NETSCOUT nGeniusONE Reviews

This is our traffic analyzer replacement. We use it to provide some functionality for our operations to do live captures so they can manage instant management.

The big features we use are definitely the packet capture function, NetFlow collection, and the UC analyzer to monitor real-time communication in our environment.

This is a typical thing, but every time they do a major code upgrade, we get hit with some nasty bugs. Some of them literally stop the whole platform from collecting traffic data. They should really do more Q&A on software stability before release.

Other than those bugs I mentioned, we haven't encountered any issues with stability. The system has been rock solid. It's just stable.

As far as we can see, the scalability issue is mostly that we need to spend more time to tune the software to understand our environment a little better. Other than that, we haven't found any scalability issues. Scalability is related to the hardware sizing and I think we did a pretty good job on that front.

The tech support team has been helpful. They are easy to engage and they're willing to engage the resources that we need to communicate with. I have no complaint about 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.

The initial setup was a little simpler than what we have with NETSCOUT now, because our environment grew.

We evaluated NIKSUN but the accounting was way worse than what we have with NETSCOUT.

You need to spend some time to make the system to fit into your environment. Once you get it there, it works pretty well.

I give it a nine out of ten. It's only to the point that we still need to do some feature requests for things we want to do. The toolset was there but, initially, it wasn't GUI-based, so it took some time for them to implement that.

Most of the time, the use case is if, for example, the network is slow or an application is slow and you don't know why, and you need something to look for the root cause of the problem. With NETSCOUT, it's very easy to check where the problem is located. You can uncover if it is in the network or the application or the server.

It's easy to use and easy to pinpoint where the problems are if ever something is slow. 

Most of the time the customers are complaining that the system is slow and you need to know why something is slow. It will give you insight into the underlying issue, which is very helpful.

The installation process is straightforward. 

Technical support is very good.

The solution could do more for security. It should offer more security-related features. 

We have had NETSCOUT for a long time. In the past, it was part of Fluke Networks, and then Fluke Networks was bought by NETSCOUT. Then, we were working together with NETSCOUT,  acting as a reseller for NETSCOUT solutions. We have been working with them for more than 10 years and of course before that, with Fluke Networks.

Technical support has been good. They do not need to improve it. We've been satisfied with the level of service on offer. 

The initial setup is very straightforward. It's not overly complex or difficult. I found the process to be very simple. 

It's a hybrid solution. You can use both cloud and on-premises deployment models. 

We are not the users of this solution. Rather, we are the reseller. We are a local reseller for these kinds of products within Belgium. We also have a company in the Netherlands, it's for the Benelux region. We have customers in Benelux and we are acting as a reseller and we sell the solutions and the support which we do ourselves. For me personally, I'm located in Belgium. I handle the Belgium market and Luxembourg, however, I have colleagues in the Netherlands and they do the Netherlands market.

I'd rate the solution at an eight out of ten. I've been pretty pleased with its capabilities overall.

I would recommend the solution to other users and organizations.

This solution has been implemented at banks and retailers to focus on network-based application performance management.

Aligning the solution with a visibility layer (taps, aggregation taps, and packet brokers - Ixia and Cubro), NMs system (Sintrex) we were able to deliver information relating to various applications and their behaviour.

Creating an environment where you triage a problem quickly and provide valuable information allows for improved MTTR.

This allows for a cross-silo approach, enhanced visibility, which enhances IT to better service the business.

We have partnered with Netscout over many years with various solutions - TruView, nGeniusOne, Infinistream, XG, etc.

With the focus on customer-defined applications and triggers we have been able to provide important information to clients regarding their application performance.

It has played an integral part in providing valuable information in a critical arena.

The ability to use pre-defined applications and configure client-specific applications allows for a comprehensive solution that enables all teams within the IT organization.

The combination of triggers with the ability to generate alarms.

The ability of the dashboards is useful for discover, mapping and understanding of application behaviour.

The ability to define client-specific applications.

If required, you can view up to a millisecond of what the behavior of the application is.

The ability to give insight into assigning the problem, with relevant information, to the correct team.

Detailed reporting that can be built with various perspectives and metrics.

Various dashboards can be built to service various applications or security teams.

The initial deployment is tedious and requires a lot of build, deployment and configuration time. Experience is key to a successful deployment.

It is critical to work with the network team to understand how the data flows across the estate to ensure that you tap, aggregate, de-capsulate, de-crypt, and de-duplicate correctly.

From these points, you need to ensure that the logical strategy and configuration suits the correct reporting and visibility as to ensure that you get the most out of any potential logical context.

It is also important to ensure that you spend time to understand the applications you want to profile and work with the application owners to ensure that everything is aligned correctly.

We have been using this solution at multiple clients for many years.

In general, the stability is good, but we have had one or two incidents where specialized support was required.

The solution can scale in most directions, bandwidth, hardware, virtual taps, etc.

