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."We can manage the entire system across the network and troubleshoot the pain points."
"Having the API access allows us to do a great deal of automation around a lot of our reporting and management tools."
"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."
"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."
"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 am able to do a lot of work on the visualization end to create different visualizations and different ways to get information out of it."
"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."
"The drill-down into detailed views of network activity helps to quickly pinpoint locations and causes. All the information is there."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"Valuable features include data threat detection, network analytics, and overall bandwidth monitoring."
"If one of our network pipes is getting plugged up by somebody using too much bandwidth, we can use the NETSCOUT tool to examine and find out what is going on."
"Stability-wise, I rate the solution a ten out of ten."
"This solution provides us with increased visibility while conducting IT deployments. E.g., if we have devices which have overloaded or links which have saturated, then this tool tells us exactly what is going on with that link or device. Very few tools do it at this level for things like DDoS."
"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 Wi-Fi side needs improvement."
"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 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."
"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..."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"On a network the size of ours, the loading times seem a little extensive, 20 or 30 seconds to load up some graphs."
"Initially, we were having a lot of issues with bugs when using version 6.1.1. There were a lot of problems with the dashboard causing confusion. We worked with our SE and the NETSCOUT engineering team to fix the visibility with the data. There should be a patch release to fix this issue. However, this seems to be working fine for us right now after the 6.2.2 upgrade."
"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."
"nGeniusONE could be improved by reducing the number of bare metal servers required to run it. Currently, you need a separate bare metal server for each of the following: Xfinity, ISNG, nGeniusONE, and CFS. It would be more cost-effective and less complex if all of these functionalities could be combined into a single bare metal server."
"I would love to have them reassemble fragmented packets. That would be a very big plus in my book."
"It's not intuitive, it's not simple to use. It is probably the only monitoring tool, out of all the ones that I have, that I really need an expert on, an expert from nGenius, a contractor that I have to pay, to manage the tool. And that's because it's simply not easy to use. Netscout needs to focus on making it easier to use."
"Initial setup was complex."
Kentik is ranked 47th in Network Monitoring Software with 12 reviews while NETSCOUT nGeniusONE is ranked 26th 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 Observer GigaStor, whereas NETSCOUT nGeniusONE is most compared with Gigamon Deep Observability Pipeline, Dynatrace, ThousandEyes and AppDynamics. See our Kentik vs. NETSCOUT nGeniusONE report.
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