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."
"It gives me the MOS, latency, and jitter."
"Stability-wise, I rate the solution a ten out of ten."
"The most valuable features are visibility, real-time, on-demand."
"Deep packet inspection is probably the strongest feature."
"It is a scalable product."
"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 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."
"It is the ability to collect data and analyze it, especially key performance indicators. This is before a customer would call to the service center to complain that they have had bad coverage or a dropped call."
"There are a lot of valuable features with SolarWinds NPM. We can receive a lot of detailed data from the monitoring that can use useful for investigations, especially when you are troubleshooting. It is very helpful. Overall it was a very good experience."
"We can proactively fix historical issues, so we won't face those problems in future."
"The most important feature is reporting. The reports that are generated are useful and they save a lot of time with respect to monitoring."
"The set up was very easy. We didn't have any problems with the setup. The deployment took less than an hour."
"The ability to customize the views and dashboards is nice. SolarWinds also allows us to access the data via the API. That's probably the feature I liked the most."
"We have configured multiple alerts for our network devices, including routers and switches, so that we are notified if any interface goes down."
"The most valuable feature is the way it monitors the environment, and how user-friendly the console is for the end-user. The interface is also very easy and it captures all the information very well."
"Being able to easily, and quickly obtain disc space statistics from servers and determine how much was free or used on various volumes."
"The Wi-Fi side needs improvement."
"The initial deployment is tedious and requires a lot of build, deployment and configuration time. Experience is key to a successful deployment."
"For individual subscriber tracings, sometimes it does not capture all the messages. There is a little bit of room for improvement there."
"On a network the size of ours, the loading times seem a little extensive, 20 or 30 seconds to load up some graphs."
"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."
"The dependency mapping is good, but I am hopeful that they will build some type of partnership and relationship with ServiceNow. I want to see NETSCOUT partner with ServiceNow so they can leverage Service Now Discovery and Service Mapping to automate the build of the service dependency mappings inside of nGeniusONE."
"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."
"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."
"There is currently less visibility or GUI to analyse the packet for troubleshooting purposes."
"Application Performance Monitoring should be included in this solution."
"The integration needs to be improved."
"Complex and overly detailed setup."
"Scalability is a bit tricky because it requires more gateways in order to get the performance you may need. It also requires a lot of licensing."
"One of the challenges with SolarWinds is that in order to pull the data, we have to have a lot of false positives."
"The integration with the APIs and the web servers deployed can definitely be improved."
"The integration with video apps could be better."
"Fortigate firewalls are one example of a product that we are unable to monitor properly via SolarWinds NPM."
NETSCOUT nGeniusONE is ranked 27th 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 and ThousandEyes. 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.