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Kentik vs NETSCOUT vSTREAM comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Oct 10, 2024

Review summaries and opinions

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Categories and Ranking

Kentik
Ranking in Network Monitoring Software
32nd
Average Rating
9.2
Reviews Sentiment
7.4
Number of Reviews
15
Ranking in other categories
Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) Protection (16th)
NETSCOUT vSTREAM
Ranking in Network Monitoring Software
79th
Average Rating
8.0
Number of Reviews
3
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of May 2025, in the Network Monitoring Software category, the mindshare of Kentik is 0.8%, up from 0.7% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of NETSCOUT vSTREAM is 0.3%, down from 0.3% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Network Monitoring Software
 

Featured Reviews

ADRIANA SALDARRIAGA TOBON - PeerSpot reviewer
Client experience and cybersecurity have improved with an easy setup
The solution is valuable for client experience, especially in the financial sector. The most important feature is cybersecurity. The pricing is good, but the functionality is the most important aspect for clients. The solution is easy to deploy and requires only one person to set up, making it easy and quick. Overall, the ease of use and the fact that it meets client expectations are major positives.
MM
Troubleshooting at the packet level helps us resolve issues more quickly
The solution provides increased visibility during an IT deployment. It enables us to troubleshoot a service when it is down. As we expand our company, more users are using the tool to quickly resolve issues. It helps us and them get to root cause quickly. For example, last week a DNS was not running anymore. We checked the packet and saw that there was a buffer overload. It has cut our overall troubleshooting time. Sometimes it took a month to troubleshoot something that we can now do within days. nGenius has helped increase application or network uptime. The DNS I mentioned is now a better server with more capacity than before, because of our troubleshooting. We see a measurable decrease in mean time to know and mean time to repair. We see that when our customers are using this tool, their stability on the link is getting better and better, every time they use it. Also, we use the solution for unified communication application performance and it helps with uptime and end-user experience. Sometimes the quality of voice calls is not good enough, so we use the Media Monitor to check the quality in real-time.

Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Pros

"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."
"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."
"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."
"Overall, the ease of use and the fact that it meets client expectations are major positives."
"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."
"Monitoring operational efficiency is easy."
"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."
"One of the valuable features is the packet decoding."
"vSTREAM gives us better visibility and reporting about our network infrastructure, allowing for cost-optimization."
 

Cons

"I would like to see them explore the area of cost analysis."
"In recent months, I've noticed that while the industry is trending towards AI, Kentik has room for improvement in this area."
"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."
"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."
"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..."
"Sometimes, the tool has complications, so we must deal with the additional support from the tool's end."
"Room for improvement exists in filtering in the packet decode."
"I would like for it to have a smaller footprint of the virtual appliance and better performance."
"I would like to see improvements made to the user guide."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The tool is cheaply priced."
"We have an annual contract with Kentik that we renew each year for a set number of licenses. We also have some burstable licenses which we can spin up and spin down, and those are paid as they are used."
"Licensing is quite expensive."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Computer Software Company
17%
Financial Services Firm
11%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Comms Service Provider
7%
Financial Services Firm
14%
Computer Software Company
13%
Government
12%
Energy/Utilities Company
10%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
No data available
 

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about Kentik?
It offers a simple yet powerful feature of classifying applications, going beyond basic statistics.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Kentik?
The pricing is good and aligns with the market target.
What needs improvement with Kentik?
The product could strive for more improvements to become closer to perfect.
Ask a question
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Comparisons

 

Also Known As

No data available
vSTREAM
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Pandora, Yelp, Neustar, Box, University of Washington, Zoom, Tata, and Cogent. 
Metropolitan Police Agency, Banpara, PropertyRoom.com
Find out what your peers are saying about Kentik vs. NETSCOUT vSTREAM and other solutions. Updated: April 2025.
850,747 professionals have used our research since 2012.