The ability to fault-find and provide business continuity and the speed to resolution has been the return on investment. People can see what's going on in the network. They're not wandering around for two to three hours, not being able to do their job because there are problems in the network. We can immediately see that this person is doing the wrong thing and we can say, "Stop it." Previously, we would have had to wait for that person to finish what they were doing, and that could bring all 2,500 users down for a period of time.

The money I'm spending on Plixer Scrutinizer is worth the investment because you can use the product in two ways as a capacity management tool for the network and as a forensic security tool. You can use it in a network operations center or a security operation center. You can do both in just one device.

We believe we have seen ROI with Plixer.

I said, "I need a tool." And they said, "Well, okay fine. One, tell us the cost. And two, tell us how long your projected return on investment is going to be." I found Plixer, and I said, "For the cost of what we're paying," at that time for SolarWinds, which was well over $20,000 a year, "this will do everything that we need it to do and will reduce our costs from what we currently have." 

There was an ROI calculation done on SolarWinds, but once their licensing exceeded $15,000, because it just kept going up and up, we were actually losing ground with them. That's one reason we replaced SolarWinds with the Scrutinizer.

For historical questions, it has reduced time to resolution by a significant amount since we previously didn't have the data. So, there were some problems that never went resolved because we didn't have the data. In some cases, it's just flat out allowed a time to resolution rather than cancelling the ticket. Easily, it is a solid 70 percent time reduction.

It allows us to show as a department that we can answer some technical problems from past complaints, so we look like we are tracking what has been going on in the network rather than its current state. The goodwill that comes out of seeing the IT department as someone who can solve a problem is where the biggest return on investment has come. 

Just for my team of eight, having something that they can look at, and go, "Oh, that's what's taking up the traffic." Now, we have a smoking gun to go address. Was it backups? Was it someone's download? That's another good return on investment rather than, "I don't know. Let's try this." We are not taking the shotgun approach to troubleshooting anymore.

We have seen ROI.

The solution has helped to reduce the time to resolution for network and/or security events by 50 percent.

We have definitely seen a return on our investment. This is a pretty good product. If the opportunity continues, we'll continue to extend the license and keep it.

I would base ROI on the time that we gained and productivity. It is difficult to make a return of investment based on productivity. Mainly, I would say the time saved.

It probably saves somebody at least one day a month at minimum.

We have seen ROI.

ROI, for us, is a much better, much faster resolution to security and network incidents, and the ability to make assessments on traffic utilization. For the SIEM, it cuts down our time by half. It's a valuable tool.