Preseem vs. SolarWinds Engineer's Toolset vs. SolarWinds NetFlow Traffic Analyzer (NTA)

For any ISP that wants to know the QoE their customers experience while using their service, Preseem is an excellent choice. The rate plan shaping also makes sure the connection feels fast, even if the speeds are being 100% utilized by the customer. This is not a DPI service though, so you can't classify or shape certain services over others. All traffic is treated fairly, and small flows are moved to the front of the queue to make sure interactive traffic like VOIP, DNS, and gaming is working well ahead of large downloads.

Incentivized

[SolarWinds Engineer's Toolset is] a great tool for monitoring database servers, highly recommended. The very good thing is that it keeps the history for two weeks, and you can see the time slice for all the server activities. Helps a lot to identify the memory and CPU bottlenecks, research blocking issues and kill the sessions, if necessary.

Incentivized

I would suggest this tool to any user that has to monitor multiple sites and locations where bandwidth monitoring can be a labor. This software works really well for central monitoring of multiple sites and services where having a technician onsite isn't feasible. I really like the reporting, though, and would recommend this for someone wanting to keep an eye on bandwidth usage for replication of data across sites.

Incentivized

• Excellent web interface that shows all the relevant performance data
• Great customer service
• Fair pricing
• Great rate plan shaping to maintain low latency
• API integration with our billing systems and many others

Incentivized

• Debugging Tools
• Saves Time for basic checks
• Ping, Telnet, SSH right from the console and hence easy user management from console itself

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

• The tool could stand to be a little less engineered, but really the ROI isn't there for them to do so. I don't think most of us care about how pretty it looks, more so does it work and can I figure it out in relatively short order.

• The unifying component that is intended to be the initial interface to the tools seems clunky. I prefer to start the tools individually rather than using it.
• The port scanner could use some improvements to make it easier to use.

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

Very easy to use and intuitive. Just be careful with the WAN Killer...it does what it says.

Incentivized

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

Our organization uses it regularly. It is reliable, and we keep finding new uses for it

Incentivized

It is useful for our Infrastructure team and also provides valuable insights to our application team regarding the traffic being sent from various endpoints. They can monitor their applications and ensure there are no network issues that may impact their application.

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

Any Amplifi product can show client infrastructure usage and date. the Dream Machine is perfect because it has built-in everything for the client to manage his local network.

These tools complement the Engineer's Toolset. They are excellent at detecting most issues and at keeping the network monitored and protected. However, when it comes time to dig into an issue, especially a hard to fix intermittent issue, these products lack the granularity of monitoring needed for these types of issues. Having said that the toolset is not made to do full time enterprise level monitoring. With these tools and the toolset I am able to have a more complete view of the network and deliver higher levels of service and quicker responses to issues.

Incentivized

SolarWinds NTA is hands down a superior product compared to Wireshark. However, when doing smaller isolated projects the affordability of Wireshark can not be overlooked. Wireshark does a great job of collecting data on ports and circuits. The advantage of SolarWinds NTA is the all encompassing collection of data and management of the multitude of devices. It is designed to do that, and does it very well.

Incentivized

• Preseem has increased our ability to service our end users without hiring additional staff.
• Well worth the cost - less frustration for network managers.
• Runs in the background with little to no input from network manager.
• Very reasonable cost to operate.

• Spend less time downloading free buggy tools
• All the tools in one spot, so you don't have to look around for tools
• Get to the solution sooner

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