Observer GigaStor Reviews

Observer GigaStor has aided our clients in enhancing their network performance monitoring efforts.

It has significantly helped them understand their network environment and the delivery of business applications to their end-users. It's particularly effective in managing voice or unified communications environments. 

Depending on sizing and its configuration, it can record network traffic over extensive periods, allowing users to retrospectively identify and analyze issues, which, in turn, helps improve their network environment and reduces the mean time needed to repair it.

While it's not directly related to enhancing security posture, it aids significantly in the threat-hunting process. If clients are concerned about specific network traffic, they can analyze it further to identify and address issues.

Moreover, Observer GigaStor's storage capacity meets our clients' data retention requirements. The storage capacity varies based on the model, ranging from 24 terabytes to 512 terabytes. 

Its scalability allows clients to tailor the solution to their specific needs, whether that's deploying units across different sections of a data centre or multiple data centres, ensuring it can meet any customer's storage requirements within their budget.

There are many valuable features, but understanding end-user response times stands out. It provides a score-based evaluation of user experience, helping customers quickly pinpoint whether issues originate from the network, server, client, or application. Additionally, it facilitates in-depth analysis of application dependencies.

The retrospective network analysis capability of Observer GigaStor has been beneficial. It's a pivotal feature for network performance solutions. However, I prefer to consider the entire solution suite - GigaStor, along with GigaFlow and Apex - for comprehensive network visibility and monitoring.  

So, I prefer to integrate all three solutions to provide the best visibility. They complement each other well, with Apex aggregating and correlating data from both GigaStor and GigaFlow to enhance environmental understanding and troubleshooting efficiency.

We use this solution to generate metrics and get information about network traffic. It monitors both North-South and Easy-West traffic. This helps us to troubleshoot problems. For example, if a user is calling us and has some issue with the network connection, we can connect to the GigaStor and check the exact time to help find the problem.

We have an on-premises deployment.

This solution allows us to see exactly what is going on in the network and we can very quickly solve issues with users.

I use this solution as a matrix for the traffic feed, for collecting the traffic from one server to another or from one link to another, and to write rules for firewalls. I mostly use it to filter traffic. I don’t use it to properly filter, but to have a better idea of what kind of traffic is entering my network.

The network technicians, network engineers, and security team need visibility. I can give them the information they need so that they can easily do their job.

Currently, two to five people use this for deployment and maintenance. Some people can work on the disc paths or storage. Others can take care of the applications or provide information regarding the application we want to feature or access. The system people can provide us the server they want to track or monitor, so that we can get all the traffic going in and out of those servers or applications. We can also involve the application, network, and storage teams.

If we have more infrastructure or equipment to monitor, we might increase our usage. We might add more units to provide better flexibility to get the traffic, etc. Right now, however, our current system is sufficient.

GigaStor can help write rules, is our firewall, and protocols which IP addresses can go in and out of your network. You can easily write your rules, like your ACM, for example. You can block certain traffic but allow other traffic, protocols, or ports. You can choose which traffic is important or not important in your network, and block the traffic which is not required for it to function correctly.

It's network monitoring performance and diagnosis. 

It has performed very well. It's very helpful when you want visibility into your network; not only visibility, but also the application performance and the packet captures and more. So it's very helpful.

It helps restrain things regarding the firewalls, the application control, so you can just use ACLs or, if you want, firewalls to block certain traffic that you do not want to come through your network.

Enables us to go back in time to capture an issue and analyze it for a solution. This after the fact analysis is key to overcoming the "bump in the night" issues.

Provides long term capture and analysis capabilities.

It has helped us to carry out root-cause analysis. So, now, there is no more finger-pointing because packets don’t lie.

Industry-leading line rates, packet-capture technology and data-mining capabilities are the most valuable features. In addition, their layer 4-7 analysis is a valuable asset to our organization.

With a short-handed staff, it allows us to be able to go back and troubleshoot if issues had occurred previously in time, so we don't have to recreate the problem.

Long-term data storage is the best feature for our organization.