Fortra's Intermapper vs Pico Corvil Analytics comparison

"It's all today portal-based which is a good feature for us."

"What is really cool about HelpSystems InterMapper is that because of its SNMP base, you can integrate all different makes and models on the same map. You, of course, can have more than one map, but you have an option to have visibility into the entire network from one centralized system. You can monitor IPs, routers, radios, DC power plants, and UPS. You can do it all from one network management and monitoring solution. That's what really makes HelpSystems Intermapper great. Another great thing about HelpSystems InterMapper is that you can really bundle different probes under one device. You can have a bundled device. You can monitor the physical status of a host based on the IP availability. You can also monitor services and actually see if anything happens. You can quickly determine whether it is the application layer, host layer, or network layer. HelpSystems Intermapper gives such a unique representation of a network. Ever since we started using HelpSystems InterMapper, we don't have to document everything in a detailed format and store it somewhere. Right now, it is really a combination of network topology, network monitoring, and network analyzing. So, in my opinion, it is awesome. When you have your SNMP topology defined, you don't require a dedicated NMS engineer to manage your system, which is another great thing about HelpSystems InterMapper. I see how our operators get so excited by having the ability to map a device or interface and connect interfaces together. HelpSystems InterMapper is also very operator friendly; not just user friendly, but also operator friendly. This is a unique feature, and it works really great."

"The most valuable features are its: log history, real-time monitoring capabilities, accuracy - the number of false positives is very low, and the mapping features."

"It's a nice graphical interface, a nice map, that relates Layer 1 to Layer 3, virtually instantly, to the Helpdesk support staff. It provides a default place to get critical information so we can deploy our staff."

"We like the dashboards because they essentially organize all the sessions into one viewpoint."

"We use the data to analyze how much time we spend within the applications. Then, based on that, we are doing multiple analyses and types of investigations to work on reducing the amount of time spent on the latency, which helps our applications."

"We're able to quickly drill down and find answers to events that are happening in real-time, using Corvil's analytics tools. That's the feature which is most in the spotlight..."

"The analytics features of Corvil are really good... As long as you know what the field is in the message, you can build your metrics based on that field... It means you can do the analytics that you actually care for. You can customize it..."

"Time-series graphs are very good for performance analysis. We can do comparisons... We can say this is the latency in the last 24 hours, and this was the same 24-hour period a week ago and overlay the two time-series graphs on top of each other, so we can see the difference. That's a really powerful tool for us."

"What is most valuable is the ability to troubleshoot when a client complains of spikes in latencies. It gives us the ability to go granular, all the way down to looking at the network packets and analyze them."

"The performance metrics are pretty good. We've got everything from the network layer to the actual application layer. We can see what's going on with things like sending time and batching."

"We can use CLI with the UI for configuring the new monitoring system, which is good."

"They can do a better job with SLA reporting. It does some basic reporting, but it really doesn't offer the ability to monitor devices by groups, customers, or carrier to give an overall health performance of specifically-defined environments. That's where HelpSystems Intermapper could have done a better job. I would love to see advanced SLA monitoring and reporting in this solution. They already have a lot of ingredients. They already have SNMP polling. It is really about what people are looking for from SLA monitoring, especially someone who looks at the network topology. You want to see your endpoints. You want to see half of your endpoints by simply analyzing ICMP or SNMP-based availability of your endpoints. Having an ability to define your group and how you bring devices into your group would be a huge benefit."

"It's a smaller solution so tools are not as advanced as you would find in a larger solution"

"I'd love to see more of the network management side of it coming back into it. If we were able to run scripts to bounce ports on switches, that would be great. It's asking a lot, but it's actually very doable because I do it through scripting into other products. If we could incorporate that directly into Intermapper, that would be fantastic."

"There is definitely room for improvement in the reporting. We've tried to use the reporting in Corvil but, to me, it feels like a bolt-on, like not a lot of thought has gone into it. The whole interface where you build reports and schedule them is very clunky."

"The creation of charts and real-time windows was somewhat cumbersome. The vendor's website had an application called App Agent that required improvement. This API was designed to track message rates between microservers ingested into a microservice memory map. It allowed users to monitor the number of transactions that occurred at specific points within the application, and it was quite impressive. However, it had some limitations, and it mainly served as a tool for basic tracking. The protocols it employed could reveal the type of server-to-server communication and the specific order types, but it was not able to provide a more in-depth analysis of the application. The vendor has the potential to integrate application metrics more extensively into their product suite."

"The analytics feature is very nice, but it's mostly software. We are hoping that it could be embedded in ASICs, so it could be faster."

"Alerting isn't great... you can only put in one email address in. And that's for all kinds of alerting on the box."

"Before I got the Corvil training... one thing that was not very efficient was that every time you had to create a new stream or a new session from within Corvil... you had to tell it what protocol the message is going to come through and how to correlate messages, etc... After I went for the training, they had already added these nice features in the 9.4 version where it could do auto-discovery... Based on the traffic that it has already seen, it could create sessions on the fly."

"While the product is scalable, it's not easy to scale. It needs investment hardware and network bandwidth consideration. It's not something you can just do overnight."

"Overall, the Corvil device needs a little bit of training for people to handle it. If that could be reduced and made more user-friendly, more intuitive, it would be better."

"It's quite difficult to see, sometimes, how hard your Corvil is working. When we had a very busy feed that chucked out a lot of data it wasn't working very well on Corvil. We had to raise a case for it. It turned out to be that, in fact, we were overloading Corvil."

"It is pricey versus its competitors."

"We bought a box from Corvil and it was $200,000 for one big CNE. Then there are obviously the recurring maintenance fees. The licensing is perpetual but the maintenance fees are not."

"Corvil has reduced the time it takes us to isolate root causes."

"I like the way they've decoupled the hardware now... Everything's based on the licensing side now. The way they do the packs is fair. It's very flexible in that we're not charged per decoder, we're charged for a certain pack. Whether we use one decoder or 20 decoders, as long as they're in the same pack, there's no extra charge. Expensive but fair is how I'd summarize it."

"The pricing is very expensive. Corvil could work on the pricing."

"Pico Corvil Analytics is expensive. There are several competitors in the market. Selling this solution to a trading firm might be challenging as there are several other solutions available that can perform basic similar operations, such as using Wireshark and Python scripts to obtain the required values. However, that does not nearly approach the comprehensive end-2-end automated depth of metrics and their correlations that Pico Corvil Analytics provides."

"As I am working more with Corvil, it looks like it is improving diagnostic times."