Pico Corvil Analytics vs SolarWinds ipMonitor comparison

"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."

"It allows us to trace the flow. The logic is built sufficiently for us to be able to break down clients' orders, underlying child orders, and execution. Thus, it's a good way for us to trace client flow through a myriad of different internal systems."

"Broadly speaking, this solution has reduced incident diagnosis times because it is a tool that we don't have elsewhere."

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

"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."

"Corvil is really useful, if you want to produce statistics for your application across different platforms then I would definitely recommend it."

"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."

"It has all the decoders so it's capturing every network packet and it's decoding in real-time and it's giving us latency information in real-time... It's the real-time decoding and getting the latency information statistics that we find the most useful."

"The initial setup is very straightforward and it is easy to add nodes."

"IPAM is used for IP address reservation and tracking, helping us easily identify live IP addresses."

"IPAM is used for IP address reservation and tracking, helping us easily identify live IP addresses."

"The most valuable feature is the availability of end devices."

"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."

"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."

"Alerting isn't great... you can only put in one email address in. And that's for all kinds of alerting on the box."

"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."

"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... 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."

"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."

"While the product is scalable, it's not easy to scale. It needs investment hardware and network bandwidth consideration."

"The licensing cost is high compared to open source tools."

"The licensing cost is high compared to open source tools."

"The solution does not include enough features and has some performance issues."

"The solution does not include enough features and has some performance issues."

"It is pricey versus its competitors."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"The solution is a bit expensive because the annual license does not include new features that are priced as add-ons."