We performed a comparison between NETSCOUT nGeniusONE and SolarWinds NPM 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 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."
"This solution provides us with increased visibility while conducting IT deployments. E.g., if we have devices which have overloaded or links which have saturated, then this tool tells us exactly what is going on with that link or device. Very few tools do it at this level for things like DDoS."
"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."
"The stability of this product is ok."
"For me, the most valuable features are the dashboards which we use to highlight the overall impact to the customers, and being able to drill down into the nitty-gritty of the customer experience."
"The packet capture is the most valuable feature for us. It gathers data from the device. In case somebody has a problem, I can go back X amount of time - days, hours - and get the data to do real troubleshooting."
"If a lot of traffic from one site is hitting AWS Cloud or the data center, then we want to know which client is utilizing the most bandwidth. We will work with nGeniusONE to troubleshoot the issue."
"Stability-wise, I rate the solution a ten out of ten."
"It gives us a map of the network setup and one console to see the entire network."
"We had some interfaces where the SFP Ports were having some problems after a while. We found which of the SFP Ports was having the error and changed it, so the bandwidth become okay."
"I like that SolarWinds NPM is a strong tool for monitoring network devices, switches, and routers. It's also a user-friendly tool. My team also likes how scalable it is."
"As we look to add more servers to our virtual environment and to understand the impact, the solution allows us to dig into the historical charts related to capacity planning."
"We have configured multiple alerts for our network devices, including routers and switches, so that we are notified if any interface goes down."
"We found that it was easy to operate, and it was simple if anyone has entry-level working experience or even if someone is not experienced."
"Network performance is the main issue clients are facing. SolarWinds checks if a node is down, and we can set thresholds for performance metrics. For example, we set it up to get an alert automatically if a value is over 80 percent. It has a full dashboard that covers CP, hard disk, and node monitoring."
"It did a good job of the collection and then an investigation of the net flow of information for understanding the applications that were being used at certain locations."
"The Wi-Fi side needs improvement."
"The technical support could improve a bit with quicker responses for early on questions. What I think are simple questions are taking a long time to get answers to."
"The GUI has gotten better over time but there could be some improvement in how the GUI is built."
"The solution is not easy to install."
"For individual subscriber tracings, sometimes it does not capture all the messages. There is a little bit of room for improvement there."
"I would like to see improvement in the user experience. It's hard to manage it. We need a dedicated, highly-qualified person, compared to similar tools. Obviously, it's in a higher bracket, salary-wise. That's something the NETSCOUT team needs to focus on. It's a completely niche-skill technology, where we need to have the skills to manage, maintain, and deploy it."
"The initial deployment is tedious and requires a lot of build, deployment and configuration time. Experience is key to a successful deployment."
"The scalability needs some work. From a probe perspective, we are limited to a certain amount of throughput on the devices themselves. Without having actual hooks into the bare metal hardware for the solutions, it's a bit of a "thumb in the air" as to when we hit our capacity or when our high watermark is."
"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."
"If they’re going for a “cover everything” approach, then they need to do so and enable a bit more of the "cover everything approach" within every one of the tools."
"The price of the solution can be improved."
"I would like to have a Syslog server module for this product. That would make the solution better."
"The SolarWinds notification and alerting configuration could be simplified as it would be easier to find if it was within the NPM web application instead of in a separate client application."
"This product could improve by adding cloud monitoring. I want SolarWinds NPM to do much more integration, and have more involvement in cloud monitoring, like AWS or Google, or Azure. I feel like it requires lots of improvement for cloud monitoring in NPM."
"Complex and overly detailed setup."
"SolarWinds needs to be improved such that it is on par with the leading products in the market."
"I would like to see some enhancement on the reporting side, such as making it a little bit easier to create reports or having a larger assortment of canned reports."
NETSCOUT nGeniusONE is ranked 27th in Network Monitoring Software with 47 reviews while SolarWinds NPM is ranked 4th in Network Monitoring Software with 146 reviews. NETSCOUT nGeniusONE is rated 8.2, while SolarWinds NPM is rated 8.2. The top reviewer of NETSCOUT nGeniusONE writes "We use it every day for the triaging of events, saving us a lot of time". On the other hand, the top reviewer of SolarWinds NPM writes "High-level, comprehensive, and proactive monitoring in a user-friendly interface". NETSCOUT nGeniusONE is most compared with Gigamon Deep Observability Pipeline, Dynatrace, ThousandEyes, AppDynamics and Pico Corvil Analytics, whereas SolarWinds NPM is most compared with Zabbix, PRTG Network Monitor, ManageEngine OpManager and ThousandEyes. See our NETSCOUT nGeniusONE vs. SolarWinds NPM report.
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SolarWinds NPM and nGenius One are very different in nature and capabilities.
SolarWinds NPM has a wide range of capabilities to monitor the availability of network devices and services, track network paths (by active testing).
nGenius One is more of a traffic visibility solution that captures traffic and shows the characteristics of the conversations going through the network (including the network and end-user performance).
If you are looking at the second, you certainly want to look at Accedian's Skylight which offers a massive advantage when it comes to performance visibility!
Although both products can overlap in what information they provide, nGenius One primarily uses packets from the network to monitor application performance and excels at deep packet analysis. SolarWinds primarily gathers data from SNMP, WMI, Netflow and other metrics to monitor the status of equipment (up, down, temperature, interface data, etc) as well as providing application performance statistics.
Common aspects of Solarwinds NPM and NetScout - Provide information pertaining to the network - latency, response time, the path taken, traffic info
Key differences - Use of different techniques - SNMP vs Packet capture
SNMP may give you added information like node status, hardware health, performance statistics, device-level information Packet capture may give you added information like TCP retransmissions, packet loss.
Solarwinds will rely on SNMP configuration on a device to send status, statistics and discovery using Polling as well as send Traps on specific incidents NetScout will rely on various port mirror taps into the network where the traffic needs to be analyzed in detail.
Skills required for Solarwinds are fairly minimum (maybe just understanding how SNMP works - polling & traps while NetScout skills will need you to master TCP/IP communication with details of the packet fields - source IP, dest IP, source port, dest port, various flags, etc.
From my experience, I would suggest PRTG Network Monitor over both instead of getting into details as to which one of NETSCOUT and Solarwinds is better. Both Solarwinds and NETSCOUT are expensive. NETSCOUNT is into loggerheads with Gartner report. Gartner rate Solarwinds well and PRTG Network Monitor is as good or even better than Solarwinds but far less expensive. I would recommend evaluating PRTG Network Monitor also to assess its suitability to meet your requirements.