LiveAction vs. PingPlotter

From a packet tracing standpoint, it was easy to setup and analyze an issue we were having with eigrp errors between 2 data centers. Took a few minutes to stand up on both sides and compare the traffic to determine hellos weren't being sent. On the other spectrum, had it had the analytics of such products as Extrahop, it could have recognized and alerted us of an internal DNS attack we had.

Incentivized

It is well suited for performing monitoring and testing from a single device. It is less appropriate if you have to monitor from multiple different endpoints. That type of deployment would be more of an enterprise application. If you are looking for an end user monitoring solution then PingPlotter is the one for you.

Incentivized

• Network QOS Assessment, and recommendations, and point-and-click remediation
• Network L2/L3 Assessment, and recommendations, and point-and-click remediation
• Network Security Assessment, and recommendations, and point-and-click remediation

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

• I use it primarily as a monitoring tool from a security standpoint, so one complaint is that the filter creation process takes a little time to learn.
• In the digital days of printing less, I do still need to print network diagrams for compliance documentation and some of the larger network diagrams documents do not print easily.
• I wish the network connection lines were easier to see. They are typically very light and you have to drill down to see them more clearly.

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

I installed it and it just started working. I realized I could then tweak it to show what I needed but didn't have to spend a long time configuring it before use, editing YAML files etc. Maybe that's fine for a network professional, but I only need this software if something goes wrong, and then need it to work quickly out of the box.

Incentivized

Can't really rate this, we never had to call support. The product wasn't complicated to setup and learn. We have a high level of network knowledge so the product was self-explanatory.

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

There is not any other product that does exactly what LiveAction does. Some come about halfway close, like scrutinizer by Plixer. However, there is a gap with that product as it doesn't give proper quality of service recommendations, or to update l2/l3 configs to head off problems. Plixer's scrutinizer product costs about the same. It was a no-brainer to pick LiveAction.

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

• Real time insight to network issues whether security related or not.
• Great reporting features for executives.

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