We performed a comparison between ITRS Geneos 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."
"One thing we're utilizing in Geneos is the Gateway-SQL. That's really helpful for us. Using Gateway-SQL, we are able to merge two different views into one. Suppose we have to check something in the log and that we have to check something in the database and do a comparison before publishing a result. We can achieve that using Gateway-SQL."
"ITRS can define rules to alert when certain parameters that you monitor breach a threshold. Rules can be configured to fire recovery actions automatically to clear the alert"
"The clean and colorful UI and easy to use options like snooze and active times."
"Real-time log monitoring with desktop alerts is valuable as it tells us immediately when there is an issue."
"I would say that it is an easy-to-use monitoring tool. Amongst the available monitoring tools, it is a really good option."
"The filtering in the Active Console is exceptional. Depending on the user base, some people don't want to see server-level errors, so we have filters set up in the Managed Entities view, which allow us to filter out things that certain groups don't want to see, while allowing them to see other things. It's a great real-time monitoring solution. And you can draw graphs immediately, right from the Active Console, whether they're current graphs or historical graphs."
"The ability to build integrations to tools that are not monitored out of the box is the most valuable feature."
"I always appreciate Geneos's stability and ease of use."
"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."
"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 drill-down into detailed views of network activity helps to quickly pinpoint locations and causes. All the information is there."
"It offers a simple yet powerful feature of classifying applications, going beyond basic statistics."
"Having the API access allows us to do a great deal of automation around a lot of our reporting and management tools."
"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."
"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."
"Data visualization – real time and historical – is a weakness."
"A lightweight version which could host more than 100 gateways, as we can see slowness while loading all our gateways."
"One thing that could be improved in terms of rapid scaling would be more ability to clone aspects of an implementation. It seems like there are opportunities in this area, where we have repetitive tasks to do when it comes to implementing things on new servers or on new gateways. It would be great if there was an easy way to clone something that had already been done."
"The main feature that needs work is the Dashboard designer."
"It needs to be easier to configure, especially with the JMX plugins."
"The deployment method for upgrading is a bit tricky. It takes a little bit of manual effort. If that could be a bit more automated, it would help us a lot."
"Backward compatibility with deprecated features and in system documentation on what configuration areas are needed to be updated."
"Geneos' application monitoring could be improved a lot. Products like AppDynamics and Dynatrace provide the process thread-level monitoring, but Geneos lacks these capabilities."
"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."
"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."
"I consider the pricing model as an area for improvement."
ITRS Geneos is ranked 17th in Network Monitoring Software with 57 reviews while Kentik is ranked 47th in Network Monitoring Software with 12 reviews. ITRS Geneos is rated 8.2, while Kentik is rated 9.2. The top reviewer of ITRS Geneos writes "The flexible dashboard sets it apart from competing tools, but it's costly and lacks scalability". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Kentik writes " Flexibility for creating reports and gaining more visibility is a definite strength". ITRS Geneos is most compared with Dynatrace, AppDynamics, Grafana, Datadog and Prometheus, whereas Kentik is most compared with ThousandEyes, Arbor DDoS, SolarWinds NPM, NETSCOUT nGeniusONE and Datadog.
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