We performed a comparison between Cisco Secure Network Analytics and Kentik based on real PeerSpot user reviews.
Find out what your peers are saying about Zabbix, Datadog, Auvik and others in Network Monitoring Software."We can manage the entire system across the network and troubleshoot the pain points."
"The deployment was a breeze. It is a very innovative and robust platform that allows us to bi-directionally stitch together data elements from Netflow-enabled devices to provide a context for network utilization."
"Cisco Stealthwatch has predefined alerts for different types of security issues that might happen in the network. Whether it's PCs or servers that are used for botnets or Bitcoin mining we receive the alerts automatically. This functionality is what we receive from the solution out of the box."
"The most valuable feature is integration."
"Being able to identify specific date closed across the network is invaluable."
"If you are using Darktrace or NAC solutions you can integrate Stealthwatch."
"From a security standpoint, it is just seeing pockets as well. Visibility is very key for us."
"It's a dependable product that is able to pinpoint where we have vulnerabilities if they occur."
"The most valuable feature of this solution is data hoarding because it catches threats on a frequent basis that we had no idea of."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"I really love the Data Explorer. I use it all the time to go in and craft exactly what I need to see. I'm able to then take that story and explain it to the executives. I've done that a couple of times and it is helpful."
"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."
"I am able to do a lot of work on the visualization end to create different visualizations and different ways to get information out of it."
"The Wi-Fi side needs improvement."
"The GUI could use some improvement. Being able to find features more easily would be a great improvement if it was simplified."
"Cisco Stealthwatch can improve by having bundled packages for popular add-ons. It would be a lot easier for people implementing it, have let's say a better way to use the product."
"They should include Citrix VDIs in the next release."
"Its granularity for RBAC roles-based access control needs improvement."
"If they can make this product more web-based, that would be amazing."
"I would like to see more and cleaner reporting. For example, if I pull up Steven and I want to look and maybe compare him to what you've done in the past week, and compare that to the past six months, the point would be to see what the difference in activity looks like over this time. I don't see that capability in reporting to date. You see that trend but you don't really see a straightforward comparison. That right there is key to what we want to see about the normal activity."
"One thing I would like to see improved is if it could automatically be tied through ISE, instead of you having to manually get notifications and disable it yourself."
"It's a good solid solution but integration with Network Access Control products with Cisco ISE would be good."
"I consider the pricing model as an area for improvement."
"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."
"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."
"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..."
"I would like to see them explore the area of cost analysis."
"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."
"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."
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Cisco Secure Network Analytics is ranked 24th in Network Monitoring Software with 57 reviews while Kentik is ranked 47th in Network Monitoring Software with 12 reviews. Cisco Secure Network Analytics is rated 8.2, while Kentik is rated 9.2. The top reviewer of Cisco Secure Network Analytics writes "Increased the visibility of what is happening in our network". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Kentik writes " Flexibility for creating reports and gaining more visibility is a definite strength". Cisco Secure Network Analytics is most compared with Darktrace, Cisco Secure Cloud Analytics, ThousandEyes, Vectra AI and Arista NDR, whereas Kentik is most compared with ThousandEyes, Arbor DDoS, SolarWinds NPM, NETSCOUT nGeniusONE and Zabbix.
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