NETSCOUT nGeniusONE vs. Riverbed SteelCentral AppResponse
As of April 2019, NETSCOUT nGeniusONE is ranked 12th in Network Monitoring Software with 5 reviews vs Riverbed SteelCentral AppResponse which is ranked 30th in Network Monitoring Software with 1 review. The top reviewer of NETSCOUT nGeniusONE writes "Cuts down on troubleshooting time and response time to actual issues within our network". The top reviewer of Riverbed SteelCentral AppResponse writes "The application response time is user-friendly". NETSCOUT nGeniusONE is most compared with Gigamon, SolarWinds NPM and ExtraHop. Riverbed SteelCentral AppResponse is most compared with SolarWinds NPM, Dynatrace and NETSCOUT nGeniusONE.
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Quotes From Members
We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
Pros | ||
The most important feature is that it permits us to receive alarms if there is an incident within the infrastructure. The feature I love the most is the reporting feature, the MBI (Monitoring Business Intelligence) which permits us to send advanced reports to our customers in PDF format or in Doc format. We also deploy Centreon Map which gives our customers intuitive views of their information system. We are alerted on service impacts and not when something is down. We have saved a lot of time on non-business-hours intervention. What I like most about Centreon is that it is very flexible and customizable, based on the user and/or business needs. Centreon is very flexible when it comes to monitoring parameters. We can use scripts found on the internet or scripts created by our infra/apps team. Also, the data visualization features are very simple and straightforward, yet very informative. I find the product's scalability to be one of the most valuable features since it allows us to add unlimited devices for monitoring and to set up additional polling servers without additional license cost or downtime in our monitoring. The product is available in ISO image format, ready for deployment. Centreon also has a comprehensive guide and documentation that are simple and easy to follow. What we like about it is that, whereas with Nagios, by design, if you have five or six data centers, you have to open five or six web pages to see what's going on, In Centreon, this is all included in one page, a single site, one dashboard. You don't have to jump from one specific dashboard to the other. I really like the filtering capabilities of it. You can easily tell what's critical next to what's okay, the state of the services. It's very easy to get the whole picture quickly. E-mail alert notifications are valuable. | Deep packet inspection is probably the strongest feature. Aside from having the logs that are just on the firewall, we're able to get the traffic as it's going in between, throughout our network. It isolates end sources that are having issues, where we don't have any other tools that would be able to go down to an end-user's computer to find out what's going on. It catches bigger issues on a weekly basis. That's how often we find something big enough that the only reason we know about it is because of the nGeniusONE. The bigger issues are mostly security-type issues: Odd traffic leaving our network or coming into it, that has found its way past a firewall. The biggest benefit is the ability to do low-level packet inspection. When I say packet inspection, I don't mean looking at payload, but just looking at your communication handshakes and the like. It reduces troubleshooting time because you can get a much better view into the communications path between servers, database servers, web servers, and understand what's going on. We are using nGeniusONE to run our bandwidth capacity management reports. In the past, we used to be very reactive, we used to depend a lot on suppliers to tell us which sites are our hot sites, meaning, which have high bandwidth utilization. Now we do this in a much more proactive way and we are moving to a more predictive approach in that aspect, thanks to nGeniusONE. The ability to be able to do detailed traffic analysis such as top-talkers, application-specific monitoring, and understanding them through patterns, is helpful. We're also able to gain an understanding of voice calls, voice traffic, whether we have packet loss in a certain part of the network or jitter or high latency that might be impacting the network. All of those are nice functionalities. | With some APM solutions, it can take a long time to check a periodic report, but you can get all the necessary details quickly with AppResponse. |
Cons | ||
I would like to see a better UI, one which is more responsive. The most important issue is the capability to interconnect with other systems. It already exists for some of them. For example, the Stream Connector is something we use to populate data in another system. This kind of facility for connecting should exist for all products that it makes sense to have connected to a monitoring solution. Centreon needs to improve the granularity of the data as well as the graphical data. It would also be better to if there was improvement to the filtering/grouping system as well as the creation of views. The Home view could be improved by adding customization functions that allow users to change the size of the widgets for a more uniform layout. Centreon technical support is only available during Central European business hours. When it comes to critical business solutions, there should be a 24/7 hotline that customers can rely on. There are improvements that they need to make to their API. When we're using different systems and we want to disable monitoring for a specific server, we still can't do that through the API. That's something that's lacking. This solution lacks service monitoring in the cloud. It is necessary to improve service monitoring of database services in the free version. | There are so many pieces of their product that integrate with one another that perhaps a recommendation for improvement would be some sort of bigger overview and map to help understand how all their pieces integrate together. I'd like to see the nGeniusONE, the nGeniusPULSE, and the OptiView, their three separate products, work a little better together, a little more streamlined. Another thing that would help out is if they packaged the NetFlow monitor into nGeniusONE. Their NetFlow monitor works with nGeniusONE where you can actually get the netflow of pretty much anything you hook it up to. But it's a separate box that you have to buy. If there was a way that could package that into nGeniusONE, it would be a complete package