We performed a comparison between Kentik and NETSCOUT nGeniusONE based on real PeerSpot user reviews.
Find out in this report how the two Network Monitoring Software solutions compare in terms of features, pricing, service and support, easy of deployment, and ROI."The single dashboard is a valuable feature."
"We can manage the entire system across the network and troubleshoot the pain points."
"We're also using Kentik to ingest metrics. It's a useful feature, and its response time, whenever we're pulling back the data, is higher than our on-prem solution."
"The most valuable features have been anything around traffic engineering: being able to determine the source or destination of a surge of traffic, whether it's DDoS-related, or a customer just happened to have a sudden uptick in traffic. Being able to tell where that's coming from or where it's going to enables us to do things based on that."
"In terms of the solution’s real-time visibility across our network infrastructure, I have not been able to find any other monitoring or netflow visualization tool that gives me the kind of information I get from Kentik. If I need to take a deep-dive into something that I see, it's really easy for me to do that. Whereas with most other things, I have to use five or six other tools to get that kind of data, with Kentik, I have it all in one place."
"It offers a simple yet powerful feature of classifying applications, going beyond basic statistics."
"The most valuable feature is being able to pull traffic patterns; to and from destinations. We're able to understand where our traffic is going, our top talkers from an AS set, as well as where our traffic's coming from."
"One of the valuable features is the intuitive nature of building out reports, and then triggering actions based on specific metrics from those reports. It has a really good UI and the ability to surface data through the reporting functions is pretty good. That's helped a lot in the security space."
"I really love the Data Explorer. I use it all the time to go in and craft exactly what I need to see. I'm able to then take that story and explain it to the executives. I've done that a couple of times and it is helpful."
"Having the API access allows us to do a great deal of automation around a lot of our reporting and management tools."
"It gives me the MOS, latency, and jitter."
"Deep packet inspection is probably the strongest feature."
"The VoLTE model, call search and Media Monitor were essential when we launched VoLTE. We're relying heavily on them to troubleshoot our VoLTE calls."
"The details it provides are among the most valuable features; the ability to drill down and get to the packet level."
"With the Vprobes, we quickly identified issues on the application servers, which we normally couldn't, where it usually would be a full circle round between our NOC and server people."
"The most valuable feature of this solution is being able to drill down into any kind of troubles that are reported to us, by use of identifiers."
"The installation process is straightforward."
"It's a consolidated, single tool that talks to multiple platforms. It's not vendor-proprietary; it's independent. It provides interoperability with different products, whether they are routing products, switching products, wireless, wired, load balancing, or proxy. It works with anything you can name."
"The Wi-Fi side needs improvement."
"The technical support needs improvement."
"I believe they're already working on this, but I would love for them to create better integrations from network flow data to application performance — tracing — so that we could overlay that data more readily. With more companies going hybrid, flow logs and flow data, whether it be VPC or on-prem, matched with application performance and trace data, is pretty important."
"They're moving more in a direction where they are saying, "Hey, here's information that you may be interested in or may a need," before the question has to explicitly be asked. Continuing to move in that direction would be a good thing."
"I would like to see them explore the area of cost analysis."
"We asked for a way, regarding the potential networks that exist, to hook Kentik up with external tools like peering DBs to correlate things together and see what we can do... This is all in the [next] beta now."
"The only downside to Kentik, something that I don't like, is that it's great that it shows you where these anomalies lie, but it's not actionable. Kentik is valuable, don't get me wrong, but if it had an actionable piece to it..."
"I consider the pricing model as an area for improvement."
"There is room for improvement around the usability of the API. It's a hugely complex task to call it and you need a lot of backing to be able to do it. I should say, as someone who's not in networking, maybe it's easier for people who are in networking, but for me that one part is not very user-friendly."
"I've checked out the V4 version of the interface and it's still a little bit clunky for me to use. I still go back to the old interface. That's definitely one that they still need to work on. It doesn't seem like everything that you get in the V3, the older interface, is there. For instance, I was trying to add a user or do the administrative tasks in V4, and I couldn't figure out where I was supposed to do that."
"The technical support could improve a bit with quicker responses for early on questions. What I think are simple questions are taking a long time to get answers to."
"On a network the size of ours, the loading times seem a little extensive, 20 or 30 seconds to load up some graphs."
"NETSCOUT nGeniusONE is a complex product since it deals in areas like network packet brokers and packet analysis, making the tool complicated for end users."
"Maybe the optics cost could be improved. It's not about the product itself, but the optics cost from other companies is very high, which affects the business. When you buy a $1 million product, you shouldn't be expected to pay $500,000 for support. So, support, operation, and professional services are very expensive. It's the main weakness."
"Our biggest area of concern right now, supporting the applications, is that while NETSCOUT does a good job of monitoring the network and the applications, we need more visibility into system health and performance monitoring."
"Some of the filters could be easier to see and to set up. That's the only thing that I've ever had any trouble with."
"Trying to set up dashboards is hard to figure out at times, if you don't do it every day. It's not really intuitive to set them all up... If there were a wizard to take us through, step-by-step, creating dashboards and the like, that would be really helpful."
"One of the products we use is SolarWinds, and it provides a very cool mapping of an agent from end-to-end. If NETSCOUT could somehow implement that into their design... make it quicker and easier to get those net paths, it would be huge."
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Kentik is ranked 47th in Network Monitoring Software with 12 reviews while NETSCOUT nGeniusONE is ranked 23rd in Network Monitoring Software with 47 reviews. Kentik is rated 9.2, while NETSCOUT nGeniusONE is rated 8.2. The top reviewer of Kentik writes " Flexibility for creating reports and gaining more visibility is a definite strength". On the other hand, the top reviewer of NETSCOUT nGeniusONE writes "We use it every day for the triaging of events, saving us a lot of time". Kentik is most compared with ThousandEyes, Arbor DDoS, SolarWinds NPM, Datadog and Zabbix, whereas NETSCOUT nGeniusONE is most compared with Gigamon Deep Observability Pipeline, Dynatrace, ThousandEyes, AppDynamics and SolarWinds NPM. See our Kentik vs. NETSCOUT nGeniusONE report.
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