Nmap vs. Riverbed Aternity

Nmap is the ideal solution if you are working alot in network environments. If you come to grips with the syntax and the most-used features (the online community helps alot), you will be able to much more quickly and thoroughly troubleshoot networks or check for security vulnerabilities, for instance. It is free to use and is available for Windows and Linux, so I would say it is very much warrented for any network administrator or sysadmin to take it out for a spin.

Incentivized

We are a services organization and we use Riverbed SteelCentral AppInternals with our customers. It has allowed us to expand the footprint in the application management business with virtually all of our major accounts. We were able to expand and go into other applications that we weren't in or offering previously. Now, we have a new value proposition for our customer enhanced visibility, enhanced stability, and we can reduce our cost to them because our cost structure is reduced by using Riverbed SteelCentral AppInternals.

Incentivized

• Nmap is very good at discovering systems on your network.
• Nmap is very good at guessing a systems operating system with a high degree of accuracy.
• Nmap is good at validating externally facing systems to make sure that unauthorized access is not allowed.

Incentivized

• Root cause finding/remediation (it goes beyond analysis).
• Shows latency between applications and servers.
• Identifies long-running SQL queries, and puts the onus back on developers to clean up their SQL code.

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized

• We found the platform slightly costly for the return. Having tried multiple products this was the best of the lot.
• We did find a few applications where the diagnostic data wasn't overly insightful.

Incentivized

Nmap uses are very practical and I don't think there is a better tools for what Nmap does. It is open-sources that therefore there is no cost to use it. It offers a number of benefits, including but not limited to network mapping, port scanning and more. It is very reliable as a network scanning tool.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

The support I give the highest rating because it is really amazing. Every time we triggered the tool support, we were very well served very quickly and efficiently. The problems were solved quickly and without stress. The staff helped us within minutes and had a lot of patience with us

Incentivized

A similar but more basic alternative is available on Android, called Fing. It's very useful for diagnosing issues on networks when you only have your mobile device to hand.

A graphical user interface alternative to Nmap, is Zenmap. It's the official GUI for Nmap and does use Nmap under the hood. It makes things a bit more 'point and click'.

Incentivized

The three tools mentioned above are great too. All deliver and fulfill their functionality well. But we chose Riverbed SteelCentral AppInternals because we received referrals from other friends who work at other major companies around the world and use this solution and have never had any problems. So for reliability we chose this one

Incentivized

• NMap being free of charge has a positive impact on our budget. It is an enterprise-class tool that anyone can download and use.
• NMap, both command line and GUI, is a very advanced tool that is easy to use, so there's very little learning curve involved, which has a positive impact on productivity and security.
• A valuable feature that is a huge time saver is that you can compare scans. This saves hours of searching manually for differences in scan results. Faster results means faster mitigation of problems, which can be a real money saver.

Incentivized

• Helped us drive automation for the client
• Generation of detailed reports for monitoring activity performed
• Overall improvement in compliance and risk management for servers
• Drive operational efficiency across the project

Incentivized