We performed a comparison between IBM SevOne Network Performance Management (NPM) 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 network data collection has been very flexible for us. It's been thorough in areas that were lacking. They have a team that I've worked with to add other pieces to it. So if it's missing something out of the box, they work with me to add it. I was able to collect that data. It's not perfect, but it's pretty thorough."
"The automation feature is good because if your CMDB is OK and it is already in sync, then the automation part is good to go."
"One of the most valuable features is the graphs, which you can build instantly. I have used some open-source platforms in the past, but they are not as good. With SevOne, the sampling in the graph can be every few seconds, not just every few minutes, and that's really helpful. It's really fast."
"Its ability to monitor practically any type of network device via SNMP is most valuable. This is the main functionality that we're using. If a network device exposes a metric, such as interface utilization, SevOne will monitor it for us."
"It's given us the ability to create various real-time network performance reports and distribute them to any colleague who can access these reports immediately."
"The out of the box reports and workflows are pretty good and they meet our requirements well."
"It also gives us the closest thing to real-time insight into network performance that we have, with just a 10-second delay. It's very important for us to know the health of the infrastructure very quickly."
"Flexible architecture: You can extend the system and its capacity by attaching another cluster pair."
"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 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 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."
"Having the API access allows us to do a great deal of automation around a lot of our reporting and management tools."
"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."
"It offers a simple yet powerful feature of classifying applications, going beyond basic statistics."
"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."
"The Wi-Fi side needs improvement."
"High-frequency polling is data-intensive because you're pulling more. If SevOne could figure out a way to manage the impact of high-frequency polling on the system, that would be very popular."
"One area that requires a little bit of improvement is the topology of visualization and being able to map out connections, end-to-end. It's able to do that, but it's not as impressive as we would like it to be. We would like to understand the different interface types and the connection points better, through the visualization. Heatmaps also need further development."
"The reports are easy to configure but they are a bit outdated in terms of appearance and visualization."
"SevOne should work with the graphs legend functionality."
"Would benefit with the addition of AI modules for proactive data insights."
"The reporting of NMS is good, but it could be better."
"We previously have had discussions on some reporting enhancements. So, we raised a feature request, which was delivered from SevOne."
"In terms of having a complete view of our network performance, I would rate it a nine out of 10. The reason for not giving it a 10 is that there is no packet capture associated with SevOne, but we do have other tools in place to do that."
"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."
"I would like to see them explore the area of cost analysis."
"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."
"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 consider the pricing model as an area for 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."
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IBM SevOne Network Performance Management (NPM) is ranked 41st in Network Monitoring Software with 52 reviews while Kentik is ranked 47th in Network Monitoring Software with 12 reviews. IBM SevOne Network Performance Management (NPM) is rated 8.6, while Kentik is rated 9.2. The top reviewer of IBM SevOne Network Performance Management (NPM) writes "We can get a new vendor certified and monitored in our system significantly faster than before". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Kentik writes " Flexibility for creating reports and gaining more visibility is a definite strength". IBM SevOne Network Performance Management (NPM) is most compared with Instana Infrastructure Monitoring, LogicMonitor, SolarWinds NPM, Splunk Enterprise Security and NETSCOUT nGeniusONE, whereas Kentik is most compared with ThousandEyes, Arbor DDoS, SolarWinds NPM, NETSCOUT nGeniusONE and Datadog.
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