We performed a comparison between SolarWinds NetFlow Traffic Analyzer and Wireshark based on real PeerSpot user reviews.
Find out what your peers are saying about Darktrace, Vectra AI, Auvik and others in Network Traffic Analysis (NTA)."For managing the traffic, it provides you a response about whether the traffic is down, up, or heavy, which is a very powerful feature. It has a good response time. We have been using this solution for many years, and we don't have any problem with this solution."
"The program is scalable enough for our usage."
"With SolarWinds, we are now able to accurately gauge bandwidth consumption."
"The most helpful feature of SolarWinds NetFlow Traffic Analyzer is bandwidth analysis, which lets you see who's hogging your network."
"It helps us know when a branch is down because it has a graphic presentation of all the locations a node represents."
"As it offers enterprise solutions, it has all the essential features for business."
"What the network team found most valuable in SolarWinds NetFlow Traffic Analyzer is that it helps them to troubleshoot or analyze the issue. For example, traffic that comes from our location: India, goes to the US, so for the network team to analyze where the traffic comes from and where it is directed, and whether the packets are being dropped, they use SolarWinds NetFlow Traffic Analyzer. The network team also likes that through the solution, they can analyze the complete traffic utilization and how they're going to use it. SolarWinds NetFlow Traffic Analyzer is user-friendly. The team finds it comfortable to use."
"The solution's most valuable feature is its traffic analysis."
"Being able to dissect email data and figure out what is inside email messages was the most valuable feature. Such a feature is pretty helpful for an ongoing forensic investigation or when there is a potential insider threat that you are trying to investigate. It allows you to see the network activity of the users you are investigating. It also gives you more visibility into your network. It was very easy to set up. There is a lot of information out there on Google and YouTube about how to use it. There is also community support. If you have any trouble, it is pretty easy to find an answer online. You will have to do some digging only if you have a very specific use case."
"The most valuable feature of Wireshark is the ability to choose a destination of flow that has not been working as expected."
"Setup is very easy. It's also possible to change source code and compile if you want to change something in the code, because it's free."
"I find Wireshark a very useful tool. Its best feature is that it allows me to deeply understand what's going on at the packet level, as well as any adverse signatures that I can analyze. When I need to create an IPS rule, I need to check the traffic deeply to get more insights about the actual traffic, what's the name of certain flags, etc., and I'm able to do all that through Wireshark. The tool is also user-friendly."
"I have found the most valuable feature you can design your sniffer the way you want to."
"You can use Wireshark to see the traffic packet format, the IP layers, the fields, and the enabled flags."
"The product is simple to implement."
"I use the filters very often, to determine what type of traffic I am looking for. The use of filter allows traffic to be segmented so that a value can be looked at individually apart from the other traffic."
"This solution does not do a very good job when I am trying to look deeper into my internal network, in particular with respect to individual ports."
"SolarWinds' technical support is ok, but it could be faster and more knowledgeable."
"The problem is that SolarWinds is trying to bolt in too much and that can leave bugs, which you have to then sort out, leaving the product unstable. SolarWinds needs to try and slow down and improve the stability of the product, as opposed to bringing out more and more features."
"An area for improvement in SolarWinds NetFlow Traffic Analyzer is the dashboarding. The user interface also has room for improvement because it's currently clunky."
"It is very slow to pick the dynamics of the network."
"An area for improvement in SolarWinds NetFlow Traffic Analyzer is application visibility because some applications aren't being recognized correctly. You can see applications such as Facebook and YouTube, but SolarWinds NetFlow Traffic Analyzer needs to have more visibility into more applications. Currently, SolarWinds fails to detect more powerful applications, such as Zoom and Teams. If SolarWinds NetFlow Traffic Analyzer can recognize every application and be able to report on each in terms of bandwidth, then that would be good. This is what I'd like to see in the next release of the solution."
"The licensing should be more realistic so that we can adjust the number of nodes according to my needs, rather than in fixed increments."
"They should work on the configuration of the Log Analyzer feature."
"The decryption of encrypted packets could be better."
"You need some basic knowledge to work with Wireshark. Maybe it could be more user-friendly just for new users. Just for the new generation."
"We would like the product to be developed so that it doesn't rely on internet access for installation. We would like to see all of the components required to be integrated into the installer."
"I wish the filters were a little bit more prepopulated."
"The product is great but I wish there were more of an emphasis on the command line tools."
"The system could be improved upon by adding a better and more powerful data processing engine."
"Whenever we select one of the packets, in terms of the number of bytes, for example, there are three planes, and in the detailed plane, I have to count the number of bytes manually."
"Big trace files (more than 1,000,000 packets) can be slow, but then you can use "TraceWrangler" (also free) to help with slicing and dicing the data."
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SolarWinds NetFlow Traffic Analyzer is ranked 6th in Network Traffic Analysis (NTA) with 34 reviews while Wireshark is ranked 4th in Network Troubleshooting with 61 reviews. SolarWinds NetFlow Traffic Analyzer is rated 7.6, while Wireshark is rated 9.0. The top reviewer of SolarWinds NetFlow Traffic Analyzer writes "Displays traffic visibility and efficient traffic flows". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Wireshark writes "User-friendly with an easy setup and a nice interface". SolarWinds NetFlow Traffic Analyzer is most compared with Zabbix, Cisco Secure Network Analytics, ManageEngine NetFlow Analyzer, SolarWinds NPM and Fortinet FortiSIEM, whereas Wireshark is most compared with Zabbix, Nagios XI, Colasoft Capsa, SolarWinds NPM and Observer GigaStor.
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