We performed a comparison between DX Spectrum 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."
"I can use it to detect whenever things go wrong on my network."
"It does correlation so instead of producing 20 alarms if a site goes down, it only creates one."
"It covers a lot of different types of hardware. It can do a lot and saves us time."
"Discovery: Scheduled, on-demand, synchronized with eHealth."
"It is easy to navigate."
"This product provides good visibility into applications at the backend."
"The most valuable feature is the event correlation mechanism."
"The most valuable features of DX Spectrum are the comprehensive alerts."
"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."
"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."
"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 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."
"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."
"Having the API access allows us to do a great deal of automation around a lot of our reporting and management tools."
"The Wi-Fi side needs improvement."
"I think the management or configuration of devices needs some improvement."
"For my use case, incident coordination was an area of improvement. The internal software engine for coordinating outages could use improvement because sometimes, we used to get false alerts for unrelated devices. They did a really good job of trying to make sure that you got one major alert and any of the subsequent devices downstream were just additions to that, but occasionally, the engine wouldn't properly catch the right things, and we used to get a flood of alerts."
"It's not a great performance management tool. Its reporting capabilities are not very good at all."
"It needs better integration with other CA products."
"It doesn’t give you performance metrics: You need CA eHealth for this."
"It was somewhat complex to implement."
"The Spectrum OneClick is a Java-based client, and that's aging. Really, before any new feature integration, I'd love to see a comprehensive rebuild of the UI."
"Integration with some other tools, and integration with some Network Packet Broker, need some improvement."
"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."
"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."
"I would like to see them explore the area of cost analysis."
"I consider the pricing model as an area for improvement."
"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."
"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 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."
DX Spectrum is ranked 13th in Network Monitoring Software with 115 reviews while Kentik is ranked 47th in Network Monitoring Software with 12 reviews. DX Spectrum is rated 8.4, while Kentik is rated 9.2. The top reviewer of DX Spectrum writes "Comprehensive alerts, beneficial overall network viability, and scalability not limited". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Kentik writes " Flexibility for creating reports and gaining more visibility is a definite strength". DX Spectrum is most compared with DX NetOps, Zabbix, SolarWinds NPM, Cisco DNA Center and ThousandEyes, whereas Kentik is most compared with ThousandEyes, Arbor DDoS, SolarWinds NPM, NETSCOUT nGeniusONE and Datadog.
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