We performed a comparison between SolarWinds NetFlow Traffic Analyzer and SolarWinds NPM based on real PeerSpot user reviews.
Find out in this report how the two Network Traffic Analysis (NTA) solutions compare in terms of features, pricing, service and support, easy of deployment, and ROI."It keeps up with the network traffic, which is a good thing. It provides more context to plain alerts compared to using an older system. So, it helps an analyst reduce the information overload."
"Cognito Streams gives you a detailed view of what happens in the network in the form of rich metadata. It is just a super easy way to capture network traffic for important protocols, giving us an advantage. This is very helpful on a day-to-day basis."
"One of the core features is that Vectra AI triages threats and correlates them with compromised host devices. From a visibility perspective, we can better track the threat across the network. Instead of us potentially finding one device that has been impacted without Vectra AI, it will give us the visibility of everywhere that threat went. Therefore, visibility has increased for us."
"The administrative privilege detection feature is the most valuable feature. The admin accounts are often highly accessible to the high-risk component of the environment. If those accounts are compromised or are being used in a suspicious manner, that's high-fidelity events for us to look into."
"The most useful feature is the anomaly detection because it's not signature-based. It picks up the initial part of any attack, like the recon and those aspects of the kill chain, very well."
"What I like best about Vectra AI is that it alerts you about suspicious activities."
"It does a reliable job of parsing out the logs of all the network traffic so that we can ingest them into our SIEM and utilize them for threat hunting and case investigations. It is pretty robust and reliable. The administration time that we spend maintaining it or troubleshooting it is very low. So, the labor hour overhead is probably our largest benefit from it. We spend 99% of our time in Vectra investigating cases, responding to incidents, or hunting, and only around 1% of our time is spent patching, troubleshooting, or doing anything else. That's our largest benefit from Vectra."
"What my organization likes best about SolarWinds NetFlow Traffic Analyzer is its easy deployment. It's also well-integrated in terms of monitoring because my organization also uses a SolarWinds solution for monitoring. You can connect SolarWinds NetFlow Traffic Analyzer directly to that monitoring tool to get information. My organization also finds the default graphs that appear before the configuration in SolarWinds NetFlow Traffic Analyzer very useful."
"The initial setup was straightforward."
"What I like about SolarWinds NetFlow Traffic Analyzer is that it's useful for analyzing traffic. It also has an application visibility feature that lets you control applications."
"The software management tools are very useful for our customers."
"What people found most valuable in SolarWinds NetFlow Traffic Analyzer is its report customization feature."
"The bandwidth monitoring functionality is one of the most important features for our customers. When the customer notices that their bandwidth usage is too high for some reason, they will use the traffic analysis within SolarWinds NTA to identify which protocols (e.g. HTTPS) or applications are using up the bandwidth."
"What the network team found most valuable in SolarWinds NetFlow Traffic Analyzer is that it helps them to troubleshoot or analyze the issue. For example, traffic that comes from our location: India, goes to the US, so for the network team to analyze where the traffic comes from and where it is directed, and whether the packets are being dropped, they use SolarWinds NetFlow Traffic Analyzer. The network team also likes that through the solution, they can analyze the complete traffic utilization and how they're going to use it. SolarWinds NetFlow Traffic Analyzer is user-friendly. The team finds it comfortable to use."
"For managing the traffic, it provides you a response about whether the traffic is down, up, or heavy, which is a very powerful feature. It has a good response time. We have been using this solution for many years, and we don't have any problem with this solution."
"The benefit of this solution is the reporting. We're able to report on and see our network in a graphical form. We are able to detect when a device is added to a network."
"It is considerably cheaper compared to other tools."
"Monitoring capabilities are at a high level and it is easy to see utilization, access ports, and CPU memory in real time or through a lens for long-term visualization."
"We have configured multiple alerts for our network devices, including routers and switches, so that we are notified if any interface goes down."
"SolarWinds dashboard is very fast. Also, their interface is very good, it looks very user-friendly. The product allows me to see a summary of the network being monitored at a glance."
"Provides a good level of tools and covers essential components."
"It's easy to understand, even if you are not too technical."
"The nice thing about SolarWinds is that it's kind of all-in-one. I can manage the status of my networking devices, whether they are up or down, I can see how much traffic is going across an interface, and I can run a report that tells me exactly what that traffic is."
"An area for improvement in Vectra AI is reporting because it currently needs some details. For example, when you download a report from Vectra AI, you won't see complete information about the alerts or triggers. Another area for improvement in the tool is that sometimes, an alert has high severity, yet it's marked as low severity. Vectra AI should have a mechanism to change the severity level from low to high or critical."
"If you hit a certain number of rules, triage filters, or groups, the UX responds more slowly. However, we have a complex network and a lot of rules. So, our setup might not be a typical implementation example. We even had UX engineers onsite, and they looked at issues, improvements, and user feedback. Since then, it has gotten a lot better, they even built in features that we specifically requested for our company."
"Integration with other security components needs improvement. It should have true integration as opposed to just being a separate pane of glass."
