We performed a comparison between SolarWinds NPM and Wireshark 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."
"The initial setup is easy."
"The solution is easy to install and it takes a couple of hours."
"The ability to quickly identify downtime is the most valuable."
"All the features are very good. The monitoring of the equipment, the configuration manager, and the IP address monitoring are great."
"The most important feature is reporting. The reports that are generated are useful and they save a lot of time with respect to monitoring."
"The initial setup was straightforward. We deployed the solution from new and completed the upgrades."
"I believe the ease of setup and use, including everything, from the initial installation to the discovery of devices is the most valuable."
"I love the GUI. Almost everything is accessible through the web interface. It is very user-friendly. It is easy to drag and drop resources wherever you want them."
"The product is simple to implement."
"Being able to dissect email data and figure out what is inside email messages was the most valuable feature. Such a feature is pretty helpful for an ongoing forensic investigation or when there is a potential insider threat that you are trying to investigate. It allows you to see the network activity of the users you are investigating. It also gives you more visibility into your network. It was very easy to set up. There is a lot of information out there on Google and YouTube about how to use it. There is also community support. If you have any trouble, it is pretty easy to find an answer online. You will have to do some digging only if you have a very specific use case."
"It is a stable product. I would rate the stability a ten out of ten."
"It gives us the ability to pinpoint problems and to communicate network problems with software and hardware vendors."
"The transmission and reception issues are valuable."
"I can save the traffic and analysis when I want to. Also, it's especially helpful to follow the stream (TCP, UDP, etc.)."
"The filter option provided by Wireshark is its most valuable feature...Scalability-wise, I rate the solution a ten out of ten."
"Wireshark is very user-friendly; even someone with basic IT knowledge can use it."
"The Wi-Fi side needs improvement."
"Fortigate firewalls are one example of a product that we are unable to monitor properly via SolarWinds NPM."
"SolarWinds could offer more support and insights for a broader range of devices. Currently, it focuses on routers, switches, and some load balancers. However, it lacks an out-of-the-box dashboard for monitoring firewalls and some other modern network security devices. We have to customize it a lot."
"The solution could improve in many areas, such as the marketing and description of the products, providing areas of improvement, cloud capabilities, and being able to be more streamlined with the current integration points with other applications."
"It is difficult for stakeholders to translate technical requirements, which results in difficulties selecting a platform or implementing a solution."
"The only thing that can be improved is to continually add to the existing capabilities of the product."
"An area for improvement in SolarWinds NPM is the short retention period. Currently, it's just for seven days of data, which is very low, making it hard for my organization to keep that data. SolarWinds recommended a seven-day retention period, but my organization needs a fourteen-day data retention period. Hence, I'd like an increase in the retention period or the database limit in SolarWinds NPM because you can't go back to the data for any investigation if seven days have passed. Another area for improvement in SolarWinds NPM is the database, which needs to be a bit more mature. I want a modified database in the next release of SolarWinds NPM. I'd also like more options added to groups because, currently, it's very limited."
"We also had to be attentive to vulnerabilities, because SolarWinds NPM have some issues in that area. We had to work with our security team, so that they could help us check and backup the data, and check what they needed to secure."
"Better offline license management. I’ve had to get in touch with customer support several times simply to remove an expired license from our NPM servers."
"In the future, it would be nice to see color coding. It is just black and white."
"With Wireshark, you cannot download and utilize the packet in automation."
"Its user interface was a little less friendly. They can make its user interface a little bit more friendly. It is for technical people, and most of the technical people would be able to figure it out, but it would be good to improve its user interface. They can maybe build artificial intelligence into it. Currently, it takes a lot of manpower to analyze and dissect all the data."
"It needs the ability to follow multiple interfaces for specific traffic from different network zones/virtual networks. It would help to understand how any packet is going through the network."
"I wish the filters were a little bit more prepopulated."
"Wireshark gets stuck when it is a larger file."
"The average person would probably find Wireshark hard to use. When I first installed it, I was overwhelmed by all the data it was shooting out. It doesn't make sense until you start doing some research and figure out what everything means. It isn't the most user-friendly tool. It just provides so much information."
"Big trace files (more than 1,000,000 packets) can be slow, but then you can use "TraceWrangler" (also free) to help with slicing and dicing the data."
SolarWinds NPM is ranked 4th in Network Monitoring Software with 147 reviews while Wireshark is ranked 3rd in Network Troubleshooting with 61 reviews. SolarWinds NPM is rated 8.2, while Wireshark is rated 9.0. The top reviewer of SolarWinds NPM writes "High-level, comprehensive, and proactive monitoring in a user-friendly interface". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Wireshark writes "User-friendly with an easy setup and a nice interface". SolarWinds NPM is most compared with Zabbix, PRTG Network Monitor, ManageEngine OpManager, ThousandEyes and HPE OneView, whereas Wireshark is most compared with Zabbix, Nagios XI, ClearSight Analyzer, Microsoft Network Monitor and Colasoft Capsa.
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