It just saves time. We have run into situations where contractors come in, and they plug in a WiFi device that is handing out DHCP addresses, which affects the rest of the network. To be able to quickly identify from where the problem is originating, you need a network tool that can identify the device that is doing this. It just brings into clear focus the exact issue when there is a problem or outage. 

When there is a crisis and you've several people wanting to know an estimate of when things are going to be back up and running again, you need to have answers. I have been at places that didn't have a tool like that. I know one place that had an outage for almost a week, and it was craziness. It turned out to be just a bad cable. That's all it was. They were having trouble with their email server, which was an on-premise email server, but emails were taking six hours to appear. The whole problem was because of a bad network cable. When I plugged in the Fluke analyzer, it analyzed and told me immediately that there were transmission errors on this one port from one switch. It told me this within 10 minutes. It is an incredible product.

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When there is a performance issue, we do the sniffer capture on the OptiView XG, and then we analyze the captures. If it helps to determine what the problem is, then it improves the server or application performance.

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We had two devices that we didn't know what was wrong with them. Communication wasn't working and the graphical interface actually allowed us to see what traffic was being sent to which device. We were able to find out that there was actually double acknowledgments coming from one of the devices. We were able to share that with the coders and ultimately get it fixed.

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We use it for all of our predictive Wi-Fi designs. We get standards reports, so we're able to do more of the designs, more quickly, and more consistently.

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On the wireless side, when users say that they have trouble connecting to the wireless network in a certain area, I take the Fluke up and I use the analyzer to see the signal strength and if I need to add wireless access points in that area.

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I don't use it that much, maybe once or twice, so I can't really say whether it has helped the way my company functions much. I want to. The challenge is getting the experience with the product to use it successfully. I think that's one of the areas where Fluke (now OptiView) probably needs to step up and make it available to end users so they would use this product more often.

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It allows us to be able to troubleshoot, predominantly in the field, with the tools that we would normally have in the lab. The portability, the software of it, is nice to use.

The GUI’s very user friendly, so it's easier for the field service guys to handle.

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There are a lot of improvements depending on the situation. We have a lot of tools that we can use. If we are in the field and we have OptiView, it is our first line of defense. It is very easy to do the troubleshooting right away. It's an issue of portability.

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It helps us with troubleshooting. For example, we have a lot of 10 GigE connectivity in our data centers, so we can inject it into the switches, scan the ports and it enables us to capture that data.

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When there's an issue of communication, data being dropped, we can prove the network that provided it. That allows the developers or software engineers to work on finding the solution in their area. It tells them that it's in that section. It defines the problem area.

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We use it as a site survey tool. I don't hire out, so it's done in-house. I don't use it every day, but only when I need to.

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We use it. It's great for going out there and getting environmental information regarding WiFi. It's great for doing surveys. It's great for generating reports that can be submitted to management-type people, that type of stuff.

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We've been using it a lot for the wireless portion. We've been doing surveys, heat maps, verification of signal strength, and everything else. If we use the OptiView, we also can use verified LAN and WAN, we do bandwidth throughput testing. Those are some of the big tasks we use it for.

It's the one product that we go to when we have a problem or need to get information, because it can do so much. You don't have to go back and grab this or that other device. It's a Swiss Army Knife.

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It helps us troubleshoot when we have problems.

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It just made it easy to troubleshoot certain situations and to get a quicker resolution, depending on the situation. Basically, we utilize it to troubleshoot situations, packet analysis, wired and wireless, sifting of traffic, and then accurate analysis; when someone says they've got issues with an application. That's generally what we're doing.

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We are using this product to improve our view of what is happening with the packets. We can analyze the information there fairly quickly. We can resolve the issue at hand, whether it is a software issue or a hardware issue.

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Its effectiveness has improved the way my organization functions.

It is hard to say what it takes to analyze a network without this device, and then of course with it. For example, with the wireless. I was able to plug it in and see that the client was using the same channels for communication too close together. They were interfering with each other, causing problems with the client using their laptops. Once we were able to rearrange the channels that the individual access points were using, everything cleared up.

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Basically, what OptiView XG allowed us to do is, when someone says, "Hey, there's a problem, we're experiencing slow latency in a site", we put it on both ends and we look at the traffic going between both ends and see where the latency lies. It gives us an overall view of what's going across that, and we can make adjustments or we can then pinpoint and say “Hey, this thing's going nuts and talk to whoever is responsible for that server or application.”

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It has helped with troubleshooting and has simplified the way the organization functions.

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Right now, we haven't gotten into it as much as we can. We did use it to troubleshoot our VLANs because we were having a problem with the VLANs. That helped quite a bit with displaying our VLANs and the paths things took.

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I work for a Cisco partner company and and a certain part of the demand of our customers is characterized in troubleshooting of their networks. We always use the OptiView XG to detect failure points on the network of our customers, because it is fast to identify problems. We've solved problems involving spanning tree, duplicity mac address, timeouts for databases, delay and latency and so on, all this using the OptiView XG. View full review »

I think it cuts down the time to resolution drastically for an environment that would not have the ability to do these packet captures.

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Troubleshooting becomes less of a mystery, particularly when showing the problem to other people. It's a lot more difficult showing someone Wireshark and explaining what's going on. I can lend my Linkrunner to Help Desk and have them check out a port with little training. I can show the problem on an OptiView and the graphs will make it easier to understand. View full review »

If I'm looking for a client, if I have a MAC address, I can punch in the MAC address and it'll direct me to the switch and the port without me having to home to the switch itself. It can home my whole network, more or less, and find exactly where this MAC address is at. Basically, it streamlines troubleshooting and finding troublesome clients.

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It has streamlined and simplified troubleshooting complex networking problems that would be nearly impossible to uncover with other products. View full review »

With network discovery, the troubleshooting process was easy, but with this resource, we can see the pathway from the device to the resource, it's amazing! View full review »

We used it for our post-sales, so we can get a better understanding of the customers’ wireless needs.

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We use it to validate new networks.

We use it in our data center.

We need it for troubleshooting WAN circuits, which are LAN circuits. We use it to troubleshoot and validate LAN and WAN circuits. We have approximately 300 servers that we use OptiView for.

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When we do a capture, it gives us the details of where the problem is and what it could be. It gives a detailed report of what it found on the network.

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It allows us to tune our wireless networks in a way that's never been done before.

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OptiView XG helps us troubleshoot problems faster than we would normally be able to.

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