"I would like more integrations with IOCs and threats currently on the Internet. I would also like to know which threats are based on zero-day attacks, current botnets, etc. Therefore, I would like more information on external threats."
"The reporting from Cognito Detect is very limited and doesn't give you too many options. If I want to prepare a customized report on a particular host, even though I see the data, I have to manually prepare the report. The reporting features that are built into the tool are not very helpful."
"I would like to see data processed onshore. Right now, the cloud components, like Office 365, must be processed on servers outside of Australia. I would like to see a future adoption of onshore processing."
"They use a proprietary logging format that is probably 90% similar to Bro Logs. Their biggest area of improvement is finishing out the remaining 10%. That 10% might not be beneficial to their ML engine, but that's fine. The industry standard is Zeek Logs or Bro Logs, or Bro or Zeek, depending on how old you are. While they have 90% of those fields, they're still missing some fields. In very rare instances, some community rules do not have the fields that they need, and we had to modify community rules for our logs. So, their biggest area of improvement would be to just finish their matching of the Zeek standard."
"As people always complain about the pricing for SolarWinds NetFlow Traffic Analyzer, it's an area for improvement in the solution. People find it expensive. Another area for improvement in SolarWinds NetFlow Traffic Analyzer is support, as it could be better."
"There are some areas for improvement in SolarWinds NetFlow Traffic Analyzer. There are some challenges with the solution when compared to other monitoring tools such as difficulty in operations and difficulty with backup installation. My team is currently trying out different solutions but would need to see how it goes."
"The solution needs better log management and log coordination with tools."
"NTA's documentation for the implementation phase needs some enhancement."
"What needs improvement in SolarWinds NetFlow Traffic Analyzer is performance because sometimes, my team struggles too much for the solution to perform correctly for a specific deployment in my organization. Having a more detailed view in SolarWinds NetFlow Traffic Analyzer is another area for improvement, but that's more part of the protocol than the actual solution."
"One area that we struggle with is the price. Because the price of this solution is so high, we are largely unable to introduce it into the local market, and only the banking sector has the means to afford it."
"If your network is on SolarWinds, and you notice that the traffic is bad because it says "user downloading a heavy file," it doesn't indicate which endpoint is downloading those heavy files. SolarWinds doesn't have the tools to be able to handle this kind of situation. You can just notice through your network device that the traffic is becoming overwhelming or heavy, but you cannot go inside and get more details related to the endpoint where it is happening. We would like SolarWinds to be able to handle this kind of situation and even manage the traffic inside a network from the endpoint to the network device. These would be good enhancements. It is mostly stable. The problem comes only when we want to add another SolarWinds model. SolarWinds has so many models, and sometimes when we want to add other models on the platforms that are reserved for our firm, it freezes. When this happens, we have to create a new VM for that model."
"Technical support could be improved with quicker response times."
"The improvement would be that SolarWinds NPM thoroughly checks its patches before releasing them to the market. Better testing, alpha testing, and then releasing it to the market."
"We also had to be attentive to vulnerabilities, because SolarWinds NPM have some issues in that area. We had to work with our security team, so that they could help us check and backup the data, and check what they needed to secure."
"They have had a rather large security breach in the past. It's cost some companies customers."
"An area for improvement in SolarWinds NPM is the short retention period. Currently, it's just for seven days of data, which is very low, making it hard for my organization to keep that data. SolarWinds recommended a seven-day retention period, but my organization needs a fourteen-day data retention period. Hence, I'd like an increase in the retention period or the database limit in SolarWinds NPM because you can't go back to the data for any investigation if seven days have passed. Another area for improvement in SolarWinds NPM is the database, which needs to be a bit more mature. I want a modified database in the next release of SolarWinds NPM. I'd also like more options added to groups because, currently, it's very limited."
"SolarWinds could offer more support and insights for a broader range of devices. Currently, it focuses on routers, switches, and some load balancers. However, it lacks an out-of-the-box dashboard for monitoring firewalls and some other modern network security devices. We have to customize it a lot."
"Being able to detect devices that are trying to connect wirelessly would make using this solution much easier."
"I would like to have a Syslog server module for this product. That would make the solution better."
"It would be good to have high security."
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SolarWinds NetFlow Traffic Analyzer is ranked 7th in Network Traffic Analysis (NTA) with 10 reviews while SolarWinds NPM is ranked 4th in Network Monitoring Software with 47 reviews. SolarWinds NetFlow Traffic Analyzer is rated 8.0, while SolarWinds NPM is rated 8.0. The top reviewer of SolarWinds NetFlow Traffic Analyzer writes "Good real-time traffic reports, but uncomfortably high pricing and mediocre support". On the other hand, the top reviewer of SolarWinds NPM writes "Simple to set up with good visualizations and helpful support". SolarWinds NetFlow Traffic Analyzer is most compared with Cisco Secure Network Analytics, Auvik, Zabbix, Plixer Scrutinizer and Wireshark, whereas SolarWinds NPM is most compared with Zabbix, ManageEngine OpManager, PRTG Network Monitor, LogicMonitor and Nagios XI. See our SolarWinds NPM vs. SolarWinds NetFlow Traffic Analyzer report.
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