We performed a comparison between DX Spectrum, LinkRunner, and Wireshark based on real PeerSpot user reviews.
Find out what your peers are saying about NetAlly, Wireshark, Auvik and others in Network Troubleshooting."The fault management is perfect."
"The most valuable feature is the ability to put health checks in place not only for the infrastructure but for some of the services that are on top of the infrastructure."
"The quick notification of issues, quick alerting because timeliness is always valuable, it's very important for us."
"It helps our NetOps group actually handle alarms in a way that lets them see the bigger picture of those alarms, and how they might affect our services. It helps us communicate information about the network state better to services that might be impacted by a specific network condition."
"We were able to standardize the internal processes across all internal departments, resulting in almost an elimination of non-standard process flows through our organization."
"It does correlation so instead of producing 20 alarms if a site goes down, it only creates one."
"Spectrum is very useful for us, because the product lets us monitor and control all the various components of our infrastructure that support our business from an IT perspective."
"All networks (or network equipment) are monitored through CA Spectrum."
"In terms of network validation, and copper and fiber Ethernet configuration, I can't imagine life without LinkRunner devices. The minute I got the 10G, everybody was fighting over it. They had never used such a device before and it was just breathtaking for them to very quickly see the validation you can gain from these devices."
"LinkRunner 10G is very handy for onsite troubleshooting and implementations. We can quickly identify the links in terms of 1G, 2.5G, 5G, and 10G on the copper side, and also from 1G up to 10G on the fiber side. It is very handy for me because we deal with a lot of banks. Especially for the provisioning of new services, we use this tool to identify the link capacity and do the necessary testing to ensure all the circuits are ready before the handover to the next team to operate the technology. This is something that saves a lot of time as compared to the old days."
"In terms of documenting ad hoc additions and other changes to wired ethernet connections, this product is very good. It keeps the information in the cloud and I have the ability to name it. This makes it very nice and easy to see."
"It is fast in providing results. It is pretty accurate."
"Having the results sent directly, via email, from the LinkRunner itself makes it really great for logging different things that you're trying to document within your organization. You can have a paper trail of what your organization has as far as infrastructure goes."
"Performance testing is the most valuable feature. It gives a brief summary of the information we're looking at, such as latency, jitter, and the available throughput."
"It provides a way to test 10Gig connectivity. Previously, we had to hook up a switch. That was our only way. Now, with LinkRunner, we can test on the fly if an SFP is bad or if the switch has the right configuration on it."
"I like the fact that I can tell the equipment to stop at a certain point during the test of a cable, to see whether or not there is basic connectivity. I can stop it before it starts pinging the outside world, such as Google or, perhaps, our core network switch. Those basic results—do I have a basic connection and power—finish up fast and I can move on."
"I can save the traffic and analysis when I want to. Also, it's especially helpful to follow the stream (TCP, UDP, etc.)."
"Wireshark's best feature is that it's adaptive, which means it's the go-to tool for network-related developers."
"It has good basic features."
"I find Wireshark a very useful tool. Its best feature is that it allows me to deeply understand what's going on at the packet level, as well as any adverse signatures that I can analyze. When I need to create an IPS rule, I need to check the traffic deeply to get more insights about the actual traffic, what's the name of certain flags, etc., and I'm able to do all that through Wireshark. The tool is also user-friendly."
"Wireshark helps us to understand network traffic."
"Wireshark is very user-friendly; even someone with basic IT knowledge can use it."
"The transmission and reception issues are valuable."
"It is a stable product. I would rate the stability a ten out of ten."
"The visual is a little archaic."
"Make it easier to certify devices."
"We have had one support issue that's been open for a couple of months, and it is currently open."
"If the integration is simplified or improved, it will be a unique selling point in comparison to the competition on the market."
"DX Spectrum could be improved by them getting rid of the Java console. It would also be better with Turkish language support."
"It doesn’t give you performance metrics: You need CA eHealth for this."
"It needs better integration with other CA products."
"The upgrade process could be smoother. More of the steps around upgrading could be automated."
"It runs tests quickly, but it takes a while to boot up. It's somewhat disappointing that LinkRunner takes some time to turn on. When I arrive in the space, I usually spend the first two minutes waiting."
"I wish they had software that could create continuous streams of traffic. I'm not sure if that's possible with LinkRunner, but it would be very helpful in some of the test case scenarios that clients are looking for, in regards to quality of service"
"It's a little bit tough getting used to at first, but once you get the hang of it, and once you start using it more, like anything, it gets easier. The difficult part, at first, is knowing where to find each test and how to use the tests."
"It is very stable. That being said, there is one feature that is not quite as stable as the rest of the product. You can leave it plugged into a location where you're doing some work and connect to it remotely by a program called VNC... sometimes that function breaks down, if you've been running for a couple of days... if you're remotely controlling it, you're probably not right next to it. That can be modestly annoying."
"They should allow firmware updates even if you don't have an AllyCare contract. I'm in a situation right now where they've released firmware for bug fixes, but we cannot access those, which makes the device almost useless. You almost want to just throw it out the window because they're not supporting their product unless you have an AllyCare contract."
"A feature that I would like to see is the ability to send a tone down the cable. That would be great. I have to use a separate tool for that. If I'm trying to troubleshoot a cable that is not plugged into a network switch, I need the ability to tone."
"Being really nitpicky about the LinkRunner G2, I wish the form factor was a little bit smaller. However, I'm sure that the size of the unit is compromised by the fact that the battery is large. If that were to mean having less battery life, I would not change it."
"One of the things I'd like to see in future versions of LinkRunner is a wireless dongle embedded into the product so that I don't need to have a separate wireless dongle. It should be built into that."
"DNS could be improved."
"Wireshark could be improved by adding more monitoring features."
"Wireshark is similar to an OS defense tool, meaning that it runs on an OS such as Ubuntu and Fedora, but I'm unsure if it's compatible with Windows or if it's a straightforward process to run it on Windows. Right now, my team needs to run Wireshark from a dongle to use it, so it's an OS-dependable tool, and that's an area for improvement. I was unable to use Wireshark on Windows, and I couldn't capture it, as I'm unsure how to configure the wireless card into monitoring mode on Windows. The process was straightforward on Linux, but it wasn't the case on Windows OS. It seems Wireshark isn't compatible with all OS. For example, you can analyze the log, and you can analyze it on the Windows server, but you can't do a capture in Windows. Configuring Wireshark for Windows isn't as easy as configuring it for Linux."
"Big trace files (more than 1,000,000 packets) can be slow, but then you can use "TraceWrangler" (also free) to help with slicing and dicing the data."
"Wireshark is restricted when any sort of encryption is involved, such as XSL encryption or DLX."
"We would like the product to be developed so that it doesn't rely on internet access for installation. We would like to see all of the components required to be integrated into the installer."
"There is a disadvantage when it comes to sampling intervals. Additionally, I've heard from a colleague that Wireshark might be less effective in the voice domain."
"The system could be improved upon by adding a better and more powerful data processing engine."
