We performed a comparison between Cisco Secure Network Analytics and Kentik based on real PeerSpot user reviews.
Find out what your peers are saying about Zabbix, Datadog, Auvik and others in Network Monitoring Software."We can manage the entire system across the network and troubleshoot the pain points."
"Cisco Secure Network Analytics has increased the visibility of what is happening in our network, and I think that's the most important reason to use it. We can see what is really happening instead of just looking at numbers from routers or switches."
"It does change the way we troubleshoot and it is relatively easy to use once you learn it. I would recommend it to someone considering it."
"The artifacts available in the tool provide better information for analyzing network traffic. It enables a holistic view of network traffic and general packet analysis. It's easy to identify anomalies without the use of signatures. The way in which we implemented Stealthwatch Cloud has enabled my team to analyze traffic behind proxies."
"The ability to send data flow from other places and have them all in one place is very valuable for us."
"It has been pretty stable since we deployed it, and everything seems to be working fine."
"The most valuable feature is NetFlow. The beginning of any security investigation starts with NetFlow data."
"Cisco Stealthwatch provides the solutions analytics and threat detection capabilities that I am looking for. It has also improved the network visibility of our organization."
"Able to drill down into a center's utilization, then create reports based on it."
"It offers a simple yet powerful feature of classifying applications, going beyond basic statistics."
"I really love the Data Explorer. I use it all the time to go in and craft exactly what I need to see. I'm able to then take that story and explain it to the executives. I've done that a couple of times and it is helpful."
"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."
"Having the API access allows us to do a great deal of automation around a lot of our reporting and management tools."
"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."
"We're pretty happy with the API functionality. It's web, and it's very simple to set up queries. It has served us well and you don't need to be an expert on the API or the product to set these things up."
"The drill-down into detailed views of network activity helps to quickly pinpoint locations and causes. All the information is there."
"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."
"The Wi-Fi side needs improvement."
"One update that I would like to see is an agent-based client. Currently, Stealthwatch is network-based. A local agent could help manage endpoints."
"The visualization could be improved, the GUI is not the best."
"It's not great as a standalone solution."
"Some of our customers find this solution to be a little bit tough because they don't understand how to configure and use it."
"Stealthwatch is still maturing in AI. It uses artificial intelligence for predictions, but AI still needs to mature. It is in a phase where you get 95% correct detection. As its AI engine learns more, it will become more accurate. This is applicable to all the devices that are using AI because they support both supervised and unsupervised machine learning. The accuracy in the case of supervised machine learning is dependent on the data you feed into the box. The accuracy in the case of unsupervised machine learning is dependent on the algorithm. The algorithm matures depending on retrospective learning, and this is how it is able to detect zero-day attacks."
"Its granularity for RBAC roles-based access control needs improvement."
"We need to be able to filter out internal IPs as non-threats."
"It hasn't really improved our direct detection rate but it has definitely reduced our incident response time as we wouldn't have been able to detect threats or immediate risks without this solution."
"I consider the pricing model as an area for improvement."
"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."
"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'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..."
"I would like to see them explore the area of cost analysis."
"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."
"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."
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Cisco Secure Network Analytics is ranked 24th in Network Monitoring Software with 57 reviews while Kentik is ranked 47th in Network Monitoring Software with 12 reviews. Cisco Secure Network Analytics is rated 8.2, while Kentik is rated 9.2. The top reviewer of Cisco Secure Network Analytics writes "Increased the visibility of what is happening in our network". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Kentik writes " Flexibility for creating reports and gaining more visibility is a definite strength". Cisco Secure Network Analytics is most compared with Darktrace, Cisco Secure Cloud Analytics, ThousandEyes, Vectra AI and Arista NDR, whereas Kentik is most compared with ThousandEyes, Arbor DDoS, SolarWinds NPM, NETSCOUT nGeniusONE and Zabbix.
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