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Observer GigaStor vs Pico Corvil Analytics 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

Observer GigaStor
Ranking in Network Monitoring Software
84th
Average Rating
9.0
Reviews Sentiment
8.1
Number of Reviews
7
Ranking in other categories
Network Troubleshooting (14th), Network Packet Broker (NPB) (8th)
Pico Corvil Analytics
Ranking in Network Monitoring Software
69th
Average Rating
9.0
Reviews Sentiment
7.1
Number of Reviews
9
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of August 2026, in the Network Monitoring Software category, the mindshare of Observer GigaStor is 0.5%, up from 0.2% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Pico Corvil Analytics is 0.6%, up from 0.5% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Network Monitoring Software Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Pico Corvil Analytics0.6%
Observer GigaStor0.5%
Other98.9%
Network Monitoring Software
 

Featured Reviews

Jeroen-Dubbelman - PeerSpot reviewer
Director at Bitrate
Aids significantly in the threat-hunting process and provides a score-based evaluation of user experience
There are many valuable features, but understanding end-user response times stands out. It provides a score-based evaluation of user experience, helping customers quickly pinpoint whether issues originate from the network, server, client, or application. Additionally, it facilitates in-depth analysis of application dependencies. The retrospective network analysis capability of Observer GigaStor has been beneficial. It's a pivotal feature for network performance solutions. However, I prefer to consider the entire solution suite - GigaStor, along with GigaFlow and Apex - for comprehensive network visibility and monitoring. So, I prefer to integrate all three solutions to provide the best visibility. They complement each other well, with Apex aggregating and correlating data from both GigaStor and GigaFlow to enhance environmental understanding and troubleshooting efficiency.
Ted Hruzd - PeerSpot reviewer
Founder at AI Fit LLC
Helpful support agents, beneficial issue detection, and high availability
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 product suite could benefit from more out-of-the-box predictive analytics capabilities, such as projecting market or symbol movements. However, it is unclear whether the vendor currently provides this functionality. Users may need to adjust their software to perform such analysis independently.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"Enables us to go back in time to capture an issue and analyze it for a solution, and this after the fact analysis is key to overcoming the bump in the night issues."
"There are many valuable features, but understanding end-user response times stands out. It provides a score-based evaluation of user experience, helping customers quickly pinpoint whether issues originate from the network, server, client, or application. Additionally, it facilitates in-depth analysis of application dependencies."
"This solution allows us to see exactly what is going on in the network and we can very quickly solve issues with users."
"I have no regrets using this product, I am very satisfied for what I paid for it and for the things I am able to do with the product."
"Go take a look at it. It's a great product and has great capabilities."
"Industry-leading line rates, packet-capture technology and data-mining capabilities are the most valuable features."
"I also have the ability to see an application's performance, to see what's going on, why a network is slow, why this program for this user is experiencing a delay or some network issue"
"It's able to capture packets and, after a long time, you can come and use that information; to check, to analyze - everything you would want to do. So it's very good and helpful if you want to protect your data. It is stored in a certain place where you can access it every time you want to analyze it."
"In the sense that it helps us identify performance issues, it does give us a performance advantage over competitors."
"Corvil is a great tool; it is the only one of the vendors that has 100% visibility into the market data stream."
"Corvil definitely delivers a performance advantage for our firm over our competition because we are able to address all issues on a near real-time basis."
"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 like the dashboards because they essentially organize all the sessions into one viewpoint."
"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."
"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."
"Corvil is really useful, if you want to produce statistics for your application across different platforms then I would definitely recommend it."
 

Cons

"Graphics need improvement. Because a lot of the information there you have to input first in some case to have full potential. It could be more automated."
"The Observer Console UI is consistent and stable, but could use some updating to be more modern."
"GigaStor feeds into Apex. So, the area where there could be improvement would be in artificial intelligence. For example, the incorporation of more advanced machine learning or AI capabilities could enhance its functionality."
"Maybe the graphical user interface could be simplified to allow people to use it more easily. It's already good, but they can work more on it to make it even easier."
"There are some issues, in our environment that puts processing restraints on the Gigastor when turning on trending data to be sent to APEX."
"I would like to have more than 4TB of storage available in the portable version of this solution."
"The interface is pretty complex, so for the average user, it takes a while to get up to speed with it. I would like it to be more user-friendly."
"There is definitely room for improvement in the reporting... The whole interface where you build reports and schedule them is very clunky and I find that, whereas on the GUI you can pull out all the metrics you want and it's very flexible and nice and easy to customize, the reporting is not very intuitive."
"In terms of performance analysis, if you really want to dig down into the minutiae and get statistics on the important things... that would be the only piece lacking because, in our environment, we have thousands and thousands of symbols. With the architecture that Corvil is built on, it's cumbersome."
"With the architecture that Corvil is built on, it's cumbersome."
"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."
"Alerting isn't great... you can only put in one email address in. And that's for all kinds of alerting on the box."
"For FIX protocol, maybe we could have built-in configurations for signatures and decoders. Also, for certain protocols, which are newer, we would like to just add the signatures within the decoders itself."
"Sometimes, when you are saving any configuration and making changes, there are times something is missing. An error comes up, or sometimes there is no error, and the errors are not very straightforward as to the issue."
"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."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"It depends on the requirements you have. There are three types of license. There's the updates license, the work group license, and the workstation license."
"It's quite expensive."
"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."
"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."
"Corvil has reduced the time it takes us to isolate root causes."
"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."
"The pricing is very expensive. Corvil could work on the pricing."
"As I am working more with Corvil, it looks like it is improving diagnostic times."
"It is pricey versus its competitors."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Construction Company
18%
Financial Services Firm
13%
Outsourcing Company
8%
Computer Software Company
7%
Financial Services Firm
30%
Outsourcing Company
9%
Computer Software Company
7%
Comms Service Provider
5%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business5
Large Enterprise3
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business2
Midsize Enterprise1
Large Enterprise6
 

Also Known As

No data available
Corvil
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Cisco Systems, Hawaiian Telecom, Renown Health, State of Nevada, U.S. Department of Veteran Affairs, Allstate Insurance, Jack Henry & Associates, United States Airforce, US Bank, Blue Cross Blue Shield of Minnesota, Texas Tech University Health Sciences Center, Chicago Board Options Exchange
NASDAQ, Commerzbank, Pico Quantitative Trading, CME Group, Interactive Data, Tokyo Stock Exchange Inc.
Find out what your peers are saying about Observer GigaStor vs. Pico Corvil Analytics and other solutions. Updated: August 2026.
910,005 professionals have used our research since 2012.