We tested some free applications from Netflow ten years ago but quickly moved into SolarWinds NetFlow Traffic Analyzer.

Two others solutions that we can compare with SolarWinds NTA are SolarWinds NPM (Network Performance Monitor) and ManageEngine NetFlow Analyzer.

We have found that our banking customers prefer SolarWinds NPM compared to NTA because in NPM you can also view factors such as CPU and switch utilization, and check which ports are up or down. On the whole, they can monitor much more with NPM, and this is especially important for the banking sector. When it comes to networked devices such as ATMs, NPM provides good notification features where customers can be notified via email or SMS whenever an ATM link goes down.

ManageEngine NetFlow Analyzer is another similar solution to SolarWinds NTA, but it's not nearly as good compared to SolarWinds NTA and NPM in terms of real-time reporting. ManageEngine NetFlow Analyzer's reporting seems to suffer from server hanging issues and it sometimes takes a minute or more to update the reports.

Before choosing ThousandEyes, we evaluated Riverbed. We select a solution based on our use case. Our main purpose here is to monitor service delivery on the cloud and Riverbed cannot do that. Riverbed could replace SolarWinds but does not have that capability, which ThousandEyes does. So that's the main difference.

When selecting new products, we always put out an RFI to see who has what out and available. Afterward, we evaluate those and make a selection. The NOC was responsible for choosing the product and then it came over to my team, the network service group. Since the NOC was responsible for the comparison, I don't have information on the other solutions that were evaluated.

I know that we evaluated NetBrain. Although they do not necessarily claim to be a network monitoring tool, a lot of the features offered by SolarWinds are also available. My understanding is that the price point was an issue.

There were members of our team who had experience with other solutions, but we adopted this one after installing and using the evaluation version.