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A10 Networks Logo
1,192 views|790 comparisons
100% willing to recommend
Kentik Logo
357 views|263 comparisons
100% willing to recommend
Comparison Buyer's Guide
Executive Summary

We performed a comparison between A10 Thunder TPS and Kentik based on real PeerSpot user reviews.

Find out what your peers are saying about Cloudflare, NETSCOUT, Akamai and others in Distributed Denial of Service (DDOS) Protection.
To learn more, read our detailed Distributed Denial of Service (DDOS) Protection Report (Updated: April 2024).
768,857 professionals have used our research since 2012.
Featured Review
Quotes From Members
We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use.
Here are some excerpts of what they said:
Pros
"Based on previous equipment that we had, it's amazing that this device can do what it can do in a 1U form factor. The devices that we have right now have never gone over capacity and we've actually mitigated some pretty large attacks.""The solution has reduced the amount of manual intervention required during an attack. We have the inline solution and when it comes to the customers that we have on it, it has saved us some troubleshooting time.""We can keep track of all the customer's requirements. We can forecast our trails and we can forecast our overall financial things.""We selected the solution because of its programmable automated defense using RESTful API. We didn't want to connect to the box. We wanted to be able to do some automation. We wanted to have our own portal because we wanted to connect our customers to our own UI using the A10 API. It has been good and exactly what we need.""They give us the ability to configure many features for DDoS. There are many items that we can use.""The solution's support is one of the coolest things about the product. I""Thunder TPS has automated mitigation and fully managed support in case the device cannot handle the attack. They have engineers available to respond.""The response time to an attack is instant. We've used some outsourced solutions in the past, out in the cloud, that weren't so quick. But it's all within our control now. We control how fast it mitigates."

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"We're pretty happy with the API functionality. It's web, and it's very simple to set up queries. It has served us well and you don't need to be an expert on the API or the product to set these things up.""The most valuable features have been anything around traffic engineering: being able to determine the source or destination of a surge of traffic, whether it's DDoS-related, or a customer just happened to have a sudden uptick in traffic. Being able to tell where that's coming from or where it's going to enables us to do things based on that.""In terms of the solution’s real-time visibility across our network infrastructure, I have not been able to find any other monitoring or netflow visualization tool that gives me the kind of information I get from Kentik. If I need to take a deep-dive into something that I see, it's really easy for me to do that. Whereas with most other things, I have to use five or six other tools to get that kind of data, with Kentik, I have it all in one place.""One of the valuable features is the intuitive nature of building out reports, and then triggering actions based on specific metrics from those reports. It has a really good UI and the ability to surface data through the reporting functions is pretty good. That's helped a lot in the security space.""The drill-down into detailed views of network activity helps to quickly pinpoint locations and causes. All the information is there.""We're also using Kentik to ingest metrics. It's a useful feature, and its response time, whenever we're pulling back the data, is higher than our on-prem solution.""Having the API access allows us to do a great deal of automation around a lot of our reporting and management tools.""The most valuable feature is being able to pull traffic patterns; to and from destinations. We're able to understand where our traffic is going, our top talkers from an AS set, as well as where our traffic's coming from."

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Cons
"The last issue we had to contact them about was just a question of a false-positive. The A10 system wasn't supposed to decide what is a false-positive. So if we send it good traffic, it's supposed to just pass that good traffic through. But we opened this last ticket because the A10 did block some of the good traffic. Their support had to tweak it a little bit, but it wasn't anything that took a long time.""The upgrade process for the boxes is not efficient. We have to go through the A10 aGalaxy where we have issues, like timeouts. They told me it was fixed in the latest version, but I tried to do it on the Portal and it is not working all the time.""We currently do not use the solution's machine-learning-powered Zero-day Automated Protection because of an issue with it... We also use the aGalaxy platform, which is a management platform for the TPS devices. The issue is that some TPS features were added at the TPS level but weren't carried over to aGalaxy, and we manage all of our devices through aGalaxy. So we can't actually use some of the new features that are available on the TPS because that functionality doesn't exist in aGalaxy. That is one of my biggest complaints.""The solution is a little expensive.""It is very difficult to implement. It should be made a bit easier to implement. There is also a lack of resources on the internet. They need to develop more resources.""I rate Thunder TPS seven out of 10 for scalability.""They have a cloud scrubbing feature that redirects the traffic if the on-prem appliance can't accommodate a large amount of traffic but it's not available where we are.""If there's one aspect of A10 that needs improvement it would be the training. All of their training is done online, at least in what we've been exposed to. I would like to have a classroom environment for training... It would give [people] a chance to provision it."

