NETSCOUT Network & Application Observability Reviews

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.

The primary use case for NETSCOUT is troubleshooting at the packet level. We are a reseller, so we see every use case.

The solution provides increased visibility during an IT deployment. It enables us to troubleshoot a service when it is down.

As we expand our company, more users are using the tool to quickly resolve issues. It helps us and them get to root cause quickly. For example, last week a DNS was not running anymore. We checked the packet and saw that there was a buffer overload. It has cut our overall troubleshooting time. Sometimes it took a month to troubleshoot something that we can now do within days.

nGenius has helped increase application or network uptime. The DNS I mentioned is now a better server with more capacity than before, because of our troubleshooting.

We see a measurable decrease in mean time to know and mean time to repair. We see that when our customers are using this tool, their stability on the link is getting better and better, every time they use it.

Also, we use the solution for unified communication application performance and it helps with uptime and end-user experience. Sometimes the quality of voice calls is not good enough, so we use the Media Monitor to check the quality in real-time.

One of the valuable features is the packet decoding. 

Also, the single pane of glass view is really good. Because I open the monitoring, the http monitoring, for example, and then I go to the session and then to the packets, I only use a single view.

We use the dashboard to help us with proactive monitoring of SaaS applications and remote sites, to see if problems are going to happen.

In terms of additional features, I would like to see Diameter fragmentation and IPSec decoding.

Room for improvement exists in filtering in the packet decode.

The stability is okay, but sometimes we see that the memory on the server is not 100 percent correct and we need to stop and start the software to have it reallocated again.

The scalability is okay because we can deploy more vSTREAMs in the solution on a regular basis. When we deploy a new vSTREAM, we connect it, and we have a new link in a matter of days.

Technical support is okay. On occasion, it can take a long time for an issue to go through to the engineering level. But we use our SE to escalate it more quickly.

The initial setup is straightforward. We do the deployments almost every week for another customer. For us, it's in our hands, in our fingers.

Licensing is quite expensive.

As a reseller, can troubleshoot for customers with NETSCOUT, as an audit.

We are doing capacity planning with the probes, and if we see that probe interface is running too high, has too much load, we sell a new InfiniStream to the customer and we load-balance the link between the InfiniStreams.

We use it for a lot of VoLTE monitoring and network monitoring in general. Most of our services are being monitored via NG1.

It gives us increased visibility while conducting an IT deployment. For example, once we launched VoLTE, we had other tools in the network that we were using for some other use cases, but in terms of MOS scoring and general monitoring of how the VoLTE calls were doing, we were using the Media Monitor.

We're not really using it to proactively capture outages, like Zero-day outages for example, when there is something completely new. But once we detect an outage, we can then use the tool to understand what it was and create an alarm, and that can be used for future similar outages so we can avoid them in the future.

It also helps us get to root cause quickly. We had an Rx Diameter issue at some point in IMS, and without the product it would have taken us more time to be able to troubleshoot and figure out what was happening. With the product, we were able to use Universal Monitor right away to figure out the actual error code and understand the issue from there.

In terms of unified communication, that's the VoLTE modules and the MOS scores. We used it heavily when we launch VoLTE. Currently, we have monitors set up per region so that we can monitor VoLTE. We also have it per event, so when we know something is happening on a big scale and we really need close-up monitoring, we set it up specifically for that area or region or the particular cells, to monitor that particular event.

The solution has cut our overall troubleshooting time and has helped to increase our network uptime.

The most valuable feature is VoLTE, for sure. The VoLTE modul, call search and Media Monitor were essential when we launched VoLTE. We're relying heavily on them to troubleshoot our VoLTE calls.

There is a lot of the VoLTE, voice, video MOS, and customer experience that we'd like to do. There's a lot of throughput analysis where we're trying to understand, with the vendor, whether it's accurate or we need more work on it. Those are our top priorities.

NG1 has been stable for a while in our environment - at least we have what we needed. But with nBA, there's a lot of room for improvement.

Stability is a tricky question. It is stable, but the way we use it, we have a lot of tweaks and a lot of specific and detailed configurations on the InfiniStream. It's a very manual process to configure it right now. We're also looking into ways to automate that and, hopefully, eliminate the human error.

So it's stable, but once you start doing more and more with it, there is always something happening in the background that we're not sure of, that fails or something happens, and we have to troubleshoot it and understand it.

So far, on the NG1 side, it's been very easy to scale. We just go into InfiniStream if we need to and we can very easily link it to our same NG1.

In terms of actually needing to add new InfiniStream, this has been a challenge because we'd like to reduce costs. However, there are a lot of use cases where we absolutely have to have new hardware, which we don't like, but it is what it is.

