I can't think of any additional features that I'd like added to the product right now. However, one feature that was just added recently was one that we really wanted: a forecasting feature. It just looks at the trends of the past to forecast where it thinks you will be in the future. That's one that we're looking forward to. It is out there now, but we still haven't received it yet. We have to get another level of license or something for that.

One of the things we talked about with the developers, who are very smart guys, brilliant engineers, is to improve the dashboard. The dashboard they have is great, but is doesn’t have the multiple line charts combined into one.

If they could offer that, then we wouldn't need to do that unofficially on the outside. We wrote the software ourselves in Java and did it ourselves. If they had something like that in a dashboard to have all the lines combined, that would help us.

One other thing that is a problem for us is the Certificate of Networthiness requirement that they have in the military, in the Department of Defense networks. It means that your product has to meet certain tests and requirements to be credible, and to make sure it's not spyware or anything like that. It was difficult for me to get Statseeker on this network, because it didn't have such a certificate.

I worked a little bit with the Statseeker team and I was able to write a statement. Basically, I vouched for it on my own volition, as an engineer. The network administrator said that he had something in the book for it, and nobody ever came back and looked at it.

I think Statseeker itself could do a better job in closing deals and they would have a bigger customer base if they could meet such a requirement. This requirement is very easy to meet. They're not doing anything wrong, but you have to illustrate and explain how you're collecting the data off the network.

They want to see how you're collecting traffic and how often. They want to know what kind of stuff you're sending back out; if it's HTTP, then it's their website. That could be very easily achieved by documenting that and applying for such a certificate. That could be available for all customers in the DOD. I think it would open a new market for Statseeker. It would potentially give them many more customers around the country, the United States, and foreign countries, as well, where that is required.

On the core part of the product, I really don't know how you could improve it. It's a very solid solution.

There is a need for many developments to mature Statseeker. It should provide a study use case to show how it monitors the SD-WAN service.

I would like to see the solution incorporate diagnosis of the workstation. A lot of times, the Network Engineer will blame the network first, even though it might be a desktop problem. For example, the drivers might be outdated, the memory is horrible, or the CPU is overwhelmed.

I would like to see all of the reports put up in a nice, GUI format, that shows whether devices are up or down, and the severity of any problems.

The user interface needs to be made more intuitive.

Maybe they could provide a little bit more flexibility on creating custom dashboards.

The only other thing that I wish that they would implement soon is that they don't support SNMPv3 TRAPs. I would like to see that back in.

With Statseeker I'd like to see some flow, i.e. what's tuning-up the network. The trend I like is managing the traffic load by going to the cloud. 

Statseeker tells you routing-wise how things are working, in terms of transmit and receive. You shouldn't be transmitting more than you are receiving. It depends on the traffic, but it should just mix and match. 

With Statseeker, we caught a lot of issues. We have a lot of operational issues.

The interface could improve a little bit. I find with new users, I tend to have to spend a bit of time walking them through how to use the interface. It could be a little more user-friendly. Once you get it, you get it, but it seems to take a bit of time. It's not super intuitive for new users.

In terms of additional features, in our environment, we run Cisco ONS, Optical Networking System. There are certain statistics that you can pull from those devices, and it's a less common platform, so I don't think there's a lot of support for the ONS. It would be handy for us to have ONS support within Statseeker.

It would be nice if they open it up for additional support with different vendors.

This solution would be improved with better automatic discovery for ping-only devices. Every time we add an access point, which is a ping-only device, we also have to remember to add it to Statseeker. It would be very helpful if while doing a ping sweep of our network, once Statseeker discovers a new device, it performed a reverse DNS lookup on the IP address to get the hostname and then automatically add it.

I would like to see NetFlow improved, with better reporting capabilities that are similar to Scrutinizer.

I would like to see some layer two and layer three topology mappings, similar to what NNMi and SolarWinds presents. For fault, it's very good, but for tier one, they like to see pictures.

I would like the ability to update the dashboard. I would also like the ability to access via an API. Then I could produce a dashboard that my C level can understand. This is just so they can go and refresh whenever they want to and see what things look like.

We would like to see improvements in reporting and multiple-user integration. Reporting has everything you can think of, but it can be cumbersome to set up and tweak the reports to get the exact data you want. When setting up multiple users with AD authentication, it is a bit tricky and problematic. I wish this had an easier integration.