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"I believe they're already working on this, but I would love for them to create better integrations from network flow data to application performance — tracing — so that we could overlay that data more readily. With more companies going hybrid, flow logs and flow data, whether it be VPC or on-prem, matched with application performance and trace data, is pretty important.""The only downside to Kentik, something that I don't like, is that it's great that it shows you where these anomalies lie, but it's not actionable. Kentik is valuable, don't get me wrong, but if it had an actionable piece to it...""There is room for improvement around the usability of the API. It's a hugely complex task to call it and you need a lot of backing to be able to do it. I should say, as someone who's not in networking, maybe it's easier for people who are in networking, but for me that one part is not very user-friendly.""I would like to see them explore the area of cost analysis.""I consider the pricing model as an area for improvement.""They're moving more in a direction where they are saying, "Hey, here's information that you may be interested in or may a need," before the question has to explicitly be asked. Continuing to move in that direction would be a good thing.""We asked for a way, regarding the potential networks that exist, to hook Kentik up with external tools like peering DBs to correlate things together and see what we can do... This is all in the [next] beta now.""I've checked out the V4 version of the interface and it's still a little bit clunky for me to use. I still go back to the old interface. That's definitely one that they still need to work on. It doesn't seem like everything that you get in the V3, the older interface, is there. For instance, I was trying to add a user or do the administrative tasks in V4, and I couldn't figure out where I was supposed to do that."

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Pricing and Cost Advice
  • "The financials are always a challenge with this type of technology. That's not really a product-functionality thing but it's the area where we push A10 the most."
  • "We had a customer who was down for six hours and the loss of revenue for him was three times the price he was paying for us per year. The customer just said, "I don't care about paying you because on only one attack I saved money. It's three times better than losing money.""
  • "Pricing was much higher with Arbor (APS) for the same type of solution."
  • "Pricing is very reasonable."
  • "We may need to pay fifty percent more if we purchase other solutions. For the payments made to A10 Thunder TPS, we have received three-year support."
  • "We did a price survey, and compared to other solutions, A10 Thunder TPS wasn't cheap."
  • More A10 Thunder TPS Pricing and Cost Advice →

  • "We have an annual contract with Kentik that we renew each year for a set number of licenses. We also have some burstable licenses which we can spin up and spin down, and those are paid as they are used."
  • More Kentik Pricing and Cost Advice →

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    Questions from the Community
    Top Answer:The most valuable feature of A10 Thunder TPS is load balancing.
    Top Answer:We did a price survey, and compared to other solutions, A10 Thunder TPS wasn't cheap.
    Top Answer:The solution is a little expensive.
    Top Answer: It offers a simple yet powerful feature of classifying applications, going beyond basic statistics.
    Top Answer:Hey Julia Navigating Kentik's pricing can be a bit like wandering through a maze blindfolded, but don't worry. My experience with Kentik has taught me a few tricks. First off, the pricing model… more »
    Top Answer:Customers usually need more information to effectively use this solution. So, simplifying it could be an area of improvement. Moreover, I consider the pricing model as an area for improvement. The… more »
    Ranking
    Views
    1,192
    Comparisons
    790
    Reviews
    4
    Average Words per Review
    277
    Rating
    8.8
    Views
    357
    Comparisons
    263
    Reviews
    1
    Average Words per Review
    429
    Rating
    9.0
    Comparisons
    ThousandEyes logo
    Compared 30% of the time.
    Arbor DDoS logo
    Compared 17% of the time.
    SolarWinds NPM logo
    Compared 10% of the time.
    NETSCOUT nGeniusONE logo
    Compared 10% of the time.
    Datadog logo
    Compared 7% of the time.
    Learn More
    Overview

