We performed a comparison between Kentik and vRealize Network Insight 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."We can manage the entire system across the network and troubleshoot the pain points."
"The single dashboard is a valuable feature."
"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."
"We're pretty happy with the API functionality. It's web, and it's very simple to set up queries. It has served us well and you don't need to be an expert on the API or the product to set these things up."
"Having the API access allows us to do a great deal of automation around a lot of our reporting and management tools."
"The drill-down into detailed views of network activity helps to quickly pinpoint locations and causes. All the information is there."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"Whenever we say "valuable" with respect to the network, it's more towards the security. The firewall rule issues it shows us and the recommendations that we get from vRNI are the most valuable features because they are actually making our network more secure."
"It gives the visibility that was either broken or there in pieces only. This solution provides a unified view of the whole system, back and forth. It has helped to reduce time to value, increase performance, more easily manage networks, and provide deep visibility."
"It provides deep visibility into what is happening with traffic and helps us manage our network."
"What's valuable to us is the ability to get a view into the virtual space, which is something we haven't had before. Before, it was done by collecting from network endpoints and extrapolating into the virtual environment. Now it's coming directly from the virtual environment."
"The solution has helped improve our organization by directing the network traffic using SDN."
"It allows you to see traffic that you couldn't otherwise see, which is traffic within your Layer 3-bounded network, meaning east-west traffic. It's hard to get that any other way."
"I like being able to see the flows coming in and out of the product. In terms of monitoring network flows, we use it to verify whether or not different servers/applications should be communicating with each other."
"The ability to use the natural language query and see the visualization is quickly intuitive, and it works very well."
"The Wi-Fi side needs improvement."
"The technical support needs improvement."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"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'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."
"I would like to see more reporting features, more dashboards."
"While it's not exactly a feature, what normally happens when we are trying to look at the VM flow portion is - although Network Insight does have options to integrate a few physical switches into it - we can't really get an end-to-end flow of the network. We might be using a few switches that are not supported by Network Insight. That is where they can improve, in the support for more physical switches and network devices."
"There's enough information there, especially in the visualizations, but I would love to see this in a kiosk mode, where I could have a dashboard for interested stakeholders to see and appreciate what's going on. Then, moving on to a more practical level for our Help Desk, our operations team could benefit by seeing, in real-time, a visual view of the network."
"In a very general way, I would like to see an improvement in interoperability with third-party product, from other vendors."
"There could be some deeper analytics into packet inspection and trace flows. It could use some kind of machine learning to look at Layer 7 traffic for potential malware or corrupt packets."
"I would like to see application identification. That would be cool."
"vRNI needs more remediation where it hooks into NSX."
"I want to be able to monitor a network flow that is approximately two weeks back, but I haven't found an easy way to do this."
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Kentik is ranked 47th in Network Monitoring Software with 12 reviews while vRealize Network Insight is ranked 22nd in Network Monitoring Software with 44 reviews. Kentik is rated 9.2, while vRealize Network Insight is rated 8.6. 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 vRealize Network Insight writes "Provides deep analytical insights and makes migrations efficient with dependency mapping". Kentik is most compared with ThousandEyes, Arbor DDoS, SolarWinds NPM, Datadog and NETSCOUT nGeniusONE, whereas vRealize Network Insight is most compared with ThousandEyes, NETSCOUT vSTREAM, AppNeta by Broadcom, Zabbix and SolarWinds NPM. See our Kentik vs. vRealize Network Insight report.
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