NETSCOUT Network & Application Observability Reviews

The primary use case is network and application performance management.

We build application dashboards and performance indexes for locations.

This solution provides us with increased visibility while conducting IT deployments, e.g., data migration.

The solution helps us get to root cause quickly by using the Media Monitor to help identify QoS mismatches for voice calls on the network.

We use the solution for unified communication application performance. It helps us with uptime and end user experience. We can proactively detect if there are issues and resolve them before they impact the end user.

• Application performance
• Triage
• Resolution
• Problem identification

The single pane of glass is possibly overrated.

The dependency mapping is good, but I am hopeful that they will build some type of partnership and relationship with ServiceNow. I want to see NETSCOUT partner with ServiceNow so they can leverage Service Now Discovery and Service Mapping to automate the build of the service dependency mappings inside of nGeniusONE.

The user interface needs some updates. There is some complexity to the product. You have to understand where the InfiniStreams are and what physical interfaces are connected where, so when you go into the user interface, you know what data you are collecting and from where.

The stability is okay.

The scalability is difficult. Packet capture and packet broker are hard to do because you ultimately have to build a separate overlay network, so you can capture the packets. The network speeds are constantly increasing, so now you are at 10 gig or 100 gig capabilities, and it's hard to scale.

The initial setup was straightforward, but we did leverage an RSE in the beginning.

We used NETSCOUT directly for the deployment.

We have seen ROI.

The solution has cut our overall troubleshooting time by two to four hours.

The solution has helped increase our application/network uptime by less than two percent.

Understanding what problem you are trying to solve. NETSCOUT nGeniusONE is not a true application performance management product. However, because of the wire data, packet data, its ASI capabilities, and the analytics on the roll up of that ASI data, there is benefit and value there. 

We use the solution for proactive monitoring of remote sites. To some extent, we also use the solution for SaaS applications that are external to the environment to do proactive monitoring.

The primary use case is troubleshooting.

We were able to find working hardware, which we were not able to do it with any other tools.

This solution provides us with increased visibility while conducting IT deployments. E.g., if we have devices which have overloaded or links which have saturated, then this tool tells us exactly what is going on with that link or device. Very few tools do it at this level for things like DDoS.

The solution help you get to root cause quickly.

It provides very low details. I can't get this low of level detail from any other tool, down to the packet level.

They can improve the UI. For example, with all modern tools, they generate a shared URL, like a Slack URL. Somebody clicks and they see the exact same thing as you. With this tool, if you want to tell somebody how to get to your view, you have to give pointer steps. 

The single pane of glass is a decent effort, but it is not how things are done these days.

It is not a good monitoring tool. It is more like response tool for us.

We see it overload once in a while. It doesn't have built-in protection. Therefore, once it gets too much data, it tends to crash. Then, we have to recover it.

The scalability becomes very expensive quickly.

The technical support is excellent.

The initial setup was complex. There are a lot of things that you need to configure together. There is not one push button. You have to feed a lot of data into the initial configs before it starts working.

Do your research before you jump in. These type of solutions take a long time to build. Spend a few months doing the research before you jump into it, because once you start and get the project going, it's very hard to roll back or switch off. 

We worked directly with NETSCOUT for the deployment.

We have seen a measurable decrease in mean time to know (MTTK) and mean time to repair (MTTR).

This solution has cut our overall troubleshooting time.

The license becomes cost prohibitive very quickly.

We always use a mix of different tools, and NETSCOUT is one of them.

One advantage that NETSCOUT has in the market is a very broad range of products. They cover a whole range of 11 products, where other vendors tend to be specialized, with a more narrow field. So, NETSCOUT is a good end-to-end vendor.

The product is efficient, but the learning curve is very steep. Also, the technology feels a bit outdated.

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 this to investigate various network anomalies, application performance issues, and anything that somebody can't seem to solve in our environment.

As the network team, we get engaged when somebody having a problem with an application, and they have run into so many walls that they've come to us. The network team typically manages this from top to bottom, so we use it to troubleshoot.

This solution helps us get to the root cause. Most recently, we had a third-party vendor who was experiencing trouble. They said it was our problem, trying to determine if something was wrong with the SSL connection. They spent some time looking at it, like days or weeks even looking at this.  When they came to us, and said “Can you get a packet capture? Can you tell us what is going on?” We were able to identify it in about a minute.

We use this solution for unified communication application performance. It help us with uptime and eases our experience. There are user experiences that we've been able to get to the root cause of very quickly using their tools. We have found QoS mismatch and different anomalies in the QoS configuration. We have used this to troubleshoot and find issues, where we could explain exactly why a client was behaving the way it was. It might not be necessarily security, but technical.

The speed that you can get from the top of a problem all the way down to the packet layer of troubleshooting analysis.

The dependency mapping might be one of the best pieces of the product. We have not leveraged it as fully as we can, but it is an extremely powerful piece.

The product is a little complicated.

It is a very stable product, if it's properly implemented. Anybody who is using the product should probably use Professional Services to implement it properly.

It's very scalable.

Technical support is superior among most of the support centers that I have dealt with.

Our environmental is complicated. So, the initial setup was a bit complex, but it was as simple as it could have been made.

We used NETSCOUT Professional Services years ago. 

