Colasoft Capsa vs. Observium

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

Incentivized

• If you are on a budget, this is one heck of a tool for the price (including the ~$200/year for the Pro subscription).
• If you are OK with maintaining and updating open source tools, this is a great tool.
• If you are afraid of the Linux command line or live in a Windows-centric world, this might not be the tool for you.
• If you can't stand things occasionally not working, this is probably not a good fit.

Incentivized

• Robust Application. Able to handle traffic that most businesses will throw at it.
• Easy to use. Easy to setup captures and filter down to specific traffic types.
• Relatively cheap for what it's able to accomplish.

Incentivized

• Automatic device discovery.
• Scalability
• Real-time monitoring.

Incentivized

• Needs options to scale to 10Gb/s networks. The cutoff for performance looks to be around 3Gb/sl
• Needs API access to trigger capturesl
• Needs Agents for remote capturesl

Incentivized

• Documentation
• Community support
• Easy to set up but hard to customise fully

Incentivized

It's open source. Your mileage may vary. Sometimes the provided documentation is beyond frustrating, other times it's right on the mark.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

I haven't used other products that are similar to Observium. Observium is an open tool, with a robust feature set. There are elements of comparable monitoring across other tools, but nothing I've seen that is a complete parallel in terms of feature set and visualizations. If I were asked, I wouldn't have another tool to recommend over Observium.

Incentivized

• 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.
• Relatively cheap compared to the feature set.

Incentivized

• It is good for DC admin.
• Only positive impact.
• Highly recommended.

Incentivized