Colasoft Capsa vs. Spiceworks Connectivity Dashboard

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

hassle free of IT resources is plus point. Monitoring the external resources related to Websites, service provider links or any hosted applications is a great feature in Spiceworks Connectivity Dashboard. Alert reporting on monitored resources is at ease. Integration with custom devices needs to be improved. devices integrated with snmp protocol is not reported with full details which needs to be rectified by Spiceworks Connectivity Dashboard.

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

• Monitoring Applications
• External resources monitoring related to ISP
• Alerting mechanism via email and dashboard 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

• Integration with custom devices needs to be improved
• providing more insight of device is required when added to monitoring list
• the feel and look of dashboard needs some improvement
• Agent is resource hungry, to be made light weight for systems

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

Spiceworks Network Monitor being a free tool, can easily be overtaken against any other product which is cost involved and most of the features are available which are provided by any leading network monitoring tool available in the market. Few of the features which are not present in spiceworks tool (like autodiscovery of resources) needs to be added which will give a great competition for the product. Alerting features, response tickets, sending alerts via email is one of the great features in the product

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

• if on premises cannot be deployed on Linux environment which needs windows license requirement
• competitive price makes easy for decision
• lacking in auto discovery of devices is the most negative point for ROI

Incentivized