    The Thunder TPS is a family of high-performance DDoS defense solutions that detect and mitigate multi-vector DDoS attacks. Unlike traditional DDoS defenses that leave a wake of collateral damage against users, Thunder TPS applies a source-based defense-in-depth mitigation pipeline. This multimodal defense that includes actionable DDoS weapons intelligence, operator definable adaptive policies, and machine learning-powered Zero-Day Automated Protection (ZAP) blocks attackers while protecting real users.

    The Thunder TPS is uniquely suited for communication service providers, online gaming, and enterprise network operators who protect large networks and need compact solutions with faster response from a fully automated, zero-touch defense during an attack.

    Kentik's AIOps Network Traffic Intelligence platform unifies network operations, performance, security, and business intelligence. 

    With a purpose-built big data engine delivered as public or private SaaS, Kentik captures a high-resolution view of actual network traffic data and enriches it with critical application and business data, so every network event or analysis can be tied to revenue & costs, customer & user experience, performance & risk.

    Sample Customers
    DDoS defense solution trusted for more than 200 service providers, online gaming, and enterprises including; Bungie, Comcast, KDDI Corporation, Leaseweb, Microsoft Azure, NTT Docomo, Softbank, Turkcell Superonline, Verizon and more.
    Pandora, Yelp, Neustar, Box, University of Washington, Zoom, Tata, and Cogent. 
    Top Industries
    REVIEWERS
    Comms Service Provider40%
    Cloud Provider10%
    Media Company10%
    Computer Software Company10%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Computer Software Company21%
    Financial Services Firm15%
    Comms Service Provider15%
    Government9%
    REVIEWERS
    Comms Service Provider38%
    University13%
    Computer Software Company13%
    Music Company13%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Computer Software Company24%
    Financial Services Firm10%
    Manufacturing Company7%
    Comms Service Provider7%
    Company Size
    REVIEWERS
    Small Business33%
    Midsize Enterprise33%
    Large Enterprise33%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Small Business23%
    Midsize Enterprise30%
    Large Enterprise47%
    REVIEWERS
    Small Business8%
    Midsize Enterprise17%
    Large Enterprise75%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Small Business21%
    Midsize Enterprise17%
    Large Enterprise62%
    Buyer's Guide
    Distributed Denial of Service (DDOS) Protection
    April 2024
    Find out what your peers are saying about Cloudflare, NETSCOUT, Akamai and others in Distributed Denial of Service (DDOS) Protection. Updated: April 2024.
    768,857 professionals have used our research since 2012.

    A10 Thunder TPS is ranked 15th in Distributed Denial of Service (DDOS) Protection with 12 reviews while Kentik is ranked 22nd in Distributed Denial of Service (DDOS) Protection with 12 reviews. A10 Thunder TPS is rated 8.8, while Kentik is rated 9.2. The top reviewer of A10 Thunder TPS writes "A highly stable solution that can be used for load balancing". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Kentik writes " Flexibility for creating reports and gaining more visibility is a definite strength". A10 Thunder TPS is most compared with Arbor DDoS, Cloudflare, Radware DefensePro, Corero and Imperva DDoS, whereas Kentik is most compared with ThousandEyes, Arbor DDoS, SolarWinds NPM, NETSCOUT nGeniusONE and Datadog.

    See our list of best Distributed Denial of Service (DDOS) Protection vendors.

    We monitor all Distributed Denial of Service (DDOS) Protection reviews to prevent fraudulent reviews and keep review quality high. We do not post reviews by company employees or direct competitors. We validate each review for authenticity via cross-reference with LinkedIn, and personal follow-up with the reviewer when necessary.