My predecessor made the decision. He's a very security-minded, security-focused individual. Most of the other vendors are providing a solution that looks at NetFlow analytics and that's it. Scrutinizer provides NetFlow analytics of network performance, but also provides security.

We do use Darktrace for a different reason, on top of Plixer. But the advanced reporting from Plixer is providing me more detail than Darktrace. Darktrace is giving us some good PLP stuff, but they are for different purposes. Darktrace is looking for more shadow-IT stuff, where Plixer is looking at more real-time flow and analytics.

Plixer's years of experience in delivering security and network visibility solutions influenced our decision to go with them. They seemed to have a solid solution, out-of-the-box, in 2014. Back then, AVC was not something that was widely deployed. That was pretty much the stone age of application visibility control, especially in Australia. There are still not a lot of people using AVC.

My company made the switch to Plixer Scrutinizer because it is scalable, compact, and very competitive in pricing. It is also a small company, and not a large company, so you can ask questions about features and won't have to wait ten years before a feature becomes available. Plixer Scrutinizer has a dedicated NetFlow-only team and organization.

I work with a small credit union near Seattle, Washington. I found Plixer by checking and doing some blog searches and asking for recommendations from other network engineers.

Previously, we used SolarWinds' NetFlow Traffic Analyzer module. It did the job, but it was extremely slow. That was the primary reason we switched. So we looked around, and this was the best solution that we came up with, as far as bandwidth utilization goes.

Our customers were using either LiveAction or Stealthwatch from Cisco, and they liked that Plixer Scrutinizer had greater visibility compared to Cisco which does well only on Cisco environments. A lot of the clients we have are, given the market, taking advantage of adding HP switches to their infrastructure, so they're no longer single siloed. That was a key feature of Plixer Scrutinizer.

Our customers also used AkenTech and ExtraHop. What made them choose Plixer Scrutinizer over ExtraHop was the price. It came down to pricing because Plixer Scrutinizer only charges by node, so how many exporters or devices customers were taking exports from, while ExtraHop does bandwidth, and that seems to be a very expensive way to do it.

The company was using the old MRTG, which doesn't really provide application visibility at all. It's not really a commercially supported product. So, if anything went wrong, it was like, "Well, I don't know how it works." We switched to get onto something that was commercial.

We have Splunk, but Splunk doesn't give us the type of info that this does. Splunk is really clunky and hard to use. We still have Splunk, but we use it more as a security means for network means.

We have used the free version of PRTG, but that solution was clunky.

Before Scrutinizer, we had to do a lot of things manually. It took more time. But now, with this appliance, we have a more automated way of doing things.

This was our first solution to collect the flow. We were looking for a device for a long time, and we are very happy with Scrutinizer.

The workflow integration within a single platform has allowed us to remove redundant tooling. So, it streamlines that process into less workflows. It's allowed us to consolidate network statistical information. We have eliminated tools like SolarWinds, ntop, and some Linux utilities.

The primary reason that we switched to Scrutinizer was the interface. I saw a demonstration of the product at one of the security seminars where it was advertised as Splunk for network data. That's exactly the type of product we were looking for and it gave us that functionality. It was also able to deliver as expected.

Other requirements that we had were that it was multi-vendor, scalable, and a single-appliance solution. So, we didn't need to have a lot of database servers or Microsoft Servers and could run it as a virtual machine.

I never used another NetFlow accounting solution. I got to know the NetFlow concept at my current company.

The vendor's years of experience in delivering security and network visibility influenced our decision to go with Scrutinizer. Up until recently, up until Cisco bought StealthWatch, Scrutinizer was the NetFlow product for Cisco. They've really got a lot of experience in terms of looking at these things, and the chats reflect that, because you've got all sorts of people writing in and telling you how to do things.