We performed a comparison between Kentik 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 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 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."
"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."
"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."
"The drill-down into detailed views of network activity helps to quickly pinpoint locations and causes. All the information is there."
"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."
"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."
"I can do everything remotely, including running PowerShell scripts or performing standard updates."
"Can easily be interconnected with other management systems."
"The solution is very user-friendly."
"It covers everything from end to end, from the standpoint of endpoint machines and the routers and switches. The switch port also comes there."
"Technical support is very helpful with our upgrades."
"The solution is stable and reliable."
"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."
"The most valuable features in SolarWinds NPM are the network search and diagnostic tools."
"The Wi-Fi side needs improvement."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"I would like to see them explore the area of cost analysis."
"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."
"The integration needs to be improved."
"The solution could be more secure."
"The scalability can be better."
"If they did some type of synthetic monitoring, it would have been better."
"The SolarWinds notification and alerting configuration could be simplified as it would be easier to find if it was within the NPM web application instead of in a separate client application."
"They need to work on their automation and automatically discover devices. They are not very good at automatically discovering devices."
"The solution needs to integrate with additional SDN technologies that are part of the hyper market."
"Robustness of network element mapping tool could be better"
Kentik is ranked 47th in Network Monitoring Software with 12 reviews while SolarWinds NPM is ranked 4th in Network Monitoring Software with 147 reviews. Kentik is rated 9.2, while SolarWinds NPM 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 SolarWinds NPM writes "High-level, comprehensive, and proactive monitoring in a user-friendly interface". Kentik is most compared with ThousandEyes, Arbor DDoS, NETSCOUT nGeniusONE, Datadog and Observer GigaStor, whereas SolarWinds NPM is most compared with Zabbix, PRTG Network Monitor, ManageEngine OpManager, ThousandEyes and Entuity. See our Kentik vs. SolarWinds NPM report.
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