NETSCOUT InfiniStreamNG Reviews

The primary use case is for reactive application monitoring, not proactive yet.

We are working on deploying proactive monitoring of SaaS applications and remote sites.

The company has been using the product for years.

It gives us the ability to show application teams more on their own applications rather than just telling them what we see and check. This is something that we can share with them.

This solution provides us with increased visibility while conducting IT deployments. If we are changing services, we usually like to enable the monitoring prior. We want to see how the changes and migration have taken effect, or if it's working as expected.

It helps us get to root cause quickly. With utilization and consumption of bandwidth, we can usually see what application is taking as much as they should (or shouldn't), then account for it accordingly.

The real-time troubleshooting and application segregation that you can do within it.

I would like to see an improved level of stitching between IPs.

It is pretty much stable.

It can be scalable. It just costs too much. With a company as big as ours, it gets too expensive to accommodate every single site.

The technical support is good. We have an SE onsite a couple days a week.

We used NETSCOUT for the deployment.

I have seen ROI in terms of time. This solution has cut our overall troubleshooting time. 

This product could be cheaper.

I recently stacked the NETSCOUT product up against its competitors, and this one came on top.

If you are looking for a good application monitoring and packet analysis tool, you can strategically use NETSCOUT to get it done. Depending on how you do it, you can do it in a cost-efficient way. That is how we did it.

I haven't used the single pane of glass or the dependency mapping. 

We use it to monitor the network.

The State has been using the nGeniusONE solution for over 10 years.

It allows us to get quicker resolutions. We can see exactly what is using up the bandwidth, so we can assist end users.

We use it for monitoring whenever we update a new circuit or site.

It helps us determine the root cause. E.g., we can easily drill down, seeing exactly what is using up the network and tell the end users what it is.

We use the solution for unified communication application performance. It helps us with our uptime and user experience. It gives us the ability to check call signals to see exactly where the issue might be occurring, depending on where InfiniStreamNGs are placed.

I like the single pane of glass view. It is nice to be able to go to one location to get everything. 

It's simple to use, easy to manage, and gives great information.

Other good features:

• Being able to do the deep dive packets.
• It shows application times.
• Network bandwidth utilization.

Being able to manage the packet flow switches in nGeniusONE would be great.

We still need to get our engineering team more involved in the tool to help them understand how to use it a bit better.

It is very stable.

The scalability is very nice. I'm excited to get into the vSTREAMs for the virtual appliances.

The technical support is great. Every time that we work with our sales engineer or attack problems, we get a resolution quickly.

The initial setup was pretty straightforward: Knowing where to place things and how to get the traffic sent over. Sales engineers are always available to assist, when needed.

We deployed it all on our own.

This solution has cut our overall troubleshooting time. Sometimes, it can go down to a few hours over what might have taken one to two days to fully troubleshoot an issue.

It has helped to increase our application uptime. We try to keep the five nines.

It helps with our time to troubleshoot issues. The less time that you take to troubleshoot an issue the quicker it will free up that person.

It is a great tool, which works extremely well for what it does. If you can get it in and get it placed correctly in your network, it's one of the best tools that you can get.

I like the dependency mapping, but I haven't use it much. I would like to utilize it more.

We do more reactive monitoring.

We use it for monitoring subscribers.

It provides you with your Internet traffic volume, like Facebook, and where your biggest source of volume is coming from.

The single pane of glass feed still needs work. I do feel for what we have that it's fine.

I would like them to simplify the interface when you go into nGeniousONE. When you look at your interfaces, they should combine them all, and instead of looking at an interface, have you look at events. Combine everything into one view.

It is very rock solid. We hardly have any hardware issues.

To capture more with the solution that we bought, you have to buy another InfiniStreamNG, and there are only four ports in the back.

I don't directly interface with the technical support. There is another group which does that in my company.

In my environment, any installation is complex. There was a lot of dotting the i's and crossing the t's. Also, getting the maintenance to do the work for the install required scheduling.

We deployed in-house.

The solution is not great, but it is not bad. It is just a monitoring device. It is an okay tool, but it's not the end all, be all of all tools.

The engineers in our core use it a lot more than we do. They have seen a measurable decrease in MTTK and MTTR, plus a reduction in their troubleshooting time.

The primary use case is for troubleshooting customers' connectivity.

This solution provide us with increased visibility when conducting an IT deployment. We are able to look back in our history of logs and see what is communicating to what resources. That is very helpful. It shows visuals of what is being connected and communicated.

