Observer GigaStor vs Pico Corvil Analytics comparison

Viavi Solutions and PICO are both solutions in the Network Monitoring Software category. Viavi Solutions is ranked #93, while PICO is ranked #73. Viavi Solutions holds a 0.2% mindshare in NMS, compared to PICO’s 0.5% mindshare. Additionally, 100% of Viavi Solutions users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 100% of PICO users who would recommend it.

Observer GigaStor

Read 7 Observer GigaStor reviews

234 Views
178 Comparison Views

100% willing to recommend

Pico Corvil Analytics

Read 9 Pico Corvil Analytics reviews

955 Views
429 Comparison Views

100% willing to recommend

Observer GigaStor

Pico Corvil Analytics

Comparison Buyer's Guide

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Oct 10, 2024

Pico Corvil Analytics and Observer GigaStor are competing network analytics products. Pico Corvil Analytics takes the lead in pricing and support, while Observer GigaStor stands out due to its robust feature set and justifies higher costs.

Features: Pico Corvil Analytics offers in-depth packet capture, real-time analytics, and cloud-based functionality. Observer GigaStor provides comprehensive historical data analysis, extensive protocol support, and retrospective analysis capabilities.

Room for Improvement: Pico Corvil Analytics could enhance its historical data capabilities, expand its protocol support, and improve offline access. Observer GigaStor might advance its real-time analytics, streamline its user interface, and simplify its cloud integration.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Pico Corvil Analytics offers easy cloud-based deployment with responsive customer support, while Observer GigaStor requires on-premises setup and supplies comprehensive installation assistance.

Pricing and ROI: Pico Corvil Analytics features a lower initial setup cost and a quicker ROI due to its subscription-based model. Observer GigaStor requires a higher initial investment but delivers significant long-term ROI through its extensive feature set.

To learn more, read our detailed Observer GigaStor vs. Pico Corvil Analytics Report (Updated: April 2025).

Buyer's Guide

Observer GigaStor vs. Pico Corvil Analytics

April 2025

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Helped 851,471 peers since 2012

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

93rd

Average Rating

9.0

Reviews Sentiment

8.1

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Network Troubleshooting (15th), Network Packet Broker (NPB) (9th)

Pico Corvil Analytics

Ranking in Network Monitoring Software

73rd

Average Rating

9.0

Reviews Sentiment

7.1

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

Mindshare comparison

As of May 2025, in the Network Monitoring Software category, the mindshare of Observer GigaStor is 0.2%, up from 0.2% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Pico Corvil Analytics is 0.5%, up from 0.3% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Network Monitoring Software

Featured Reviews

Jeroen-Dubbelman

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.

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Ted Hruzd

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.

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Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"This solution allows us to see exactly what is going on in the network and we can very quickly solve issues with users."

"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 ability to capture packets. It is not only for monitoring. That is very important for a company that wants to keep an eye on the packets, the transactions, the flows..."

"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."

"It can help to write your rules, organize firewalls, your block, and also your protocols and IP address to come in or out of your network."

"As part of my role in monitoring multiple client connections, I would use Pico Corvil Analytics to set up alerts for performance issues, such as TCP resends and dropped packets. These alerts would trigger when the volume was low and performance was poor, allowing me to work with our trading partners to find a resolution. I would present them with the statistics I had and together, we would identify the source of the issue. This collaboration resulted in the client often reconfiguring their systems. For example, we may find that a network connection needed to be made. Overall, this proactive approach helped to maintain strong connections with our clients and minimize disruptions to trading revenue."

"With the Corvil Stored Data Analyzer module, we can use it for test data or a set of production data to set up the configuration for latency setup, so we can use the fields to correlate messages."

"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..."

"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..."

"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."

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

"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."

More Pico Corvil Analytics pros

Cons

"I would like to have more than 4TB of storage available in the portable version of this solution."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"I have seen errors where the CNE and the CMC haven't synced because of something missing in the CMC, which was there in the CNE. We would get some type of error, but it doesn't actually say what exactly was missing in the CNE."

"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."

"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."

"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."

More Pico Corvil Analytics cons

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."

"It is pricey versus its competitors."

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

"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."

"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."

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Financial Services Firm

25%

Computer Software Company

19%

Manufacturing Company

10%

University

Financial Services Firm

56%

Computer Software Company

10%

Manufacturing Company

Educational Organization

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about Observer GigaStor?

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What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Observer GigaStor?

I would rate the pricing a ten out of ten. It's quite expensive.

See all answers

What needs improvement with Observer GigaStor?

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 coul...

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Comparisons

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Compared 27% of the time

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Compared 22% of the time

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Compared 20% of the time

NETSCOUT nGeniusONE vs Observer GigaStor

Compared 16% of the time

AppNeta by Broadcom vs Observer GigaStor

Compared 15% of the time

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Compared 34% of the time

Datadog vs Pico Corvil Analytics

Compared 30% of the time

ExtraHop Reveal(x) vs Pico Corvil Analytics

Compared 19% of the time

NIKSUN NetVCR vs Pico Corvil Analytics

Compared 16% of the time

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Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Observer GigaStor

May 2025

Download Observer GigaStor product report

Buyer's Guide

Pico Corvil Analytics

May 2025

Download Pico Corvil Analytics product report

Also Known As

No data available

Corvil

Overview

Observer GigaStor is a network analysis tool that comes in a variety of form factors, including rack mount, portable, and virtual. Capable of storing up to a petabyte of traffic for later analysis, GigaStor helps ensure optimal network and application performance.

Viavi Solutions

Corvil transforms Network Data with speed and precision into the powerful real-time truth. Corvil captures, decodes, reassembles, and enriches vast amounts of data in motion, adding analytics and making the resulting enriched data and IT Operations Analytics available to humans, machines and other systems.

PICO

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.

Buyer's Guide

Observer GigaStor vs. Pico Corvil Analytics

April 2025

Free Report: Observer GigaStor vs. Pico Corvil Analytics

Find out what your peers are saying about Observer GigaStor vs. Pico Corvil Analytics and other solutions. Updated: April 2025.

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