We have a good relationship with the vendor. They are always willing to help, but due to the complexity of the environment solving problems can take some time.

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.

Initial setup and configuration is complex and tedious and requires a methodical approach with experienced engineers.

For complex implementations, we rely on the vendor for more support.

The return on investment is directly linked to the deployment, configuration, and management of the solution.

If you make it a priority, you will experience good ROI.

It is important to spread the cost across the various IT silos as this solution works as an umbrella to provide information to all teams.

Try to target major aggregation points in your network to deliver the best potential data to the solution. You can from that point start to target specific areas to resolve specific issues or gain particular insight into certain areas.

Do not forget applications traverse North-South as well as East-West and in layers of those. Think about your typical WAN breakout, Layer 2 connections, Virtualized environments, and servers supported by back-to-back connections (eg. web server supported by DB server, with a direct connection).

Sintrex Flow Module, ExtraHop Reveal (x) - the reason we went with nGeniusOne was because the client has that they require a specific solutiion that NetScout answers, already deployed other Netscout solutions or that they had a specific function in mind (eg. InfiniStream tagging)

It is always important to understand the problems you are trying to solve, what insight you are trying to gain and that this is a solution for the business, not just a specific IT silo or team. 

We use this to investigate various network anomalies, application performance issues, and anything that somebody can't seem to solve in our environment.

As the network team, we get engaged when somebody having a problem with an application, and they have run into so many walls that they've come to us. The network team typically manages this from top to bottom, so we use it to troubleshoot.

This solution helps us get to the root cause. Most recently, we had a third-party vendor who was experiencing trouble. They said it was our problem, trying to determine if something was wrong with the SSL connection. They spent some time looking at it, like days or weeks even looking at this.  When they came to us, and said “Can you get a packet capture? Can you tell us what is going on?” We were able to identify it in about a minute.

We use this solution for unified communication application performance. It help us with uptime and eases our experience. There are user experiences that we've been able to get to the root cause of very quickly using their tools. We have found QoS mismatch and different anomalies in the QoS configuration. We have used this to troubleshoot and find issues, where we could explain exactly why a client was behaving the way it was. It might not be necessarily security, but technical.

The speed that you can get from the top of a problem all the way down to the packet layer of troubleshooting analysis.

The dependency mapping might be one of the best pieces of the product. We have not leveraged it as fully as we can, but it is an extremely powerful piece.

The product is a little complicated.

It is a very stable product, if it's properly implemented. Anybody who is using the product should probably use Professional Services to implement it properly.

It's very scalable.

Technical support is superior among most of the support centers that I have dealt with.

Our environmental is complicated. So, the initial setup was a bit complex, but it was as simple as it could have been made.

We used NETSCOUT Professional Services years ago. 

If the single pane of glass can be effectively implemented, it is very powerful. However, if you're not working with NETSCOUT closely, this is a little difficult. Overall, it is a very good pane of glass to provide customers.

If you are going to do a deployment of this product, you should use NETSCOUT Professional Services or have an expert.

For common issues, we have seen a measurable decrease in mean time to know (MTTK) and mean time to repair (MTTR).

It has cut the troubleshoot time on many issues. It has cut some problems from days to hours (or less).

It has helped increase our application/network uptime.

It is a little overall pricey and expensive, but you get what you pay for.

We haven't used it as much for IT deployments, but we do use it occasionally after a deployment to troubleshoot when somebody is having problems with their deployment.

I'm looking at their nGenious Visibility-as-a-service to try and leverage product. The struggle that most of people have with it: The product isn't all we do. We're not just looking at NETSCOUT all day. If you have somebody that you can dedicate to NETSCOUT, it would be an incredible investment. However, most companies don't, so I'm looking at their nGenious Visibility-as-a-service because I'm in the position where I know I can get more from the product. 

It is a great investment. The product is superior, but it's difficult to manage, keep current, be in front of, and be proactive with it. 

Detecting network issues which aren't obvious, more than just node alarms.

It benefits us by finding situations in our networks that we don't know exist.

It helps us get to the root cause quickly. It helps us find massive error codes, then we drill down on that error code, knowing that is the source of our problem.

It is on the wire. We see everything: all the packets.

I have a positive impression of the single pane of glass view. The feature is nice. Everything is structured around a drill down, starting with one pane, then drilling down.

It is a good product with a few limitations. It is so complex and takes a bit of training to figure out. We need better training, so we can take this complex solution and implement it more easily.

Change the font size on the grid in nGeniusONE so the names of the grids will all fit on the grid tiles. The font is so large that you can't see the name.

The stability is mostly good. However, we just had an outage.

We haven't scaled much. Talking to other customers, it sounds like it scales well.

The technical support is mostly good. They 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.

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 initial setup was complex. It was hard to know what to tap and how to tap. We are still wrestling with TAPs and light levels, then filtering.

We deployed the solution in-house.