straight out of the box. The GUI has gotten better over time but there could be some improvement in how the GUI is built. It's not intuitive, it's not simple to use. It is probably the only monitoring tool, out of all the ones that I have, that I really need an expert on, an expert from nGenius, a contractor that I have to pay, to manage the tool. And that's because it's simply not easy to use. Netscout needs to focus on making it easier to use. There are so many features that it makes it hard to know it all. You end up paying for things that you don't use and probably don't even need. It might be better if Netscout came up with a modular way to pay for what you're going to use and not pay for all of this "white elephant" without being able to take advantage of all of it. This is a typical thing, but every time they do a major code upgrade, we get hit with some nasty bugs. Some of them literally stop the whole platform from collecting traffic data. They should really do more Q&A on the software stability before release. | They need to better integrate with products and solutions from different vendors. |
Pricing and Cost Advice | ||
The solution is very effective, despite the low price. Open-source solutions like this can be very cost effective for an organization looking for a product that they can quickly implement, as there is no initial cost and there are no license renewal fees. However, it is important to take into consideration some of the related costs that may come along as needed, such as training, support, and product enhancements. I think Centreon's pricing is fair, especially given the criticality of our system. They were cheaper than the other solutions. The licensing terms were pretty straightforward. I believe it was based on the number of hosts. The pricing is acceptable. They only sell four hour slots for support, so if you have just one question, then you need to pay for four hours. Or, you need to wait until you have enough questions to fill those four hours. They are not flexible in this. For more complex tasks, we use prepaid support days and ask Centreon to come onsite. Centreon is an open source product. Thus, there is no need for licensing. It's quite expensive when you use the Enterprise version, but if you compare it to other providers, it's more like a middle-of-the-line product. It's always good to have a price that is lower, but I would say the price is okay because we get very good support and if we have any other issues we can always contact them. There has never been a time when I didn't get help from them. | Their pricing is very competitive with other solutions... But what I like about NETSCOUT's licensing is that it's shared across all their platforms. They don't create a new licensing scheme for every one of their products. So for nGeniusONE, you buy a certain license level, and it works on all of their products. Like any company, we always want better pricing. The pricing is okay, but it's not a cheap solution. When you want to deploy it across an enterprise as large as ours, you go into seven figures. It's not a cheap solution to get out there. If you are able and you are willing to use everything that Netscout provides to you, it's probably a relatively fair price. The problem is that it's such a large and such a complex tool that I'm not sure that many companies would be able to use it entirely, the way it's expected to be used. | The licensing model is expensive compared to its competitors, but the service it gives to your business, and the data quality, means that it's worth it. |
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Top Comparisons | ||
 Compared 37% of the time.  Compared 24% of the time. Compared 11% of the time. |  Compared 22% of the time.  Compared 10% of the time.  Compared 8% of the time. | Compared 13% of the time.  Compared 11% of the time.  Compared 9% of the time. |
Also Known As | ||
| NETSCOUT nGenius, nGeniusONE | OPNET SteelCentral AppResponse, ACE Live, OPNET, AppResponse Xpert | |
Learn | ||
| Centreon | NETSCOUT | Riverbed |
Overview  | ||
| The Centreon solution, based on a free to download Open Source Platform, monitors all critical IT Infrastructure and Applications with real-time dashboards, analytics and insightful alerts that prevent business-impacting downtimes. Since 2005, over 200,000 IT professionals from SMBs and Fortune 500 companies rely on Centreon to guarantee their organization operational performance. | The nGenius Real-Time Monitor software provides you with tools to monitor and display information about your network both historically and in real time. The nGenius Real-Time Monitor software allows you to understand your current network usage and to plan for future needs. It also allows you to proactively troubleshoot problem areas in your network. | AppResponse Xpert is a unique application performance management, monitoring and troubleshooting solution that approaches performance from the end-user's perspective. The solution is a Riverbed OPNET product, and gives a proactive, in-depth analytical view of any application performance issues, whether web-based or non-web based. AppResponse Xpert is flexible, customizable and fully automated, enabling network users to focus on the bigger IT picture, giving business users maximum productivity, and providing end-users with an optimal application experience. |
Offer | ||
Learn more about Centreon | Stay Connected Learn more with NETSCOUT nGeniusONE | Learn more about Riverbed SteelCentral AppResponse |
Sample Customers | ||
| Airbus, Bollore, BT, Canal Plus, Kuehne Nagel, Limagrain, LVMH, Oberthur Technologies, Orange, Darty, Addax Petroleum, Plastic Omnium, Auchan, Valeo, Saint Gobin, Clarins, Hugo Boss, JC Decaux, French Government (Defense, Justice, Environment, Agriculture), OptiComm, Thales, Zeiss. | Cerner Corporation | Gartner, Swiss Post, WestLB, Turner, Samlink, RGIS, NetJets, SITA, Mobistar, Lehigh Valley Health Network, and Trafigura. |
Top Industries | ||
Comms Service Provider22% Energy/Utilities Company18% Financial Services Firm18% Logistics Company15% | Comms Service Provider43% Financial Services Firm19% Government10% Insurance Company5% | Manufacturing Company25% Comms Service Provider23% Healthcare Company18% Government14% |
Find out what your peers are saying about Zabbix, Nagios, SolarWinds and others in Network Monitoring Software. Updated: April 2019.
333,153 professionals have used our research since 2012.
See also NETSCOUT nGeniusONE Reviews, Riverbed SteelCentral AppResponse Reviews, and our list of Best Network Monitoring Software Companies.
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