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."
"The most valuable features are visibility, real-time, on-demand."
"We build application dashboards and performance indexes for locations."
"The installation process is straightforward."
"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."
"For me, the most valuable features are the dashboards which we use to highlight the overall impact to the customers, and being able to drill down into the nitty-gritty of the customer experience."
"The packet capture is the most valuable feature for us. It gathers data from the device. In case somebody has a problem, I can go back X amount of time - days, hours - and get the data to do real troubleshooting."
"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."
"It helps us get to the root cause quickly. It helps us find massive error codes, then we drill down on that error code, knowing that is the source of our problem."
"Their support team is efficient, and it is easy to set up."
"Can easily be interconnected with other management systems."
"I can do everything remotely, including running PowerShell scripts or performing standard updates."
"Monitoring capabilities are at a high level and it is easy to see utilization, access ports, and CPU memory in real time or through a lens for long-term visualization."
"The initial setup was straightforward. We deployed the solution from new and completed the upgrades."
"The alerting and usage tracking notifications on disk space capacity, network and processor utilization."
"The biggest thing for me is that it provided enough information for me to monitor. It alerts and provides you with the information you need."
"From web interfaces to custom monitors and alarms, this product has a high level of flexibility that can be molded to suit your business needs, regardless of the size of your organization."
"The Wi-Fi side needs improvement."
"NETSCOUT nGeniusONE can improve the detection of what area of the infrastructure could be having an issue, such as an application, server, or network. It needs to find evidence of a fault."
"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."
"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."
"We see it overload once in a while. It doesn't have built-in protection. Therefore, once it gets too much data, it tends to crash. Then, we have to recover it."
"For individual subscriber tracings, sometimes it does not capture all the messages. There is a little bit of room for improvement there."
"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."
"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."
"The scalability needs some work. From a probe perspective, we are limited to a certain amount of throughput on the devices themselves. Without having actual hooks into the bare metal hardware for the solutions, it's a bit of a "thumb in the air" as to when we hit our capacity or when our high watermark is."
"The dashboards for this solution could be improved. We would like to divide the dashboards to give a clear view to our management team to show what we have and what deficiencies exist in our network."
"It would be nice to have a test to check if you can access a particular device via API without installing it and waiting for a poll cycle. You should have the capacity to initiate a test to see if it was reachable and get the results almost immediately."
"A feature I would ask for is for them to have this solution available for Linux systems instead of Windows."
"My team has had a lot of issues with support."
"We also had to be attentive to vulnerabilities, because SolarWinds NPM have some issues in that area. We had to work with our security team, so that they could help us check and backup the data, and check what they needed to secure."
"They need to work on their automation and automatically discover devices. They are not very good at automatically discovering devices."
"I would like to have a Syslog server module for this product. That would make the solution better."
"It would be nice if SolarWinds could have a polling engine on the site that would collect the reporting and then manage everything itself."
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.