We didn't look into any of their competitors at the time. It was very early days. We were in the build-up phase. I know some of their competitors and they're more clumsy when it comes to the graphing part. And we didn't want appliances. For us, a company that doesn't operate that many routers, pricing is not a huge deal, which it could be for other companies with thousands and thousands of devices to monitor. For us, it was a very good tradeoff to not have to deal with the on-prem hardware.

We have used open-source options such as NfSen and SolarWinds.

We've checked out Arbor, SolarWinds; you name it, we've tried it. We've had some in-house-developed stuff that we tried for about a year. Kentik really blew everything out of the water.

Arbor had a lot of what we were looking for. The problem is that they quit innovating a decade ago, and their price is ridiculous. Arbor is also device-based. You have to stick a big, massive machine in your network and each of those only supports up to about five devices. We're in an environment where we have hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of core devices. So that obviously wouldn't have scaled.

We looked at Plixer Scrutinizer.

There have been other folks in our company who have tested a variety of things. Prior to Kentik they went through an evaluation phase, from what I understand, and vetted out a variety of solutions. I believe that what made Kentik stand out was pricing and the intuitive user-experience.

We've evaluated almost everything except SiLK.

I am not a part of the purchasing or evaluation in any way. We still use Cacti for general stuff, but Kentik has replaced it on half of our boards so far.