We performed a comparison between SolarWinds NetFlow Traffic Analyzer and Vectra AI based on real PeerSpot user reviews.
Find out in this report how the two Network Traffic Analysis (NTA) solutions compare in terms of features, pricing, service and support, easy of deployment, and ROI."The integration with other SolarWinds products is good."
"The dashboard alerts me when a critical device goes off the network."
"The monitoring is perfect, showing you the details for the utilization of resources and network bandwidth."
"They have instructional videos and other information available on the site to assist you with learning it."
"As it offers enterprise solutions, it has all the essential features for business."
"In terms of the implementation, we've actually used SAM, the server and application monitoring tools. The network configuration tools are very useful in terms of bulk upgrading switches and infrastructure. Also, the Network Traffic Analyzer was extremely useful to track down errant users soaking up bandwidth."
"The most helpful feature of SolarWinds NetFlow Traffic Analyzer is bandwidth analysis, which lets you see who's hogging your network."
"This solution gives us important information about the utilization of protocols, particularly in terms of how often they are used."
"It keeps up with the network traffic, which is a good thing. It provides more context to plain alerts compared to using an older system. So, it helps an analyst reduce the information overload."
"We often use the new feature to create PCAP files from the whole data traffic. It makes it much easier to find network problems such as whether the server is responding to a request. It has nothing to do with security, but it helps a lot to find other problems."
"Cognito Streams gives you a detailed view of what happens in the network in the form of rich metadata. It is just a super easy way to capture network traffic for important protocols, giving us an advantage. This is very helpful on a day-to-day basis."
"The most useful feature is the anomaly detection because it's not signature-based. It picks up the initial part of any attack, like the recon and those aspects of the kill chain, very well."
"One of the most valuable features is all the correlation that it does using AI and machine learning. An example would be alerting on a host and then alerting on other things, like abnormal behavior, that it has noticed coming from the same host. It's valuable because we're a very lean team."
"The core product provides excellent visibility, but my favorite feature is Vectra Recall."
"It's important for us that the user interface is easy to understand and that is the biggest benefit we see from Vectra AI."
"One of the things that we didn't expect to happen was that our network team also jumped on it faster than we thought. In most cases, if it's a security tool that's working on the network part, they can also use it to find out certain flaws that have been in the system. Certain flaws, related to some legacy stuff, were already there for quite a few years, which they couldn't explain at first, but we could explain them based on the timing of certain things."
"Technical support could be improved with quicker response times."
"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."
"If your network is on SolarWinds, and you notice that the traffic is bad because it says "user downloading a heavy file," it doesn't indicate which endpoint is downloading those heavy files. SolarWinds doesn't have the tools to be able to handle this kind of situation. You can just notice through your network device that the traffic is becoming overwhelming or heavy, but you cannot go inside and get more details related to the endpoint where it is happening. We would like SolarWinds to be able to handle this kind of situation and even manage the traffic inside a network from the endpoint to the network device. These would be good enhancements. It is mostly stable. The problem comes only when we want to add another SolarWinds model. SolarWinds has so many models, and sometimes when we want to add other models on the platforms that are reserved for our firm, it freezes. When this happens, we have to create a new VM for that model."
"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."
"There is room for improvement when it comes to the traffic generated by the analyzer and the analysis of that traffic."
"I would like to see more artificial intelligence capabilities."
"SolarWinds' technical support is ok, but it could be faster and more knowledgeable."
"It's scalable, but it could be simplified because it's not completely easy."
"The solution needs to become more proactive. When Vectra AI is the primary solution in an environment - like it is in our case - you must work on response time. We have a small team so response time at endpoint level is vital."
"One area where there's room for improvement is the absence of a comprehensive TCP recording and replay feature."
"We have a lot of system solutions and integrations with system solutions. Vectra is a type of black box. It implements AI-informed detection mechanisms, but we cannot create system detections. I understand that the product is designed this way, but it would be great if we could create our own detections as well."
"The solution has not reduced the security analyst workload in our organization because we still need to SIEM. Unfortunately, while Vectra, for us, is a brilliant tool for network investigations, giving wonderful visibility, it doesn't go the whole way to replace our SIEM that is needed for compliance. So, I still have the same amount of alerting and logging that I did before. It gives us more defined ability to see incidents, but it doesn't give us enough information to satisfy a PCI or 27001 audit."
"Other alternatives, like Darktrace, have a fancier UI."
"It would be commercially beneficial if Vectra AI had something like Darktrace's Antigena Email or something similar to email protection."
"For S&D account scans, it would be easier if Vectra AI could triage with users. If a client uses a lot of accounts, then it could indicate that these accounts are benign, for example. That would help a lot."
"In education as a sector, we are looking at AI a lot in terms of how it can be used as part of the teaching and learning side of things. It would be great to have Vectra AI look at a better way to enhance the security posture related to the AI tools in our portfolio."
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SolarWinds NetFlow Traffic Analyzer is ranked 6th in Network Traffic Analysis (NTA) with 34 reviews while Vectra AI is ranked 2nd in Network Traffic Analysis (NTA) with 40 reviews. SolarWinds NetFlow Traffic Analyzer is rated 7.6, while Vectra AI is rated 8.6. The top reviewer of SolarWinds NetFlow Traffic Analyzer writes "Displays traffic visibility and efficient traffic flows". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Vectra AI writes "Integrates well with other security solutions and provides good technical support". SolarWinds NetFlow Traffic Analyzer is most compared with Cisco Secure Network Analytics, Zabbix, ManageEngine NetFlow Analyzer, SolarWinds NPM and Plixer Scrutinizer, whereas Vectra AI is most compared with Darktrace, ExtraHop Reveal(x), Cisco Secure Network Analytics, Arista NDR and Fortinet FortiOS. See our SolarWinds NetFlow Traffic Analyzer vs. Vectra AI report.
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