If the single pane of glass can be effectively implemented, it is very powerful. However, if you're not working with NETSCOUT closely, this is a little difficult. Overall, it is a very good pane of glass to provide customers.

If you are going to do a deployment of this product, you should use NETSCOUT Professional Services or have an expert.

For common issues, we have seen a measurable decrease in mean time to know (MTTK) and mean time to repair (MTTR).

It has cut the troubleshoot time on many issues. It has cut some problems from days to hours (or less).

It has helped increase our application/network uptime.

It is a little overall pricey and expensive, but you get what you pay for.

We haven't used it as much for IT deployments, but we do use it occasionally after a deployment to troubleshoot when somebody is having problems with their deployment.

I'm looking at their nGenious Visibility-as-a-service to try and leverage product. The struggle that most of people have with it: The product isn't all we do. We're not just looking at NETSCOUT all day. If you have somebody that you can dedicate to NETSCOUT, it would be an incredible investment. However, most companies don't, so I'm looking at their nGenious Visibility-as-a-service because I'm in the position where I know I can get more from the product. 

It is a great investment. The product is superior, but it's difficult to manage, keep current, be in front of, and be proactive with it. 

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.

The primary use case is to monitor our network.

This solution provide us with increased visibility while conducting an IT deployment.

When we have any type of outage, and we dig into it, we are able to tell what the root cause is instead of having to go through Wireshark, etc. 

Packet decode and bandwidth analysis reports are the two most valuable features.

The product was lacking for awhile when they did the Arbor acquisition. I was waiting to see more security stuff, which they did eventually add, and is now impressive.

The stability is excellent.

The scalability is excellent. The company allows you to add more to what you already have. Not all companies do this.

We have an on staff SE. He is one of the top guys around and excellent to work with. I deal with him all the time.

I wasn't around for the initial setup.

We have seen a measurable decrease in mean time to know (MTTK) and mean time to repair (MTTR).

This solution has cut our overall troubleshooting time.

We are looking at Pulseway at the moment.

I'm a big advocate of NETSCOUT. They're always thinking ahead, and that's what I like. I would recommend taking a look at NETSCOUT.

Overall, when we get to the point that we need to, the dependency mapping will be excellent.

We actually like the single pane of glass view. I don't know if we will ever be able to get to it, because of the organization that I work with.

Once we get it implemented correctly, I think the solution will help to increase our application or network uptime. As of right now, that is why I'm pushing for product integration within my organization, which has been difficult.

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.

Detecting network issues which aren't obvious, more than just node alarms.

It benefits us by finding situations in our networks that we don't know exist.

It helps us get to the root cause quickly. It helps us find massive error codes, then we drill down on that error code, knowing that is the source of our problem.

It is on the wire. We see everything: all the packets.

I have a positive impression of the single pane of glass view. The feature is nice. Everything is structured around a drill down, starting with one pane, then drilling down.

It is a good product with a few limitations. It is so complex and takes a bit of training to figure out. We need better training, so we can take this complex solution and implement it more easily.

Change the font size on the grid in nGeniusONE so the names of the grids will all fit on the grid tiles. The font is so large that you can't see the name.

The stability is mostly good. However, we just had an outage.

We haven't scaled much. Talking to other customers, it sounds like it scales well.

The technical support is mostly good. They could improve a bit with quicker responses for early on questions. What I think are simple questions are taking a long time to get answers to.

We wanted visibility that we did not have with our tools at the time. We had an Ericsson type solution, which we added this solution to.

The initial setup was complex. It was hard to know what to tap and how to tap. We are still wrestling with TAPs and light levels, then filtering.

We deployed the solution in-house.

This solution has cut our overall troubleshooting time by several days. It has helped increase our application/network uptime.

We have engineers spending less time troubleshooting the network. That has to have some return on investment.

NETSCOUT was sitting on the wire. The other vendors that we looked at were taking flows from network nodes instead of sitting on the wire, and we liked the wire better.

NETSCOUT is a good product, but you need to spend the time training-wise to figure it out and make it useful.

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.

The primary use case is diagnosing real-time communications for all the Voice over IP on our network. We use this solution for unified communication application performance, specifically for performance monitoring, but especially for the troubleshooting.

It has helped with the operations teams, who have been able to collect information and troubleshoot with the application. So, it has been a benefit for the lower tier support.

It has helped identify issues more quickly.

It gives me the MOS, latency, and jitter. 

It captures RTP, so I am capable of ingesting and listening to the RTP side of it.

95 percent of the solution helps us get to the root cause quickly.

I would love to have them reassemble fragmented packets. That would be a very big plus in my book.

While it does give me increased visibility while conducting IT deployments, I have experience some limitations with it.

We have jumbo frames, which can get fragmented. They don't bring together everything that I need for me to work right. If I could get an end-to-end, then it would give me a good view of how everything would be in my particular call flow.

We have a lot of timeouts when we are trying to assemble data packets together or trying to pull down a view of one particular call. However, overall, it performs adequately.

I don't directly use their technical support.

Initially, it was a little cumbersome to set up. Once we figured out the nuances of what we wanted, it was fairly simple to set up and set our cards, so we got to things a bit quicker.

Ensure that you get all your DAPS in at the right spots for your data. Learn how to build your cards to have a quick view and quick selection of where you want to troubleshoot.

I believe other departments within our organization use this solution for proactive monitoring of SaaS applications or remote sites.