, storage devices and SLA reporting.
Read full review Pros NetScout nGeniusONE can help to deep dive into the packet layer, help to identify the real network and service performance problems in the protocol layer. We have been using NetScout nGeniusONE as the main monitoring solution for the mobile network for many years. I have recently use NetScout nGeniusONE to support problem troubleshooting for a customer issue complaining of slow application connection into our Datacenter services. it was easy to use NetScout nGeniusONE to capture the problematic connection sessions by using various type of filters and export a pcap file for further analysis. I‘ve also use NetScout nGeniusONE to investigate an NBN connection issue which was intermittent and hard to capture, however, by using NetScout nGeniusONE it was easy to go back to the history capture and logs, so we won't miss any important leads. Read full review Out of the Monitoring of almost all Network Devices. Build custom pollers to monitor which is not supported out of the box. Further you can alert on these custom metrics and Out of the box metrics. It provides you great dashboards, Reports features. You can integrate it with any MoM layer tools either using its API or sending out traps. Out of the box Integration with Service Now ITSM Tool. Read full review Cons Better access to resources Pricing in this niche market is very high, hard for the little guy to take advantage of these solutions Read full review The software upgrade process is a little hairy and has caused me trouble on occasion. The server that it needs to run is a bit of a resource hog along with the SQL server. Some additional features like the network map are a bit clunky compared to some other products that we use. Read full review Likelihood to Renew The entire IT staff relies on NPM in its daily operations. It would be impossible for us to maintain our level of service without it. If SolarWinds gets to proud of their product and begins to over charge for it, we would be forced to reconsider and use a different product. But as it stands it is worth the price to renew it.
Read full review Usability Requires quite a bit of training not only for config but to use. Highly recommend having a SME come in from Netscout to help initially for these. Once you learn the UI, it’s much better to use but is not intuitive.
Read full review SolarWinds Network Performance Monitor (NPM) is quite an extensive product, covering all our bases and requirements. There are a lot of customizable options and features which you can work with for their alerting which is really useful. I haven't found anything yet which I thought SolarWinds Network Performance Monitor (NPM) could do, but it actually couldn't so overall it works nicely and does the job.
Read full review Reliability and Availability Always available. Always is important to plan the software available during the machine/application setup.
Read full review Performance Pages load slow, especially the bettors map. Could be that my server is old.
Read full review Support Rating If you spend the right amount of money with them they work very close to you to support your needs. I ignore how they work in companies with lower expenses on their products. NetScout is not a very dynamic introducing platform with enhancements that their customers need. We contract their professional services so support level is good, although too pricey from my perspective.
Read full review In all of the times that we called support, someone at SolarWinds had the answer for us in a timely manner. Through thwack and other internet searching, we have been able to resolve all of our issues that arose to our satisfaction. The support staff have always been knowledgeable of their products or had a fellow support staff member to rely on to get the needed answers.
Read full review Online Training The training is good but during the implementation, you can get situations not learned during the training. The trainer was very open to hearing the questions about use cases and always sharing his experience. I really recommend having official training to take advantage of all features that the NPM can bring.
Read full review Implementation Rating Make sure your inventory is accurate. Stand up some virtual machines for testing prior to installation. Make sure your database and its credentials are setup. Think about things you want to monitor that may not be obvious - UPS units, Door hardware, PBX systems, Fabric Channel switches, firewalls, routers, switches. Try to setup SNMP on these devices and have an IP that you will assign to the new server. If you do that it will go well.
Read full review Alternatives Considered Wireshark has been around for years and has been used primarily for packet analyzing. NetScout does this and goes above and beyond with the graphics interface analyzes and customer filtering for packet analyzes. You can go straight to the packet analyze within NetScout but you will find that to be more work, this would be like starting with
Wireshark . Instead, begin with the graphical interface to narrow down the traffic, a visual effect. Then go to the packet analyzer, time saver. As for
PRTG , it's a NetFlow/SNMP collector with a quick and dirty look at traffic but lacks the tools to dig into the information it provides.
Read full review We selected SolarWinds Network Performance Monitor because of the capabilities of the product versus the price. The tools also work well with their other products and support is fairly good. We have never had a problem when we needed to make a call.
Read full review Scalability From the direction and information I have been given it is very flexible and scalelable
Read full review Return on Investment NETSCOUT nGeniusONE is the best tool and very profitable for our organization as it helped in to reduce the manual effort of engineers to track the Network flaps and connectivity issue. Return on investment for this product is quiet good as of now and we have achieved 80% ROI till now and we are very much confident that we will achieve the full ROI. It has helped in cost cutting as we need only few network admin and engineers to track the discovery, behavior and connectivity. Earlier we need a lot of employee to do that due to which the organization may suffer some financial loss. Read full review SolarWinds allows us to proactively address hardware issues before they impact the business. We recently had a server that was experiencing issues sporadically and we were able to use the data from SolarWinds to track down and correct the issue before it tanked the server. SolarWinds gives our IT department some piece of mind knowing that they'll be alerted of any issues real time. We can use SolarWinds data to justify needed to replace or upgrade certain equipment that is key to our core business. Read full review ScreenShots SolarWinds NPM Screenshots