Item: NETSCOUT nGeniusONE
Rating: 7
Author: Verified User

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

It is used globally at over a thousand locations for network traffic analysis, including NetFlow for every site and datacenter packet capturing. The analysis includes bandwidth capacity management, Top Talkers/Top application analysis, VoIP call analysis, and SharePoint traffic. It is used by the Telecom department and recently started to be leveraged by the applications departments. We are also leveraging the service desk to use it for initial incident triage.

Pros and Cons

Good NetFlow collection and analysis.
Complete suite of network and application analysis features in one tool.
Integration of network and application metrics for comprehensive performance analysis.

The interface is very cumbersome and not intuitive.
Lack of a strong and understandable API for integration with other tools.
High cost.

Return on Investment

Positive: Improved incident MTTR (Mean Time To Resolve), reducing business downtime.
Positive: Proactive bandwidth capacity management improving financial visibility and business productivity.
Negative: High maintenance required for large organizations with very dynamic changes.

Usability

It provides a lot of useful information, but it's not always easy/intuitive to find it. It really needs to get a fully functional API integrated to support automation and integration with other monitoring and analytics tools to enable faster decision making. On the other hand, it gathers a lot of useful information from complex networks that are useful for capacity management and faster incident isolation and resolution.

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.

Alternatives Considered

ExtraHop and SolarWinds Netflow Traffic Analyzer

SolarWinds provides better modularity, improving your ROI by paying only for what you need as opposed to paying for the entire suite whether you need it or not. It also seems to be much more intuitive. However, I'm not sure that it provides packet capturing functionality for security and advanced troubleshooting purposes.
ExtraHop was evaluated but I'm not sure that it was any simpler to use than NetScout. However, it seems to have a more robust API that we could totally use.

Other Software Used

ThousandEyes, Nagios

Likelihood to Recommend

Great for detailed real-time and historical network and application (over the network) utilization analysis. It works well both for capacity management and live troubleshooting, mostly focusing on the network performance for the applications running over it. Not appropriate for detailed routing analysis (follow full routing path), application performance analysis at the client or server level (before/after reaching the network).

Useful but costly network monitoring tool

Overall Satisfaction with NETSCOUT nGeniusONE