AppNeta vs. PingPlotter

AppNeta is awesome for getting site-to-site statistics or trying to find out why at 3 am every night, this server loses connectivity to another server in a different data center. But we have found the multiple bugs in the hardware hard to deal with when the devices are a 4-hour plane ride away and require someone to console into the device.

Incentivized

The best scenario and best results are seen when the path does not reuse the same device for the "next hop". It is less well suited in situations where the path is being tricked by the re-use of devices for the next interface. This is seen required in many networks where the proper type of connection is not on an end device and the core device is used to provide a fiber to copper sort of "pass-through" connection.

Incentivized

• AppNeta provides detailed application availability & uptime.
• AppNeta provides great longitudinal data regarding how the applications perform including an overall grade or "AppDex."
• AppNeta sends notifications of service downtime that aids in technical dispatch.

Incentivized

• Monitor traffic in network
• Measure stops when contacting network locations such as websites
• Measures the lag and latency it takes to contact network locations
• Gives you both induvidual measurements as well as good oversight
• identifies when network lag or disconnect occurs

• Hardware has a lot of bugs.
• Auto-updates cannot be turned off on the hardware, causing blips in monitoring.

Incentivized

• Its a little confusing to see which targets are currently running pings and which ones are displayed in the plots.
• Starting and stopping pings requires a right click and that would be better with a play/pause button I think.
• Ability to drag and drop the graphs to reorder them.
• more columns to show which targets are running and which are displayed. Currently this is done with symbols so you cant sort by just the running targets for example I've found.

Incentivized

Timely support is one of AppNeta's strong suits. But the ability to develop permeant fixes for issues within there product is where they lack.

Incentivized

I have not had much contact with the PingPlotter support, only one time have I went to them and it was a positive experience. The questions I had were answered quickly and professionally. I have no issue with the experience I had with the Support team. This was from before and after the purchase of the product.

Incentivized

We currently use Nagios/GroundWork and Cacti to perform network monitoring. AppNeta's UI is far superior.

Incentivized

A balance of a generic tool vs a network equipment product is necessary when investigating network incidents or disruptions. Need to train the engineer to use both tools to perform their analysis and to dive down to the issues as fast as they can. Experience with the tools will continue to play a part if we were to adopt PingPlotter

Incentivized

• A reduction in network outages and length of network outages.
• More detailed post outage investigation available.

Incentivized

• Great ROI, troubleshooting time has been reduced by 90%
• Network Discoveries used to take 2 to 3 hours and were inconsistent - now it is a matter of minutes
• lacks integration into our MSP toolkit, and we now use it as a stand alone product

Incentivized