Technical support is great. We have a dedicated team. We have two SEs onsite who work with us, plus the support engineer. With those three, we have great support.

I wasn't part of the initial setup, it was set up before my time. But I helped set up the NG1 part and it was fairly straightforward because we have very good SEs on site, plus the support team. Whenever we need something we reach out, and they support us right away.

Get a demo. The guys at NETSCOUT have been super-helpful. Any time we ask for something they simply say, "Let's show it to you." They come onsite, give us a demo, show it to us, and if we like it we deploy it. We also have a sandbox, where we get our real traffic into the product in the early stages. We do all of our testing and all of our new builds in there before rolling to production, and that really helps.

Regarding the single pane of glass view, we have different views because we use different tools for different use cases. We can't really say that we have it in our network yet, but if we can work toward that, it would be good.

We have not used the Dependency Mapping the solution provides because our connections and relationship are way too complex. It's hard to see it on a visual screen.

The solution helps us with network uptime. It helps with user experience to some degree. We still have some caveats that we're trying to work on with NETSCOUT. We're using nBA now for user experience and there's some cool stuff coming up. We're looking forward to it.

I would rate nGenius at eight out of ten, because of the support and all the feedback we get. And at events, we get direct contact with their executive.

We use it for our network capacity performance, for the entire ICM backbone core.

In addition, our company uses the solution for unified communication application performance. While it's not my team, there is another team responsible for capacity performance for video and they are using the same NETSCOUT toolset for wireless, wire line, and video.

I manage the entire building, so I have the responsibility for extending network capacity if we hit a limitation. It gives us the possibility of increasing the capacity wherever it is required. We have over 55,000 employees across Canada, from the Atlantic to Vancouver, so I use the tool on a daily basis to do my analysis.

It helps us get to root cause quickly. When we have a problem or people are reporting latency on their network, my guys are, of course, checking for the dates, specific times, and IP. We can get all the information that we are looking for, in detail. While my guys are not responsible for finding root cause, the solution is quite helpful in finding it.

In addition, it has cut our overall troubleshooting time for my network guys, when there's a real network problem. It has increased our network uptime as well.

The valuable features include 

• packet analysis
• packet capture
• it's easy to use. 

The single pane of glass view is a challenge. I like the graphics, they're easy to understand, but when more digging is required, it's more complicated to get what I'm expecting. Since the challenge for me is the dashboard, I would appreciate having a better view from the dashboard. What I don't know is whether the issue is that our configuration needs work. We probably don't do the mapping and the dependency configuration properly and that may be the reason why my dashboard is not crystal clear.

The solution is pretty stable.

It's also pretty scalable, there is no problem with that. It can be expensive, but if you have a good configuration, based on what you are looking for, it's okay, it's manageable.

The technical support is very good. We are well supported by the team. Even with the PULSE - I am new on this team, I have been here less than a year - they were there all the time, on a regular basis, to provide support on that completely new application for us. We were asking very simple questions and they were always there for us. It's been a great collaboration.

The initial setup would be complex for me, since I don't have that kind of talent, but it was pretty simple for my guys.

On my team, we are doing the implementation. Other teams within the company are using third-parties to do the deployment. But on my side, it's all internal people.

We're losing a thousand per minute when we're down. Being able to know where the problem is more quickly, we're going to save a lot of money.

I'm not a big fan of pushing a particular vendor, but it is a very good product: pretty stable, pretty scalable, with a very good and solid engineering team behind it. They are available and listen to customer needs and are always willing to do more to improve their products. But because I don't like to push a product too much, I prefer that people see and try it to see if they like it, to see if it fits their needs.

The tool itself is just fantastic. We've been using it since 2001 or 2002. We are a big fan of the product.

If we are satisfied with what we have, we don't ask for more. It's always about problem resolution or product improvement. We used to have regular, weekly calls with our NETSCOUT rep and, as soon they had a new product, a new version, new updates, they would share them with us, and we would know if we wanted to go in that direction or not. Today, we are quite happy and satisfied with what we have.

We don't yet use the solution for proactive monitoring of SaaS applications or remote sites. We are working on the deployment of PULSE. I can easily imagine that with that new solution deployed in production, we will be able to do more and more proactively. It's not because it's not available with nGeniusONE, it's just that I have no one to check and be proactive.

We will see a decrease in mean time to know and mean time to repair, more and more in the coming months, with PULSE. It's more about a business impact. With PULSE, we will have that "radar view", a view of the network, the server, and the application. So instead of needing 15 resources on a call at 2 AM, and losing 45 minutes just to get everyone there to find out what the is problem, with the PULSE solution, we are going to decrease that MTTR dramatically.

