When I was first hired on, we had one InfiniStream. We've had those ever since.

We were using a different vendor product (Riverbed Cascade) before nGeniusONE. After the nGeniusONE implementation, the time to resolve a ticket and the time to identify an issue were pretty quick. With nGeniusONE implemented on all 150 of our sites, we now have real-time packet collection, a probe on all our sites that collects the data, and historical data for the past three months that can be graphically represented. These are all advantages compared to our previous solution.

We found nGeniusONE gave us more visibility for application and performance management than Riverbed.

We used a solution by SolarWinds, and we also used a solution by another provider. We realized we needed to change when we had a distributed denial of services attack that spanned greater than one gig.

Our move to a new solution was based on the user reports we get. When we heard about traces not being available or tools being unreliable, we started looking at different vendors. 

We had NETSCOUT before and switched to another vendor, The Now Factory, which has since been acquired by IBM. The user feedback was pretty immediate. We switched to that solution, and within six months it was very clear that it wasn't the right path and we actually switched back to NETSCOUT for a lot of our network monitoring needs.

Prior to this, we were just using Wireshark on laptops. We did have a product called GigaStor which we're using, but we've had a lot of issues with the stability of the product. It tends to crash, it's just not very usable.

Before NETSCOUT we were in the "prehistoric era" and we were not using another tool. NETSCOUT was the first tool that we started using for this purpose.

In our company, I know we have other tools, but as a network monitor, for the port situation, per node, I don't know what else was used.

nGeniusONE is the first solution we have used in this area.

We've had NETSCOUT so long I can't even remember what previous solution we had. We did have a couple of areas where we had Riverbed Technology but we are phasing that out.

I can't remember the name of it, but it pretty much gave us packet flow and some type of visibility into them, but it was so spotty that it wasn't reliable. They had that solution in place for about eight years, but because it was so unreliable as far as getting the actual traffic that you wanted to see, and getting the information that you were trying to get out of it, that nobody really used it.

From what I understand from the people who were using the previous solution before I got here, when they got it set up people tried to use it and it was kind of a mess and the workflow going through it was just not very well thought out. Once you finally got into it, you could see some stuff, but you couldn't ever see, what you were trying to find. People just gave up on it and it sat there. They renewed the contract on it once and when that contract expired we started looking around and we came across NETSCOUT.

I know when they ended up getting the nGeniusONE, the main reason they got it was for the actual packet inspection. We originally had it set up on the outside of our edge firewall to get visibility into all the traffic that was coming in before the firewall blocked it. A lot of the firewalls at the time wouldn't give us that information. So we'd block traffic, but we could only see some of it, and if we were getting a DDoS attack on it, we wouldn't see everything that came through. That was one of the main reasons that they wanted the nGeniusONE, to see all that information.

We've since repurposed it from that, after we realized what kind of traffic we were seeing and where it was coming from. We were able to mitigate a lot of that and we don't have the effects of the DDoS attacks like we used to. So instead of monitoring a little bit of our inside and everything coming in, we've turned the nGeniusONE to monitor everything within our network, not really caring about anything trying to come in anymore because we've upgraded our firewalls as well. It's actually getting us a lot more functionality now than it did three years ago. It's been nice that we've been able to repurpose it, and doing that has actually been pretty easy.

I worked with PoleStar. It's also another competitive product.

PoleStar tells you what you want to hear. NETSCOUT gives you the truth, whether it's good or bad. 

Polestar will give you what you want to hear. It's not that reliable. Also, NETSCOUT has its own hardware ports, while Polestar uses a lot of third-party products.

We didn't have a previous solution at all, other than Wireshark to capture packets when we needed them. We knew we needed something better than that.

We did not have another solution previously.

Previously we were using Tektronix, and that became NETSCOUT. We took nGeniusONE to improve our ability to detect issues. We were mainly working with a tracing system and nGeniusONE brought us more network visibility, with KPIs based on the network itself, and on the traffic in the network.

We've actually had NETSCOUT for a long time, but originally it was implemented as a security tool, pre- and post-firewall, to just monitor traffic that way, to see how effective it was.

Now that firewalls have improved, and we use Check Point for that, it's been transitioned to the network team - to where I am - and now we're just using it as an NPM-type solution. It didn't really come in as a replacement. It was more, "Here are some assets that we want to use for network performance," so we're learning how to use it and deploy it better.

I don't know how they came to the decision to use NETSCOUT five years ago, but we kept it because we've had an investment with them.

We did have a different solution in place before. We reviewed a couple of vendors and ended up with NETSCOUT after doing a PoC in our environment.

We have previously made use of nMetrics, Spyke and older versions of the Netscout product range and still make use of ExtraHop Reveal (x).

We do however try to fit the need of the customer to the best solution and the vendor they prefer.

We wanted visibility that we did not have with our tools at the time. We had an Ericsson type solution, which we added this solution to.

The biggest reason for the switch that we're going through right now is that it is a Solaris box running old C++ code. That definitely needs to be replaced, as that technology is dead. This is more of solidifying a two-vendor solution to make life easier for people working on troubleshooting.

The main driver was VoLTE, but also getting to a single pane of glass, so that we can have one tool to monitor end-to-end performance. Before nGeniusONE we used Empirix and we still have that solution in place today for some things.

We knew we needed to invest in a new solution because we couldn't fix things.

We previously used SolarWinds Netflow Traffic Analyzer, and switched because Netscout is more granular.

We've been using TruView. We've known for a while that we would need to switch because it was an old Fluke Networks product which was bought by or moved to NETSCOUT. We knew at some point in time it was going end-of-life. We need to keep it up and running for as long as possible, at least another two or three years, until the end of the contract, and see how long it lasts after that. Slowly but surely we'll migrate to nGeniusONE as we expand visibility.