We performed a comparison between Kentik and Opmantek NMIS 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."
"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."
"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 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."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"Having the API access allows us to do a great deal of automation around a lot of our reporting and management tools."
"In my case, I prefer to only poll interfaces that have descriptions, and the ones that don't have descriptions, I don't really want to know about them. It does allow for all these bits and pieces and adjustments, and fine tuning to get it to a point where it works for my needs."
"The big thing is the event management engine, which is really, really nice to use, and it comes at a reasonable price, unlike some of the competitors like Netcool from IBM. Those kinds of tools are hugely expensive and they come as resource-heavy types of solutions. This obviously doesn't require as much hardware, but it does offer similar benefits where you can manage all the events."
"It does have different modules, so you can extend the solution as you need it, or get as little as you need in the beginning, so you don't have to buy a full set of modules. You just buy what you need and expand later on."
"It allows for variable polling times of devices on the network. Because it's all in text, in general, that obviously makes it easier from the automation perspective as well, to modify configuration on the fly, using Puppet and those kind of tools."
"The installer itself is basically something that can be used as a no-questions-asked type of installer. I can use it with automation tools like Chef and Puppet. I don't have to answer some random questions. I can worry about all that stuff later on in the configuration."
"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."
"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."
"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 consider the pricing model as an area for improvement."
"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."
"I would like to see them explore the area of cost analysis."
"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."
"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."
"These kinds of solutions are more node- or device-based solutions. It would be nice in the future if they could be more data-oriented, so it would be easier for me to pull different stats based on ad-hoc requirements; but in a big, centralized database where I can pull specific things, and mix and match the way I want to."
Earn 20 points
Kentik is ranked 47th in Network Monitoring Software with 12 reviews while Opmantek NMIS is ranked 82nd in Network Monitoring Software. Kentik is rated 9.2, while Opmantek NMIS is rated 9.0. 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 Opmantek NMIS writes "Flexible device polling times and extensible modules are key features for me". Kentik is most compared with ThousandEyes, Arbor DDoS, SolarWinds NPM, NETSCOUT nGeniusONE and Datadog, whereas Opmantek NMIS is most compared with Zabbix and PRTG Network Monitor.
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