ManageEngine Firewall Analyzer vs. SolarWinds NetFlow Traffic Analyzer (NTA)

Offering enhanced network security, performance, and connectivity, it is well as used in a business setting. Features including application control, web content filtering, firewall, IP address, application control, VPN, and good advanced threat protection. With enhanced features and advanced threat protection you get an awesome performance cost effective firewall device.

Incentivized

We use and depend on it for status state of our network gear, switches and routers. It does an excellent job of getting you the details you need to confirm all devices and products are working at the level needed. At times, it does tend to flag network switch ports and/or switches themselves as exceeding their rated capacity when frequently it was a quick blip of high traffic due to downloads, or uploads causing the max'ing of the device. Again, you can adjust the settings but then you adjust it too high and miss real activity. It can become nuisance alerting when you tend to then ignore

Incentivized

• Live traffic monitor: Firewall Analyzer lets us monitor traffic as it flows through the firewalls. It also breaks it down according to what type of traffic (e.g., web, mail, FTP, etc.) it is. It lists the tops hosts, the top users from traffic, and a lot of other useful statistics, all in a very visual format.
• Security Monitoring: Another good visual graph Firewall Analyzer provides is the security one, which shows us if we're being attacked, from where, by what, how many, etc. It will also send us alerts when there's an alarm of any kind on the firewall.
• Reporting: We can run all sorts of custom reports, and that helps us both with compliance and informing management as to what's going on. It would be difficult to describe all the various kinds of things we can include in these reports, but they are extensive.

Incentivized

• The level of customization possible with Network Bandwidth Analyzer is very valuable. Rather than being stuck with a "one-size-fits-all" presentation, an administrator can easily create customized views, reports, and alerts so that users can have a more tailored view of the data provided by Network Bandwidth Analyzer. This has the effect of making the tool more attractive to the end user.
• The NetFlow Traffic Analyzer piece of Network Bandwidth Analyzer provides the details on bandwidth usage on the network. More than knowing how much bandwidth is being used, one is provided with detailed information on how that bandwidth is being used. This provides invaluable information for capacity planning and even certain forensic tasks faced by the network engineer.
• The ability to produce network maps provides an easy way to create an attractive and functional NOC/SOC view of the entire network. Both technician and the occasional passerby can quickly determine if there are issues to be addressed. The ability to customize a map with background images and custom icons and stencils can make these maps really pop.

Incentivized

• Configuration is easy and you can expect all the features and modules.
• Simple and intuitive dashboard.
• Firewall Analyzer helps us to gain insight into security threat and traffic.
• Analyze the user behavior.

Incentivized

• The ability to intuitively and quickly serve up specified information up to a dashboard for general “public” consumption, that cycles through several pages of information.
• The ability to intuitively set up alerting on bandwidth levels, instead of having to dig through all types of alerts available to find the one needed.
• Provide a pricing model based on different support levels: if I want only available update installations, don’t make me pay the same amount as those wanting full support.

Incentivized

It is fast to
download the test software and implement. It takes some sometime to understand the
ways you have to on board your firewalls into it. It is nice to buy and just
activate the product that you have already installed. Maybe some wizards could
be improved in order to accelerate these tasks.

As far as rating for usability is concerned I would give 10/10 as NTA is very easy to use. All you need to do is install that module and ask network Team to configure the Netflow towards Server IP. [The] rest is pre-configured and reports are pre-built. Moment you receive the flows from Network all you will have is information about traffic.

Incentivized

I know we could probably pay for it, but it would be nice if we could get to a tier 2 technician faster. Spending a couple of hours on the phone with the level 1 technician, when we have already tried the troubleshooting they are walking us through, is just a waste of time.

Incentivized

The training offered by SolarWinds is some of the best out there. They have several different videos that go into great detail from initial setup to advanced configurations. In addition to the view at your own pace video, they also have live training for customers that focus on a single product and you can ask questions with the folks who develop the software. I have had good success with their live sessions and getting questions answered.

Incentivized

ManageEngine was chosen over the use of AlgoSec as it slotted nicely with other Manage engine services we use for services such as active directory management. Other benefits include how lightweight and easy to install and set up it is. You can install it inside your network and start testing within 20 minutes.

Incentivized

SolarWinds NetFlow Traffic Analyzer compared to Wireshark and PRTG Network Monitor beats it by just the simple interface. Though all are manual setup, NTA takes it a step further with graphs and reports that analyze the data for you. In comparing to Extrahop from a bandwidth comparison, Extrahop wins but Extrahop is a lot more than just a bandwidth monitoring and cost.

Incentivized

• Firewall Analyzer has definitely freed up a lot of IT's time, by congregating logs and displaying them in a more useful, visual way.
• The cost for licenses and proactive alerting, compared to the man-hours spent reactively through data, paid for itself in a few months.
• There was no negative impact to users, and only some to IT staff who had to train on the software, which mostly consisted of videos and playing around with the software.

Incentivized

• Be prepared to answer lots of questions. When people see the data in NTA they are going to want to know why App A is talking to App B. Be ready to explain!
• Hand the keys to the NTA kingdom to the network team. They will thank you. Everyone wants to have friends on the network team, right?
• Be prepared to invest in some significant compute and storage performance to keep up with your NTA monitoring
• Running the latest firmware for your network gear is (often) required to take advantage of all the flow-monitoring. You upgrade regularly, right??

Incentivized