Because nGeniusONE is pretty stable and scalable, I would say it's a good nine out of ten.

We are using it for all our sites' access to applications and services within our organization.

We use the solution for unified communication application performance. We use Dialpad, to make test calls and it helps with uptime and end-user experience. We also use it for proactive monitoring of SaaS applications like Salesforce and Dialpad, which is our VoIP solution.

nGenius provides us with increased visibility during IT deployments. We are able to see that the application is available and working for all the sites at a glance.

It also gives us a heads-up before we start receiving customer calls that there is an issue. Likewise, we can see that it might be a case that an individual user is having a challenge, not the rest of the organization. It can save us the time needed to troubleshoot networks or the application when the problem is not there. We can then focus more on the end-user's laptop or desktop. In that way, it helps us get to root cause quickly.

The solution has cut our overall troubleshooting time, reducing it by about an hour per situation.

The most valuable feature is the quick glance to see how our application services and network are working. I like the single pane of glass view. I like being able to go to one place instead of having to hunt around for everything.

In terms of additional features, I would like to see better event notification. Right now, we put in an email address to receive an alert and it receives every event and every alert that comes out. We need something a little more granular.

Overall, there is room for improvement by having more granularity in the reporting, visualization, and alerts.

The stability is good. We did have some initial issues with the endpoints losing their IPs for some reason, but the latest update that just came out seems to have fixed that.

It seems to be very scalable. We've pretty much hit almost every site in our organization, which is over 100 sites.

Technical support is very quick. They're very responsive and knowledgeable about everything we've asked so far.

We've been bringing our LAN, WAN, and application support back in-house. The contracted vendor that we used before, their systems, are very antiquated and out of date. We needed to provide our own, and that's how we came to nGenius.

I came in towards the end of the setup, but it seemed to be pretty straightforward.

We did not use an outside resource for the setup.

I can't say that we've seen anything quite yet, but I can see it coming.

I would recommend nGenius to colleagues who are looking for this kind of solution. It's fairly quick and easy to implement, rolling out the endpoints and configuring it. It does give you pretty good information for a very simple setup.

Regarding a decrease in mean time to know or mean time to repair, and similarly when it comes to the solution increasing our application or network uptime, we haven't been monitoring that as we're still integrating it into our support staff.

The solution is an eight out of ten. The PULSE was an acquisition from Fluke and I feel that NETSCOUT is still building it into their methodology and level, like nGeniusONE.

We used to use it for application debugging, in particular SMS and MMS, but lately, we've been turning towards using it for OpenStack and cloud-issue debugging.

In a network deployment, it provides us with increased visibility.

From the service assurance perspective, in SMS in particular, they use it very heavily to proactively try to hit issues. There are a lot of times where NETSCOUT will catch something spinning up the SA organization and then, in turn, spinning up the operations organization to go catch and kill it; or it comes over to network development. So it's used fairly extensively.

We use it on the cloud side more from a reactive perspective and it's certainly helped us catch and kill a couple of issues that we wouldn't have been able to otherwise. 

It helps us get to root cause quickly. We had an OpenStack Cinder issue, a storage-type issue, and we chased our tails on that for quite some time until we managed to get the data over to a NETSCOUT probe. Then we were able to very rapidly figure out what the heck was going on.

When we can get the data into the tool, we absolutely see a decrease in mean time to know and mean time to repair, and similarly for overall troubleshooting time. With that Cinder issue, we spun our wheels for almost two weeks before we managed to get the data over to the tool and, once we did, we solved it fast. So it can be days or weeks of saved time.

In terms of application uptime, it's deployed and leveraged for almost all the applications in our organization: VoLTE, SMS, MMS, etc. So as heavily as the service assurance groups and operations use it, I'd say that they consider it pretty essential at this point.

Among the valuable features, if it's TAP'ed well, are the density of the data that you can get and the relatively high veracity or accuracy rate that we see from it.

In terms of additional features, Bruce Kelly was talking about the NFV and 5G aspects of it, in monitoring all the APIs for all of those functions. We're really looking forward to seeing that so that we can give better visibility into the functioning of the cloud and the orchestrator itself.

There is room for improvement in its stability and by expanding into the cloud and orchestration sphere, which I think is on the roadmap.

The stability is only fair. It goes down a lot.

It scales out fairly widely, horizontally. And with the new virtual one, we'll be doing it a lot wider. So it has good scalability.

Technical support is good. We've got good onsite support and those guys are generally available.

We knew we needed to invest in a new solution because we couldn't fix things.

