We couldn't deploy to the cloud due to compliance requirements. Deploying on-premises was more expensive. It wasn't rocket science. It was pretty straightforward. 

Getting the tools installed was quite straightforward, but getting the visibility we wanted of our network through the tool took a while. I think that it was probably two months before it was complete.

The logical setup is extremely simple. There is also a large body of customization that is simple to deploy thanks to the community bundles that can be downloaded and installed. ExtraHop also has a process called a quick start, which is a week-long engagement where an ExtraHop engineer executes or validates the install and builds a few dashboards to operationalize the most important applications. The process of defining and dashboarding applications can be a bit time consuming to get it just right, but that is normal for deep customization. The more dashboards there are to provide templates, the easier future ones become. Customization can be as complex as one wants to get – even to the point of bubbling up business analytics from the wire data.

The only engineering challenge is the data feed. As I mentioned, the organization where I worked had a Gigamon, which simplified things. A couple of SPAN ports on core data center switches usually gets the majority of the visibility. If there are challenges in getting east-west traffic to the data feed (server to server traffic on the same subnet and hypervisor, for instance) there are numerous approaches to getting those packets; it’s doable but sometimes a bit challenging depending on the architecture of the data center. That isn’t an issue with the platform, though, just a challenge in accessing wire data in general.

The product offers a simple, straightforward setup. It's not overly complex or difficult. 

I was involved in the initial setup and it's very straightforward, it's easy to deploy.

The initial setup was straightforward. You just need to feed it a copy of network traffic and there are no agents or other nonsense.