We performed a comparison between Kentik and SolarWinds NetFlow Traffic Analyzer 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."
"It offers a simple yet powerful feature of classifying applications, going beyond basic statistics."
"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."
"Having the API access allows us to do a great deal of automation around a lot of our reporting and management tools."
"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 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."
"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."
"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 software management tools are very useful for our customers."
"What I like the most is the bandwidth assessment."
"This solution gives us important information about the utilization of protocols, particularly in terms of how often they are used."
"What people found most valuable in SolarWinds NetFlow Traffic Analyzer is its report customization feature."
"The solution's most valuable feature is its traffic analysis."
"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."
"I would rate NetFlow Traffic Analyzer's stability ten out of ten."
"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 Wi-Fi side needs improvement."
"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'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."
"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 consider the pricing model as an area for improvement."
"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."
"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."
"I would like to see them explore the area of cost analysis."
"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 pricing is expensive."
"They should work on the configuration of the Log Analyzer feature."
"It is a scalable solution, but it is costly to scale. Therefore, I would rate scalability at eight out of ten."
"I would like to see more training videos and additional material for learning how to use this solution."
"Technical support needs improvement."
"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."
"It's scalable, but it could be simplified because it's not completely easy."
"One area that we struggle with is the price. Because the price of this solution is so high, we are largely unable to introduce it into the local market, and only the banking sector has the means to afford it."
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Kentik is ranked 47th in Network Monitoring Software with 12 reviews while SolarWinds NetFlow Traffic Analyzer is ranked 6th in Network Traffic Analysis (NTA) with 34 reviews. Kentik is rated 9.2, while SolarWinds NetFlow Traffic Analyzer is rated 7.6. 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 SolarWinds NetFlow Traffic Analyzer writes "Displays traffic visibility and efficient traffic flows". Kentik is most compared with ThousandEyes, Arbor DDoS, SolarWinds NPM, NETSCOUT nGeniusONE and Datadog, whereas SolarWinds NetFlow Traffic Analyzer is most compared with Cisco Secure Network Analytics, Zabbix, ManageEngine NetFlow Analyzer, SolarWinds NPM and Darktrace. See our Kentik vs. SolarWinds NetFlow Traffic Analyzer report.
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