We see ROI through the ability to fix and to keep the perception that our network is up 100 percent. That is absolutely critical. It keeps the customers coming in.

We also looked at Empirix.

Consider what your applications are for this and purchase your features accordingly.

Regarding the single pane of glass view, we don't think we've really fully deployed it from a cloud perspective, but from a VoLTE perspective, I know they're starting to get on top of it. From an SMS perspective, we found it very useful.

I'll give it an eight out of ten as it stands today. It's very useful, but we do see some stability concerns. There is a lot of maintenance around the probes, and I think there needs to be more development done in the cloud sphere.

We use it mainly for north-south, and soon to be, again, east-west: Troubleshooting, visibility into the VoLTE cloud that we've designed. Initially, it was very small, baby clouds, per se, but now as we redesign and go to scale, so that we have the visibility we need, we need better tools. We have the infrastructure, but we need to take the next step into the virtual lane.

We use the solution for proactive monitoring of remote sites. We have 29 data centers where these clouds are built and we're moving out to edge and we will have even more.

It has provided us with increased visibility, not during deployment, but downstream, once we actually turn up services, whether it's microservices or a VNF.

During outages, and in terms of visibility into VNF and container behavior across the various versions of our cloud, it has helped our organization.

nGenius also helps us get to root cause quickly. Signaling is one example. We have challenges between applications that share the same baby clouds but that utilize storage differently than the network. We don't have that visibility now in some of our deployments. Our new deployments will have that visibility because we're not using copper for a lot of the east-west traffic in the cloud. We're actually moving to fiber so that we have that visibility. The next step will probably vSTREAM.

In addition, I believe it has cut overall troubleshooting times for the OSS and DevOps teams, and it has increased uptime. I'm not in the operations lane, but I know that is something that we have to have.

The most valuable features are visibility, real-time, on-demand.

I need more details on the vSTREAM and how that scales from a CPU perspective. I know that we can start with one virtual CPU, but at the same time, our clouds are still limited by compute nodes. That's an ongoing question and it's part of why we're here at NETSCOUT Engage 2019, to see how we architect that out.

I'd like to see improvement in scalability and the CPU perspective on the actual cloud nodes. It would be good to have a roadmap of what impact to our underlying cloud we will see as we add vSTREAM vCPUs.

We haven't had any problems with stability.

The scalability needs some work. From a probe perspective, we are limited to a certain amount of throughput on the devices themselves. Without having actual hooks into the bare metal hardware for the solutions, it's a bit of a "thumb in the air" as to when we hit our capacity or when our high watermark is. I'm not sure if our operations teams have that capacity under control. So when we have to scale, it's a very large expense.

I'm not aware of whether the initial setup is straightforward or complex. We have a standard template when we build them out.

A lot of it was internal or direct with NETSCOUT.

We've had ongoing RFPs back and forth for multiple years. As far as new solutions for our visibility needs go, as we're right in the middle of our cloud journey from an LTE to NFV to 5G, we're trying to get a grasp. We're always on the cusp, looking for the next set of roadmaps and how we integrate that into our network to provide for our customers.

Our shortlist included the usual culprits: Empirix, Gigamon, all of them in the same build with NETSCOUT. We still have a very vast mix of everything.

We can't ever walk into our builds or our support models blindly. This solution is one of many options, but it's obviously one of the better ones that we've worked with for years, and it's an integral portion of our architecture upfront.

"Single pane of glass" is a very overused cliche in our business for the past couple of years, same with "Agile." I like the idea of being able to stitch it all together. Our operations team definitely insist on it.

I would rate NETSCOUT a seven out of ten. Not to be a detractor, but I don't have the hands-on experience from an operations standpoint, so that's why I rate it a seven.

We use nGenius for troubleshooting application and network issues.

The solution gives us increased visibility while conducting an IT deployment. Especially if it's something new, it lets us rapidly gain insight into what a particular client's traffic is going to look like.

The biggest thing, given there's an assumption that the network is the cause of the problem, is that it allows us to be more efficient when it comes to isolating what the issue is - whether it's an application issue or a network issue.

The most valuable feature is being able to get to root cause relatively quickly. Being part of the network team, of course it's always the network that is the problem. Using the tool allows us to eliminate the network as the cause of problems relatively quickly.

I also like the single pane of glass view because it presents everything in one window, obviously. You can see it all. With a quick glance, you get a pretty good snapshot of what's going on in a particular situation.

We have seen a measurable decrease in mean time to know and mean time to repair. Because the tool allows us to get to things a lot quicker, see things a lot quicker, we have actually reduced those times. It has also cut our overall troubleshooting time. Finally, it has definitely helped with our network uptime. I'm on the network team, so I get to see that. I would estimate there has been an improvement in uptime of at least 50 percent.

