We performed a comparison between Plixer Scrutinizer and Vectra AI based on real PeerSpot user reviews.
Find out in this report how the two Network Traffic Analysis (NTA) solutions compare in terms of features, pricing, service and support, easy of deployment, and ROI."The ability to view the status of the top-10 at a glance is helpful. We immediately know which link is over-utilized or heavily used... and it's all in real-time."
"There are other tools out there that will do what Scrutinizer does. But what I have found with Scrutinizer is that it does it very quickly. I've taken 25 million individual data fragments from the different sensors, and it has graphed that and mapped it and presented a picture within 30 seconds. It has a very efficient database algorithm that I am really impressed with."
"The most valuable features of the solution are the ability to track what a device is doing and to go back historically. It is also able to go down to, and identify, very low levels of traffic."
"We didn't experience any bugs."
"Visualization of the network traffic is the most valuable feature. It allows you to drill into information quite quickly."
"It's agnostic as far as what your network gear is. As long as it supports an sFlow, JFlow, NetFlow, some kind of flow monitoring, Plixer will support it very well."
"As a network engineer, the ability to identify what traffic on the link is consuming all the bandwidth at any given time, and provide immediate feedback to the business, is the most valuable feature."
"One feature I found most valuable in Plixer Scrutinizer is the very extensive reporting. Reporting is very flexible, though sometimes you need a little bit of support from Plixer Scrutinizer to create custom-made reporting in a very short time. Reporting is a very strong feature of the product."
"The solution is currently used as a central threat detection and response system."
"One of the most valuable features of the platform is its ability to provide you with aggregated risk scores based on impact and certainty of threats being detected. This is both applied to individual and host detections. This is important because it enables us to use this platform to prioritize the most likely imminent threats. So, it reduces alert fatigue follow ups for security operation center analysts. It also provides us with an ability to prioritize limited resources."
"It does a reliable job of parsing out the logs of all the network traffic so that we can ingest them into our SIEM and utilize them for threat hunting and case investigations. It is pretty robust and reliable. The administration time that we spend maintaining it or troubleshooting it is very low. So, the labor hour overhead is probably our largest benefit from it. We spend 99% of our time in Vectra investigating cases, responding to incidents, or hunting, and only around 1% of our time is spent patching, troubleshooting, or doing anything else. That's our largest benefit from Vectra."
"Vectra AI helped our team be more productive and save time. We have less work thanks to it."
"What I like best about Vectra AI is that it alerts you about suspicious activities."
"The core product provides excellent visibility, but my favorite feature is Vectra Recall."
"It gives you access, with Recall, to instant visibility into your network through something like a SIEM solution. For us, being able to correlate all of this network data without having to manage it, has provided immediate value. It gives us the ability to really work on the stuff where I and my team have expertise, instead of having to manage a SIEM solution..."
"It is doing some artificial intelligence. If it sees a server doing a lot of things, then it will assume that is normal. So, it is looking for anomalous behavior, things that are out of context which helps us reduce time. Therefore, we don't have to look in all the logs. We just wait for Vectra to say, "This one is behaving strange," then we can investigate that part."
"There was a price lift because previously the product was privately owned, and now there is some external capital in the organization, so pricing could be lower, though, for Plixer Scrutinizer, there is almost no competition at this price point."
"Data retention needs improvement. Data retention is a thing where we are looking for a better way to collect flow data for a longer time to do forensic research on security incidents. By default, data retention is quite low. We need detailed data in safe storage for a longer time, e.g., for a couple of months. An improvement would be a way to export data into a secure long-term storage."
"In Plixer Scrutinizer, scalability is an area with minor concerns where improvements are required."
"The visual acuity of how it presents data can sometimes be confusing. It takes a bit for people to spin up how to look at the graphs."
"The solution creates a visual map of a particular location and how the network flows. You need to spend time to generate all those maps. If they could figure out a way to reduce the time needed to generate the maps, that would be great."
"From what I understand it is that the solution is not very scalable in a high volume traffic environment with a large number of flows."
"There is room for improvement around the data that they have on the website about solutions... they should have more templated solutions on their website. Going out and identifying how to do RTP performance with a Cisco router, or how to do application response times in an Arrista data center deployment was where most of the work was... They should spend some more time documenting solutions and putting together white papers."
"The reporting structure, the front-end GUI, also needs some work. It needs some getting used to. It works fairly well, but it's a technical tool rather than a user tool. You have to understand the structure of the databases before you can really use it."
"It would be commercially beneficial if Vectra AI had something like Darktrace's Antigena Email or something similar to email protection."
"In education as a sector, we are looking at AI a lot in terms of how it can be used as part of the teaching and learning side of things. It would be great to have Vectra AI look at a better way to enhance the security posture related to the AI tools in our portfolio."
"The UI/UX and detection could be improved. More detections of specific security events could be useful. We've had a few incidents that were not detected by Vectra. The teams are working on it right now, but more detection is always better."
"For S&D account scans, it would be easier if Vectra AI could triage with users. If a client uses a lot of accounts, then it could indicate that these accounts are benign, for example. That would help a lot."
"A blind spot that I have is around the ease with which you can automate threat intervention."
"An area for improvement in Vectra AI is reporting because it currently needs some details. For example, when you download a report from Vectra AI, you won't see complete information about the alerts or triggers. Another area for improvement in the tool is that sometimes, an alert has high severity, yet it's marked as low severity. Vectra AI should have a mechanism to change the severity level from low to high or critical."
"We have a lot of system solutions and integrations with system solutions. Vectra is a type of black box. It implements AI-informed detection mechanisms, but we cannot create system detections. I understand that the product is designed this way, but it would be great if we could create our own detections as well."
"You are always limited with visibility on the host due to the fact that it is a network based tool. It gives you visibility on certain elements of the attack path, but it doesn't necessarily give you visibility on everything. Specifically, the initial intrusion side of things that doesn't necessarily see the initial compromise. It doesn't see stuff that goes on the host, such as where scripts are run. Even though you are seeing traffic, it doesn't necessarily see the malicious payload. Therefore, it's very difficult for it to identify these type of host-driven complex attacks."
Plixer Scrutinizer is ranked 9th in Network Traffic Analysis (NTA) with 15 reviews while Vectra AI is ranked 2nd in Network Traffic Analysis (NTA) with 42 reviews. Plixer Scrutinizer is rated 8.6, while Vectra AI is rated 8.6. The top reviewer of Plixer Scrutinizer writes "Advanced reporting runs analytics on NetFlow and provides signature-based recognition of problems in the network environment". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Vectra AI writes "Integrates well with other security solutions and provides good technical support". Plixer Scrutinizer is most compared with SolarWinds NetFlow Traffic Analyzer, Flowmon , Cisco Secure Network Analytics, ManageEngine NetFlow Analyzer and LiveAction LiveNX, whereas Vectra AI is most compared with Darktrace, ExtraHop Reveal(x), Cisco Secure Network Analytics, Arista NDR and Corelight. See our Plixer Scrutinizer vs. Vectra AI report.
See our list of best Network Traffic Analysis (NTA) vendors.
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