Plixer Scrutinizer Review

Our primary use case is monitoring bandwidth and being able to go back and look at bandwidth issues.

We are on the latest version.

It helps us determine what is going on with our Internet and who is hogging it all up. If we get a real high throughput or a throughput that's going over and getting dropped fairly quickly, we can tell who (or what device) is consuming that traffic. That was our main use case for buying it to start with. Going forward, we will start using it for other stuff too.

We have only had it a couple of months, so we've not really dug into it a lot, but being able to know bandwidth is the main thing.

• Being able to monitor VPN user traffic has been nice. 
• Being able to monitor interfaces, in general. 
• We do a little bit of reporting, but we're just getting into that.

I wish the reporting side was easier to work with, but it does a decent job. I also wish the reporting side was a little more intuitive or they offered more reporting examples.

Their user videos could be a little better. They provided me a couple of training videos, but they were very generic in nature. E.g., if they had training videos specific to Cisco or Palo Alto firewall to give training to show you specifically within Scrutinizer what you could be looking at. They did provide a basic and an advanced training video. However, even the advanced training video doesn't break down into detail, and on the configuration side, that would be nice.

We've had it about two months.

I haven't had any stability issues with it at all. I haven't seen it flake out or experienced database issues.

I'm the only person who maintains and upgrades it.

It is easily scalable. I haven't seen any issues with it.

It is in full production. It monitors several firewalls, like Cisco Firepower, and IPS.

We only have three users who are using this solution as end users. We are all network administrators. It gives anybody within our group the ability to troubleshoot it easier.

The technical support was good.

We have Splunk, but Splunk doesn't give us the type of info that this does. Splunk is really clunky and hard to use. We still have Splunk, but we use it more as a security means for network means.

We have used the free version of PRTG, but that solution was clunky.

It was a pretty straightforward setup. I wouldn't call it complex.

The deployment took about four hours. We still expanding on it though.

I did the deployment.

We have seen ROI.

The solution has helped to reduce the time to resolution for network and/or security events by 50 percent.

There are no extra costs. It's about $8,000 a year. The bang for the buck (cost) is definitely a plus.

They gave us a 30-day license. We did a 30-day demo. We installed it, knowing that if we bought it, we could just add a license and continue on. So, we did a 30-day PoC, and they gave us good support during that time.

The solution has been around for a while. The monitoring of our firewalls was the driving concept for choosing it. They did well with demonstrating that ability.

We evaluated Cisco Stealthwatch, but it was so cost prohibitive that we did not go that route. It was about 10 times more expensive than Scrutinizer. Cisco Stealthwatch was very clunky and use. The menus were very different. While you could get a ton of information, you really had to dig to get it. There was some better features obviously, because the cost is a lot higher. It's more of a security network product, but it was hard to use and cost prohibitive. Also, we saw that its ongoing maintenance to keep it running would be a nightmare. There was a lot you had to do to keep it working correctly.

I would rate it an eight (out of 10).