We performed a comparison between Kentik and SolarWinds Network Device Monitor 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."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"It offers a simple yet powerful feature of classifying applications, going beyond basic statistics."
"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."
"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."
"The most valuable feature of SolarWinds Network Device Monitor is it can alert you when a device is not working."
"The solution and its interface are elaborate and fully integrate all monitored items for easy analysis and troubleshooting."
"Link monitoring is the most valuable feature of this solution."
"The alerts we are getting when we start losing connection access have been helpful."
"The deployment process is quick."
"The product is useful for switches and IP phones."
"The most valuable feature of SolarWinds Network Device Monitor is it shows you the utilization of devices to allow you to take proactive action before something goes down or reaches the saturation point. You can take proactive action to fix the problem before it occurs."
"In terms of general network monitoring features, I find SolarWinds Network Device Monitor very flexible and comfortable to use. The software itself is extremely useful when it comes to monitoring how our data moves between different networks and environments."
"The Wi-Fi side needs improvement."
"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..."
"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."
"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 consider the pricing model as an area for improvement."
"I would like to see them explore the area of cost analysis."
"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."
"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."
"If everything were in the package so that everything was ready to go out of the box, that would be ideal."
"The reporting feature needs improvement because we are unable to configure reports that were included during initial implementation."
"When an organization's network grows, the complexity of the dashboard becomes an area of concern where improvements are required."
"The security could always be improved."
"SolarWinds Network Device Monitor lacks the granularity of other monitoring tools like LiveNX."
"The way they are presenting the map of our devices needs to be improved."
"The security needs improvement, which is why we are moving away from Solar Winds. We have security concerns."
"There is no mobile version of this product, and our team should be able to access it using a mobile device."
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Kentik is ranked 47th in Network Monitoring Software with 12 reviews while SolarWinds Network Device Monitor is ranked 42nd in Network Monitoring Software with 16 reviews. Kentik is rated 9.2, while SolarWinds Network Device Monitor is rated 7.8. 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 Network Device Monitor writes "An elaborate solution that fully integrates for easy monitoring and troubleshooting". Kentik is most compared with ThousandEyes, Arbor DDoS, SolarWinds NPM, NETSCOUT nGeniusONE and Datadog, whereas SolarWinds Network Device Monitor is most compared with FortiMonitor, IBM SevOne Network Performance Management (NPM), ThousandEyes, Auvik Network Management (ANM) and ScienceLogic.
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