The ability to troubleshoot customers' connectivity has been very beneficial.

The tool has the ability to look back within a month's data. It is very easy to navigate within the tool and troubleshoot the problem, compared to other solutions that we've used in the past.

This solution helps us get to root cause very quickly.

We don't use the single pane of glass view. It's something that we are looking into since we do own it. We just don't use it at this time.

The tool has been great. We have never had an issue with it. It has been running for many years.

It is a great, architecturally designed product and very scalable for our solutions.

The technical support is good. Every time that we reach out to NETSCOUT, they have responded quickly. The engineers are very well educated on what they need to do to help us.

An issue that used to take days is now fixed within minutes to an hour.

The solution has helped to increase your application/network uptime.

Reach out to NETSCOUT. They give great demos with good overviews on the product and how it works.

I am overall pretty satisfied with the product. It helps with our troubleshooting needs.

We haven't got to the dependency mapping yet, which is in the nGeniousONE client, but we are looking forward to getting there.

We use it for a lot of things. Application performance would be our primary use case.

We also use the solution for proactive monitoring of remote sites, as we have several remote sites across the country. We have probes in those sites that allow us to see the traffic on the local area network, and then send that back up to nG1 so that we can decipher it.

The solution provides us with increased visibility when doing an IT deployment. For example, if our application developers roll out a new application on the network and it's not performing well, we use the solution to help them diagnose and troubleshoot the problems.

In general, the solution has helped to increase application and network uptime, depending on what it's being used for. If we find a problem with application performance, we can show the developers exactly what's going on in the network and help them to improve their application so that it works better.

In addition, it has reduced our mean time to repair significantly with application issues and network issues. Everybody always points to the network and says that it's a network problem, and we can very easily decipher whether it is or if it's actually something wrong with the application.

We can get to root cause quickly. It affords us the opportunity to see things on the network that we would otherwise be blind to and helps us reduce that mean time to repair. That brings the customer back into service more quickly.

We use the solution for unified communication application performance and, while it doesn't help so much with uptime, it does help us with end-user experience.

The solution has also cut our overall troubleshooting time. It can take an hour's worth of troubleshooting and take it down to five minutes.

One of the most valuable features is the ease of use.

And I love the single pane of glass view. It makes it easier to not have to navigate everywhere. It allows more simplistic visibility, without having to go from tool to tool to tool, or from window to window to window.

The Dependency Mapping the solution provides is also great.

Regarding additional features, there is a competitor's product that has a feature that I wish NETSCOUT could employ. A company called Riverbed bought another company called OPNET, and OPNET had a technology that was fantastic in what it did and how it did it. One of the components of that OPNET product was called ACE, and if NETSCOUT could do something like that, it would be fantastic. That would give us the opportunity to look at what's called a Tier Pair Circle and see, in a more graphical way, what hosts are communicating with other hosts. That would be nice.

In terms of room for improvement, the NetFlow Collectors could handle more flows per minute.

The only other thing would be the packet flow switch being overrun, but that might be because we bought the wrong model packet flow switch. Instead of a 6000-series, we bought a 5000-series, so that very well could have been us. We didn't know exactly how much traffic was on the network until we put the tools in.

It seems rock solid. The only problems we've had are with some 6995s, which are really old and out of service and I had a couple of drives go bad. But they were replaced and everything's good. It seems solid.

So far, so good in terms of scalability. We're running into a couple of issues with the packet flow switch being overrun in part of our data center, but we're just sending it too much traffic. It's a matter of recalibrating things. It seems scalable.

So far, so good with technical support. We really haven't had to engage them very much. We have an SE and an RSE who help us out with any of the technical issues, but anytime I've had to call support they've been great.

We used Riverbed ARX, and we are still using it, but it's being phased out in favor of the NETSCOUT, because of the total package of availability. The product availability and features of NETSCOUT mean we don't have to go to a separate retailer like Gigamon for a packet flow switch solution. nG1 does a lot of things that other tools did, and we don't have to have disparate vendors and resellers.

The initial setup is relatively straightforward. There are some nuances that you need to know, but it's relatively intuitive.

We did the deployment ourselves.

Try to find a better product, because I don't think you will.

I would rate the solution at a nine out of ten, at least. I just don't see very many flaws in it. It really works well. It does what it advertises that it does. It does more than a lot of people think that it does. It's been a good investment for our company. We've really gotten our money's worth out of it.