Colasoft Capsa is a network performance monitoring and protocol analyzing tool. Capsa provides core monitoring features, as well as automated diagnostics and packet decoding. Colasoft offers a limited free version of the software.
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SolarWinds ipMonitor
Score 8.4 out of 10
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SolarWinds ipMonitor is a lightweight performance monitoring tool. It enables monitoring from a single console and out-of-the-box visibility, with some automation available.
Capsa is highly recommended to be used in small dense areas of a network where it makes sense to be able to run analytics off of a mirror port to gain insight into traffic trends. It is a costly product to install in branch locations, and requires a decent spec hardware to run appropriately
SolarWinds ipMonitor is well suited in situation where customer do not wants to hold the responsibility of underlying monitoring infrastructure management such as Servers, Database, website and their high availability. And of course when you need Network, Servers, Services fault and performance monitoring. When you have specialized network monitoring requirement such as Configuration backup, netflow traffic analysis then this is not the right tool.
I have very few pieces of software, that are specific to IT and IT services, that just work. Honestly, I don't need the support as it never breaks, but I believe in rewarding vendors that make valuable products
SolarWinds ipMonitor is a perfectly decent network mapper and performance metric gatherer, but it is held back by the UI, which can be hard to navigate once you have more than a couple dozen assets in there. It is fairly priced, but it also sometimes takes a really long time before results come in.
Although I had not much support ticket with ipMonitor support team but I can share my overall experience with SolarWinds products and support team. I am working with SolarWinds support team since last 7 years and in last 2-3 years I have seen a significant improvement in knowledge documentation which is helping end users to troubleshoot problems by themselves. Apart from this SolarWinds phone call based support is very nice as tickets and emails might take some time but a direct phone call can get your job done quickly comparatively.
Colasoft performs more like the traditional wireshark as opposed to other solutions that tend to focus on graphs instead of giving you the raw data. I personally prefer the raw data, and then the ability to build graphs upon this (which Capsa can do). This allows for quicker analysis and makes it easier to relate to.
We were trying to evaluate different providers and ipMonitor suited us because we had on-prem and cloud instances and management decided to check the paid tool. The ipMonitor is a very responsive tool and it served the purpose well but as IT is evolving and needs are changing, we discontinued the ipMonitor and shifted to Zabbix due to the customization which was the need at the time.
While the product doesn't detect malware, it has helped track down malware infected machines by using data from other applications to run filters to look for known traffic destinations for that malware. For me this is a huge ROI since malware can be the great unknown.
We currently use an outside service to monitor critical network nodes. We will do away with that service shortly.
We no longer have to wait to hear from our users if there is a network device down. We will be proactively alerted and we can begin to remediate immediately helping to limit downtime.
After initial setup and some tweaking, it requires little to no time to maintain.
