We performed a comparison between Kentik and SolarWinds NetFlow Traffic Analyzer 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."
"It offers a simple yet powerful feature of classifying applications, going beyond basic statistics."
"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."
"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 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 drill-down into detailed views of network activity helps to quickly pinpoint locations and causes. All the information is there."
"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."
"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."
"I would rate NetFlow Traffic Analyzer's stability ten out of ten."
"What people found most valuable in SolarWinds NetFlow Traffic Analyzer is its report customization feature."
"As it offers enterprise solutions, it has all the essential features for business."
"For stability, I would give SolarWinds NetFlow Traffic Analyzer a rating of ten out of ten."
"What I like the most is the bandwidth assessment."
"They have instructional videos and other information available on the site to assist you with learning it."
"SolarWinds has improved our organization because whenever a device is down, we get an alert."
"For managing the traffic, it provides you a response about whether the traffic is down, up, or heavy, which is a very powerful feature. It has a good response time. We have been using this solution for many years, and we don't have any problem with this solution."
"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 consider the pricing model as an area for improvement."
"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."
"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 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 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."
"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..."
"Technical support could be improved with quicker response times."
"It does not flow. It cannot do our metric performance monitoring. So it is very limited. They can do it but in a very limited fashion. It is only good for SNMP-based alerts."
"It is very slow to pick the dynamics of the network."
"If your network is on SolarWinds, and you notice that the traffic is bad because it says "user downloading a heavy file," it doesn't indicate which endpoint is downloading those heavy files. SolarWinds doesn't have the tools to be able to handle this kind of situation. You can just notice through your network device that the traffic is becoming overwhelming or heavy, but you cannot go inside and get more details related to the endpoint where it is happening. We would like SolarWinds to be able to handle this kind of situation and even manage the traffic inside a network from the endpoint to the network device. These would be good enhancements. It is mostly stable. The problem comes only when we want to add another SolarWinds model. SolarWinds has so many models, and sometimes when we want to add other models on the platforms that are reserved for our firm, it freezes. When this happens, we have to create a new VM for that model."
"An area for improvement in SolarWinds NetFlow Traffic Analyzer is the dashboarding. The user interface also has room for improvement because it's currently clunky."
"The licensing should be more realistic so that we can adjust the number of nodes according to my needs, rather than in fixed increments."
"It can be complex to set up and configure."
"NTA's documentation for the implementation phase needs some enhancement."
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Kentik is ranked 47th in Network Monitoring Software with 12 reviews while SolarWinds NetFlow Traffic Analyzer is ranked 6th in Network Traffic Analysis (NTA) with 34 reviews. Kentik is rated 9.2, while SolarWinds NetFlow Traffic Analyzer is rated 7.6. 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 NetFlow Traffic Analyzer writes "Displays traffic visibility and efficient traffic flows". Kentik is most compared with ThousandEyes, Arbor DDoS, SolarWinds NPM, NETSCOUT nGeniusONE and Datadog, whereas SolarWinds NetFlow Traffic Analyzer is most compared with ManageEngine NetFlow Analyzer, Cisco Secure Network Analytics, Zabbix, SolarWinds NPM and Darktrace. See our Kentik vs. SolarWinds NetFlow Traffic Analyzer report.
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