This solution has cut our overall troubleshooting time by several days. It has helped increase our application/network uptime.

We have engineers spending less time troubleshooting the network. That has to have some return on investment.

NETSCOUT was sitting on the wire. The other vendors that we looked at were taking flows from network nodes instead of sitting on the wire, and we liked the wire better.

NETSCOUT is a good product, but you need to spend the time training-wise to figure it out and make it useful.

The primary use case is troubleshooting.

We were able to find working hardware, which we were not able to do it with any other tools.

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 solution help you get to root cause quickly.

It provides very low details. I can't get this low of level detail from any other tool, down to the packet level.

They can improve the UI. For example, with all modern tools, they generate a shared URL, like a Slack URL. Somebody clicks and they see the exact same thing as you. With this tool, if you want to tell somebody how to get to your view, you have to give pointer steps. 

The single pane of glass is a decent effort, but it is not how things are done these days.

It is not a good monitoring tool. It is more like response tool for us.

We see it overload once in a while. It doesn't have built-in protection. Therefore, once it gets too much data, it tends to crash. Then, we have to recover it.

The scalability becomes very expensive quickly.

The technical support is excellent.

The initial setup was complex. There are a lot of things that you need to configure together. There is not one push button. You have to feed a lot of data into the initial configs before it starts working.

Do your research before you jump in. These type of solutions take a long time to build. Spend a few months doing the research before you jump into it, because once you start and get the project going, it's very hard to roll back or switch off. 

We worked directly with NETSCOUT for the deployment.

We have seen a measurable decrease in mean time to know (MTTK) and mean time to repair (MTTR).

This solution has cut our overall troubleshooting time.

The license becomes cost prohibitive very quickly.

We always use a mix of different tools, and NETSCOUT is one of them.

One advantage that NETSCOUT has in the market is a very broad range of products. They cover a whole range of 11 products, where other vendors tend to be specialized, with a more narrow field. So, NETSCOUT is a good end-to-end vendor.

The product is efficient, but the learning curve is very steep. Also, the technology feels a bit outdated.

Our primary use case for NETSCOUT nGeniusONE is to monitor what is coming in and out, then distinguish where we have problems in our network.

With the Vprobes, we quickly identified issues on the application servers, which we normally couldn't, where it usually would be a full circle round between our NOC and server people.

This solution provides us with increased visibility while conducting IT deployments.

We have seen a small decrease (10 to 20 percent) in our overall troubleshooting time.

The sessions, where everything is graphically displayed out, which allow people in our NOC to quickly figure things out.

The single pane of glass view makes life simpler.

The dependency mapping provides quicker analysis and quicker resolution. We are able to pinpoint problems quicker online.

I would like more in-depth convergence between all the applications, especially when I look for information through a data mine.

It has a lot of what I like to use, but some features are not there yet. It is sometimes even going down to older protocols still getting used in the world right now.

They need to improve using voice other SIP.

The stability is good, so far. We are probably five nines up.

It is definitely scalable, as long as we do things right.

The technical support has been superb, so far. We have a sales engineer who works directly with us. He has been awesome.

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 initial setup was straightforward. 

We have definitely seen ROI.

Network troubleshooting is our primary use case.

nGeniusONE provides us with increased visibility while conducting a deployment. I'm not on the IT side, I'm on the carrier side, but it provides that increased visibility for us.

From the standpoint of VoLTE and related things, it's providing visibility into the network and how it operates. It has also improved our ability to troubleshoot end-customer issues.

One of the valuable features is permanent user perspective, getting to the one pane of glass, so that they can use one tool for multiple purposes.

In terms of the single pane of glass view, NETSCOUT has many tools. I think NG1 provides that single pane for a lot of things, but users are still using several different applications within the NETSCOUT realm of applications, and more integration would be helpful.

Our biggest area of concern right now, supporting the applications, is that while NETSCOUT does a good job of monitoring the network and the applications, we need more visibility into system health and performance monitoring. We need something that will monitor the tool that monitors the network.

Stability, for us, has been an issue but, to some degree, I think that's from a standpoint of capacity. People are wanting more from the system than what we originally deployed it for, so it's pushed it to its limit. As a result, we're deploying additional capacity.

It seems to be scalable. We have a pretty big installation. Once we get capacity in place, I think it will resolve a lot of our issues.

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.

To some degree, the initial setup was complex because of the nature of the application. But, as things go, I wouldn't describe it as any more complex than anything else.

We worked directly with NETSCOUT.

I don't have access to the numbers to give a black and white answer, but I think that our company will get that return on investment over time.

I didn't get to choose. I support what the business chooses. I've supported several applications in this area, and my experience with NETSCOUT has been positive to date.

I've been speaking to people who were having some technical issues with our NETSCOUT deployment, but when it works it absolutely helps us get to root cause more quickly.

I would rate it pretty close to a ten out of ten. It's a very complex application and system, and the support from our NETSCOUT resources has been stellar.