If it had more detailed NetFlow information then it would be far better. This would allow us to find the top talkers and congestion situations. It would be helpful to be able to drill down quickly and identify a top talker to pull them off and streamline a congested circuit.

A lower cost, overall, would be fantastic.

The reporting functionality can be cleaned up a little bit. Some of the reporting operations happen on the right side of the pane, where you move from right to left, which is less intuitive than it should be. A top-down approach would be much more simple. Right to left is less natural because in English we read from top-down, left to right.

It may be helpful to have more options in the alerting section.

I would like to have soft alarming. If an inner-base all of a sudden triggers a threshold, we have to rely on a lot of other tools and then we go into Statseeker to verify it. If Statseeker would confirm it preemptively and trigger it into our network panel, that would be nice.

Training also has some room for improvement.

In terms of being able to see everything at once, Statseeker is not quite there yet.

It would be very nice to have the Cisco ACI option included in the regular license.

The newer version has bugs in a feature that I want to use, so I am unable to upgrade from my current version because of that. They are aware of this problem and will let me know once it is solved.

Integration including ability to do network diagrams.

There is a little bit of room to improve in the alerting section to give some more options there. It's all I can think of right now off the top of my head.

I would like to see fully automatic updates so that our version is always current.

I spoke to James Wells from Statseeker. We use an application called Dynatrace, which was formerly Compuware, and he was saying that they might be able to integrate Statseeker with Dynatrace. What Dynatrace does is application monitoring. So if we went to look at say some statistics and we could see some high traffic, we could drill down into that traffic and then down to the application. So James was saying that could be possible, and that would be a great improvement.

That user interface for selecting things needs to be a little more intuitive. 

The user interface needs a great deal of improvement.

A more user-friendly interface would help because it is sometimes difficult to find specific data that you are looking for. It would be nice if I could easily select individual interfaces.

It would be helpful to be able to view specific ports, more easily.

From what we have discovered, it is not really a single pane of glass.

Keep it simple, the product works so I would not over complicate it. The only thing I would add is to keep improving the Netflow analysis interface this is something that we find very useful.

I would like to see the addition of a network configuration management feature. It would take online backup configurations, deploy configurations to active nodes, compare configuration changes,  provide detailed hardware reports, and generate the configuration compliance reports. 

The inclusion of configuration management features and SIP links would improve this solution.

Configuration management: In configuration management it would be helpful if it would backup configuration files (running and start-up configuration) for devices. (Not sure if this is already available in the latest version).

The user interface could be more friendly. When I say user-friendly I mean additional windows with information on additional day-to-day statistics.

It could also benefit the user more if it had additional features for reporting.

The tool is pretty good as it is. It monitors everything we need it to on a day-to-day basis. You know, if I had to complain about anything, it would be the documentation. The videos are good but I’m a manual-reader kind of guy. A comprehensive document, including how-to’s, would be a great addition.

When it comes to documentation I think of Cisco as being the gold-standard.

You can go to their website, search for what you need and within a few click be at a document that will explain, step-by-step what you need to do.

Statseekers’ videos are useful for the basics but when you start getting into details I find there isn’t a lot of documentation.

Of course this might just be a matter of me not being able to find it on the website.  Which again comes down to me being able to search the available documentation. Either by an index-type search or clicking on a screenshot of a Statseeker screenshot and getting some sort of help context.

Detailed data can be hard to extract in CSV form. Sometimes, being able to dump down raw data would be good so various time periods across a longer period could be analysed. At present, data can be presented within Statseeker, but there is lots of "white space" between data points.

The interface looks like a Windows 3.1 program. It needs a complete refresh. Sometimes it is difficult to see all the information you are after about a list of devices as it seems to only present what will fit on the first page and there is no way to scroll to the next page.

It would be nice if they had twenty-four-hour technical support because we contact Australia and we have to wait for them to open.

I would like to see more comprehensive reporting and alerting. We do have other, more expensive solutions that handle that aspect of it. However, it would be nice to be able to specify baseline thresholds. If we're approaching those then we would be alerted, and it would probably help us with our job of troubleshooting.

It could use more features on Netflow analyser, such as time series graphs and a single network export UDP port and UDP forwarding. 

Also, more private MIB object support such as WAN optimisation performance and wireless.

I would like to see a friendlier user interface in the administration tool.

Technical support needs improvement.