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 most valuable features provided by this solution are visibility and information."
"Being able to graph and show data to management has improved our organization. We can show the data to the higher-ups. It shows them that it's picking up on these anomalies and doing its job."
"The most valuable feature of this solution is data hoarding because it catches threats on a frequent basis that we had no idea of."
"The most valuable feature is NetFlow. The beginning of any security investigation starts with NetFlow data."
"The beginning of any security investigation starts with net flow data."
"The most valuable feature about this solution is that it gives me insight of my network."
"Cisco Stealthwatch provides the solutions analytics and threat detection capabilities that I am looking for. It has also improved the network visibility of our organization."
"The feature most valuable for us is to gain visibility of what is actually floating through, so we can stop it based on whether it's good or bad traffic."
"It offers a simple yet powerful feature of classifying applications, going beyond basic statistics."
"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."
"Having the API access allows us to do a great deal of automation around a lot of our reporting and management tools."
"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."
"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 drill-down into detailed views of network activity helps to quickly pinpoint locations and causes. All the information is there."
"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."
"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 Wi-Fi side needs improvement."
"Complexity on integration is not so straightforward and you really need an expert to help build it out."
"Stealthwatch is still maturing in AI. It uses artificial intelligence for predictions, but AI still needs to mature. It is in a phase where you get 95% correct detection. As its AI engine learns more, it will become more accurate. This is applicable to all the devices that are using AI because they support both supervised and unsupervised machine learning. The accuracy in the case of supervised machine learning is dependent on the data you feed into the box. The accuracy in the case of unsupervised machine learning is dependent on the algorithm. The algorithm matures depending on retrospective learning, and this is how it is able to detect zero-day attacks."
"Reliance on Java. Get away from that."
"The visualization could be improved, the GUI is not the best."
"One update that I would like to see is an agent-based client. Currently, Stealthwatch is network-based. A local agent could help manage endpoints."
"Stealthwatch needs improvement when it comes to speed."
"We are continuing down the road of ACI and ISE with Cisco, so we would like to see the continuation of Stealthwatch integrating into ISE for exchange of information, and also, more into the ACI environment too."
"It would be better to let people know, up front, that is doesn't give you nice, clear information, as seen in the demos, without Cisco ISE installed."
"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."
"I would like to see them explore the area of cost analysis."
"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 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."
"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."
"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..."
"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."
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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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