NETSCOUT TruView vs. Nmap

Netscout’s TruView monitoring system gives your IT department the perfect view of your network landscape. With the pulse hardware app, you can perform VoIP or HTTP network monitoring tests from specific remote locations and it will populate the analysis results into your console. This will give you perspective on how your sites are performing and detect any out of Service Level Agreement (SLA) performance even before users report it.

If you're a sysadmin, or anyone who's had to deploy network services, you've almost certainly had to use Nmap at some point or other. Need to see what devices are on your LAN? Nmap can tell you that. Want to check which ports your web server has open to the internet? Nmap is your friend.

Nmap is a powerful command-line tool and has many options that require some reading of documentation to get the best out of (although generally straightforward). If the thought of working at the command-line scares you (presumably not if you're reading this review), then you may want a much simpler tool, or at least check out Zenmap GUI.

• The app monitoring gives you the details to set different filters and do a quick identification of the root cause of the problem.
• Remarkable ability to store details of performance to analyze baselining, run advance troubleshooting, error detection and catalog by trends.
• The ability to sync with a device/interface whether is physical or virtual gives me the standpoint to set analysis upon network traffic across LAN or WAN and also get the insight of Cloud segments, setting the triggers to find out where the behavior changes to non-production traffic.

• NMap provides a very fast and a very thorough network "sweep" that allows you to quickly map out exactly what's on your network.
• NMap is highly configurable. The "canned" choices are very good in most instances, but using various switches and options, you can create a very specific scan and get exactly the results you're looking for.
• NMap is easy to use. Even a new administrator will be able to use the graphical version (Zenmap) with efficiency right away.

• Product features are sometimes overwhelming if the IT team is not used to this technology. For a small and mid-size company, the number of settings and work that is needed to implement the solution could be a long and exhausting process.
• A "lite" version of Visual TruView could help a lot to small sized environments looking to develop the solution.
• I would like to add some mitigation tools for simple/common problems that could be easily managed by a monitoring tool like Netscout TruView.

• exporting, There's a serious lack of ability to export the information in a readable format to present to VPs and such. I always find myself doing a lot of data massaging to get it in a pretty format
• some scans can trigger sensitive IDS/IPS
• SYN scans can be particularly aggressive and cause problems on remote systems.

As mentioned before, our deployment success depended on their expertise. Recommendations and overall response from their support engineers was out of this world. We, as supporters ourselves, are very critical in regards to the response times and knowledge of support services representatives. Often they just want to resolve your ticket not caring about the result, or focus only on the performance review we could give them. That's a standard behavior in most overseas support centers. The TruView engineers and management cared about us, our needs, and how they delivered the help we needed.

There is a very large support community and a robust selection of add-ons and scripts. Once you get the use down this is one of the most powerful tools and you can find anything you are looking for as far as examples on the web. While not having official support its not lacking by any means.

Visual TruView is a solid competitor with solutions such as SolarWinds NPM, Nagios, PRTG, or SolarWinds NTA. Why we chose TruView was because it goes straight to what we were looking for, no hidden modules or subscriptions to secondaries licensing terms, to get the results that we were expecting. TruView takes it to another level.

Alternatives to Nmap (other IP scanners) are often much more limited in what they can do; They often only allow you to scan a specific subset of ports or a limited number of IP addresses in one command. Nmap is unrestricted in that regard. What makes Nmap stand out above the rest, is the complete network analysis package you get with it. It allows IP scanner, network deep-dives, hardware analysis, vulnerability analysis, encryption detailing, and so much more, in one free application

• Tool consolidation, an amazing GUI that shows the most from the very beginning helping the IT Teams to set their own dashboards according to their needs.
• When they meant one price tag, that's it! You won't get a headache after the purchase process is done.
• Better be ready to set the scales your organization requires because if you miss something in the design you could get an application size that overrides your initial budget.

• Nmap with Wireshark is free, so it's been a great combo team to gather info and test.
• It's allowed us to avoid fines from false positives and to fix actual issues ourselves.
• Great for finding hosts, helps keep the network secure.