Likelihood to Recommend NETSCOUT nGeniusONE is a great network performance monitoring tool as it helps to trace the path of packet and to identify the exact place where the packet is loss. It is well suited in scenarios where the organization have large network and they need continuous monitoring because loss of connectivity may lead to serious financial loss in sectors like banking, hospitals. The network performance and connectivity needs to be stable for proper execution of transactions, bookings, data transfer and other critical task. Performance monitoring of large enterprise is a big task and doing that manually requires very much effort, but with NETSCOUT nGeniusONE it becomes easy. It is not well suited in scenarios where there is small network and they can survive if any link flaps for small duration of time.
Read full review If your IT team isn't proficient in automation and scripting, Solarwinds NCM can fill that gap (assuming your company's security team signs off on approving SW in your environment given the hack.) Basic device configuration, pushing mass changes reliably and backups are NCM's strong suites. If you have a complex scenario where if/then cases are needed, NCM is a bit lack luster. Auto discovery isn't as easy either as certain parameters need to be met for that feature to work 100% of the time
Read full review Pros NetScout nGeniusONE can help to deep dive into the packet layer, help to identify the real network and service performance problems in the protocol layer. We have been using NetScout nGeniusONE as the main monitoring solution for the mobile network for many years. I have recently use NetScout nGeniusONE to support problem troubleshooting for a customer issue complaining of slow application connection into our Datacenter services. it was easy to use NetScout nGeniusONE to capture the problematic connection sessions by using various type of filters and export a pcap file for further analysis. I‘ve also use NetScout nGeniusONE to investigate an NBN connection issue which was intermittent and hard to capture, however, by using NetScout nGeniusONE it was easy to go back to the history capture and logs, so we won't miss any important leads. Read full review Integrates with Network Performance Management for Alerting and Reporting. NetPath and detects issues due to Configuration Change. Keeps a record of which user made the change. Which devices are not being backed up, devices where backups are failing, dashboard and alerting available. Read full review Cons Better access to resources Pricing in this niche market is very high, hard for the little guy to take advantage of these solutions Read full review For our use case, it does everything great and some of the features we underutilize but I would like to be able to set a configuration baseline when initially adding a node instead of after the configuration is pulled but it's not a particularly big deal to let it pull the configuration then set it as the baseline. Read full review Likelihood to Renew Medium complexity to set up in the beginning if using any non-standard devices or configurations, else fairly easy (e.g. Cisco Nexus or IOS-based devices). Reports are fairly straightforward to set up. Updates to the platform are fairly straightforward and don't take a major effort. Easy to add or remove devices.
Read full review Usability Requires quite a bit of training not only for config but to use. Highly recommend having a SME come in from Netscout to help initially for these. Once you learn the UI, it’s much better to use but is not intuitive.
Read full review The user interface is lacking. It is difficult to navigate at times and things can be done multiple ways. Quite often I am confused by how their notification structure works. It is not very intuitive. They do offer a free Academy. They also offer a community of other technical folks. I have enjoyed both.
Read full review Support Rating If you spend the right amount of money with them they work very close to you to support your needs. I ignore how they work in companies with lower expenses on their products. NetScout is not a very dynamic introducing platform with enhancements that their customers need. We contract their professional services so support level is good, although too pricey from my perspective.
Read full review To be fair, I have not had to involve Support in a number of years, but when I did, I was greeted with enthusiastic engineers who wanted to understand and solve the issue. It was a fairly complex scenario and I have discovered in my most recent implementation that engineering included that option as a standard now.
Read full review Online Training Solarwinds has actually produced new training since I last used it that is available on their site at any time. Their previous training was more than enough to get us started but now there is significantly more content. Since I'm comfortable with the Orion platform and the products we use I haven't checked the new training out yet but we have new staff go through portions of that training and they always come away with an understanding of the platform and ready to use it
Read full review Implementation Rating it was a fairly easy implementation and everything was pretty straightforward. only challenge we had was getting all the snmp communities updated on the networking equipment
Read full review Alternatives Considered Wireshark has been around for years and has been used primarily for packet analyzing. NetScout does this and goes above and beyond with the graphics interface analyzes and customer filtering for packet analyzes. You can go straight to the packet analyze within NetScout but you will find that to be more work, this would be like starting with
Wireshark . Instead, begin with the graphical interface to narrow down the traffic, a visual effect. Then go to the packet analyzer, time saver. As for
PRTG , it's a NetFlow/SNMP collector with a quick and dirty look at traffic but lacks the tools to dig into the information it provides.
Read full review Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform is a great tool and matches much of the functionality of SolarWinds Network Configuration Manager. Nothing about
Ansible will likely be overwhelming to an engineer with a little time to spare, but that spare time combined with SolarWinds already being our monitoring tool made the decision easy. Time is at a premium in small teams and SolarWinds Network Configuration Manager is very easy to use right out of the box without all the tweaking required by powerful command line driven tools like
Ansible .
Read full review Return on Investment NETSCOUT nGeniusONE is the best tool and very profitable for our organization as it helped in to reduce the manual effort of engineers to track the Network flaps and connectivity issue. Return on investment for this product is quiet good as of now and we have achieved 80% ROI till now and we are very much confident that we will achieve the full ROI. It has helped in cost cutting as we need only few network admin and engineers to track the discovery, behavior and connectivity. Earlier we need a lot of employee to do that due to which the organization may suffer some financial loss. Read full review The time savings from automatic daily backups is significant The compare configuration tool is super helpful at spotting errors when small changes occur that are hard to detect otherwise. The compliance check tool saves countless hours going through configurations for errors. Read full review ScreenShots SolarWinds Network Configuration Manager (NCM) Screenshots