We performed a comparison between NETSCOUT nGeniusONE and SolarWinds NPM 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."
"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."
"We are using nGeniusONE to run our bandwidth capacity management reports. In the past, we used to be very reactive, we used to depend a lot on suppliers to tell us which sites are our hot sites, meaning, which have high bandwidth utilization. Now we do this in a much more proactive way and we are moving to a more predictive approach in that aspect, thanks to nGeniusONE."
"The product is very good. We have very few problems."
"The quick drill-down views are similar to Wireshark views. Those are quite nice, with the views on how you interpret some of the data. The granularity of how far you can drill down into milliseconds or microseconds is a very nice feature. It actually stores quite a lot of data in its database."
"The installation process is straightforward."
"Among the valuable features, if it's TAP'ed well, are the density of the data that you can get and the relatively high veracity or accuracy rate that we see from it."
"The biggest benefit is the ability to do low-level packet inspection. When I say packet inspection, I don't mean looking at payload, but just looking at your communication handshakes and the like. It reduces troubleshooting time because you can get a much better view into the communications path between servers, database servers, web servers, and understand what's going on."
"Being able to easily, and quickly obtain disc space statistics from servers and determine how much was free or used on various volumes."
"One of the best features is the reports feature."
"It is scalable."
"It did a good job of the collection and then an investigation of the net flow of information for understanding the applications that were being used at certain locations."
"SolarWinds is reasonably priced."
"The nice thing about SolarWinds is that it's kind of all-in-one. I can manage the status of my networking devices, whether they are up or down, I can see how much traffic is going across an interface, and I can run a report that tells me exactly what that traffic is."
"The set up was very easy. We didn't have any problems with the setup. The deployment took less than an hour."
"It covers everything from end to end, from the standpoint of endpoint machines and the routers and switches. The switch port also comes there."
"The Wi-Fi side needs improvement."
"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."
"There was a point in GTP where we were creating services on nodes and after that we wanted to have services on APN. We can't have both... There are some limitations with these types of things. When we would like to use a feature, we have to remove another one."
"The GUI has gotten better over time but there could be some improvement in how the GUI is built."
"here is a big issue with the special way they use InfiniStream to store data."
"The product is a little complicated."
"The single pane of glass view is a challenge. I like the graphics, they're easy to understand, but when more digging is required, it's more complicated to get what I'm expecting."
"The solution could do more for security. It should offer more security-related features."
"I would like more in-depth convergence between all the applications, especially when I look for information through a data mine."
"The solution could be more secure."
"SolarWinds NPM needs to increase its elements. One polling engine can only support 10,000 elements then it becomes slow. There are limitations even if you have the full SLX version license."
"Having more technical and support resources available in Saudi Arabia would be helpful."
"Real-time analytics is the major weakness of the SolarWinds NPM platform today. They've done a fantastic job enabling the collection of data. Users are now demanding the ability to generate their own graphs, views, and so on; all of this must be done by an admin today."
"Time: A worldwide deployment can be confusing for dispersed users with non-local times. Each node should have a local time (with summer offset if appropriate) & each user should view & report in their local time."
"The integration with video apps could be better."
"They need to work on their automation and automatically discover devices. They are not very good at automatically discovering devices."
"It is not that stable. As a Windows software, I have seen issues with SolarWinds. The performance is slow."
NETSCOUT nGeniusONE is ranked 26th in Network Monitoring Software with 47 reviews while SolarWinds NPM is ranked 4th in Network Monitoring Software with 147 reviews. NETSCOUT nGeniusONE is rated 8.2, while SolarWinds NPM is rated 8.2. The top reviewer of NETSCOUT nGeniusONE writes "We use it every day for the triaging of events, saving us a lot of time". On the other hand, the top reviewer of SolarWinds NPM writes "High-level, comprehensive, and proactive monitoring in a user-friendly interface". NETSCOUT nGeniusONE is most compared with Gigamon Deep Observability Pipeline, Dynatrace, ThousandEyes, AppDynamics and Pico Corvil Analytics, whereas SolarWinds NPM is most compared with Zabbix, PRTG Network Monitor, ManageEngine OpManager, ThousandEyes and Entuity. See our NETSCOUT nGeniusONE vs. SolarWinds NPM report.
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SolarWinds NPM and nGenius One are very different in nature and capabilities.
SolarWinds NPM has a wide range of capabilities to monitor the availability of network devices and services, track network paths (by active testing).
nGenius One is more of a traffic visibility solution that captures traffic and shows the characteristics of the conversations going through the network (including the network and end-user performance).
If you are looking at the second, you certainly want to look at Accedian's Skylight which offers a massive advantage when it comes to performance visibility!
Although both products can overlap in what information they provide, nGenius One primarily uses packets from the network to monitor application performance and excels at deep packet analysis. SolarWinds primarily gathers data from SNMP, WMI, Netflow and other metrics to monitor the status of equipment (up, down, temperature, interface data, etc) as well as providing application performance statistics.
Common aspects of Solarwinds NPM and NetScout - Provide information pertaining to the network - latency, response time, the path taken, traffic info
Key differences - Use of different techniques - SNMP vs Packet capture
SNMP may give you added information like node status, hardware health, performance statistics, device-level information Packet capture may give you added information like TCP retransmissions, packet loss.
Solarwinds will rely on SNMP configuration on a device to send status, statistics and discovery using Polling as well as send Traps on specific incidents NetScout will rely on various port mirror taps into the network where the traffic needs to be analyzed in detail.
Skills required for Solarwinds are fairly minimum (maybe just understanding how SNMP works - polling & traps while NetScout skills will need you to master TCP/IP communication with details of the packet fields - source IP, dest IP, source port, dest port, various flags, etc.
From my experience, I would suggest PRTG Network Monitor over both instead of getting into details as to which one of NETSCOUT and Solarwinds is better. Both Solarwinds and NETSCOUT are expensive. NETSCOUNT is into loggerheads with Gartner report. Gartner rate Solarwinds well and PRTG Network Monitor is as good or even better than Solarwinds but far less expensive. I would recommend evaluating PRTG Network Monitor also to assess its suitability to meet your requirements.