Regarding additional features, we have yet to take advantage of a lot of the things that are already there. We haven't thought too much about what else we'd like to see.

Usability is the area with the biggest room for improvement. We've found that with NETSCOUT, while it's a fantastic product, the usability is a major factor because there are just way too many clicks. It's obvious, from our experience, that the people who are developing the product aren't using it.

The stability is great. We run it on Linux and we have not had any issues with stability of the product. It's been really awesome. We've had products run on Windows and there are always issues with Windows. I don't mean to bash Windows. We've been running it for years and I can count on one hand the times that we've had a reason to reboot our servers.

The scalability is good. We don't have a lot of appliances. What we have is not very big, but we've been able to easily add without any issues, so scalability is not a factor.

Technical support is okay. It depends on whom you talk to. The first level can be a struggle at times, but once you get to the right person, a knowledgeable person for your issue, they're really good. It's just that getting to that person is sometimes a struggle.

We knew we needed to switch because we had been running a solution that was really old, a very old iteration of NETSCOUT. We knew a couple of years ago that we needed to move to newer versions of NETSCOUT and that's how we started down the nGenius path.

The initial setup was straightforward, with easy-to-follow documentation.

We did it all internally.

I'm not sure what other vendors we looked at because we've always had NETSCOUT in-house and they've always been tops as far as industry reviews are concerned. We went with them because they were a known entity to us and we stayed with them.

Going back to usability, keep that in mind when you're looking at products. That's the biggest thing: The fewer clicks the better, when you're looking at any product.

In terms of proactive monitoring, that has been something we've been trying to get to. It's still a lot of firefighting at this point, the reactive thing. Proactive is the ideal, but we haven't been able to use the tool proactively the way we would like to.

I give it an eight out of ten. I think it could be better. Usability is a factor. But, overall, it gives you a single pane into networking application performance.

Troubleshooting is our primary use case for the solution.

We get increased visibility from nGenius while conducting an IT deployment. If the deployment has issues then we can always go back, look at the logs, and figure out what may be happening.

A lot of times people blame the network, and since I'm responsible for the network, people call me. Through troubleshooting using the tool, I verify that it's not our issue, and I also use the tool to help figure out what the issue really is.

It helps us get to root cause quickly. For example, troubleshooting an application issue without the tool would mean we wouldn't have the collection of data to go through to figure out what the problem is. Now that we have X number of hours, maybe even days of data, depending on what we're actually watching, we can look at the data. It's possible that somebody's having an application issue and they come to us figure out what the problem is and we can help them solve their issue a little faster.

We have seen a measurable decrease in mean time to know and mean time to repair. It's a little hard to say how much because it depends on what you're troubleshooting, but I would estimate it at 25 percent, or even less, of what it would normally be. And our overall troubleshooting time, in most cases, is down to a day, as opposed to multiple days. Without the data, it's almost impossible to figure out what a problem may have been.

The packet capture is the most valuable feature for us. It gathers data from the device. In case somebody has a problem, I can go back X amount of time - days, hours - and get the data to do real troubleshooting.

In terms of the single pane of glass view, it's good, but trying to set up dashboards is hard to figure out at times, if you don't do it every day. It's not really intuitive to set them all up. Other than that, it's a good dashboard. A lot of people are using it.

If there were a wizard to take us through, step-by-step, creating dashboards and the like, that would be really helpful.

It's very stable. Every once in a great while we'll have to reboot the nGeniusONE server. That may be server-related and not application related.

We haven't really scaled it very much. We're not a really big shop. We've got five InfiniStreams collecting into our nGeniusONE. It's supposed to scale pretty well, but I don't really have much comment on it because we're pretty small as it is.

Technical support is very good.

We didn't have a previous solution at all, other than Wireshark to capture packets when we needed them. We knew we needed something better than that.

The initial setup was a little complex, only because it was the first time we were getting into such a tool. We didn't know much about it. We had to learn while going along. It was complex, but quite doable.

We did it ourselves.

I don't see the numbers, because I'm a technical guy. But I would imagine there probably is a return on investment because we're fixing these applications faster, causing less of an outage. I would say we're actually saving money, or at least not losing as much money when these applications are down. It's a big help there.

I would show someone who is looking into this type of product what I know about the product, how I use it, and help them make a decision on whether it's the right product for them.

The product has a lot of capabilities and we're just using a small fraction of it. So, right now, I would call the solution a nine out of ten, because we only use a small portion of it. But for what we do, it helps us out tremendously.

Troubleshooting our LTE network - any situations that come up in our cellular network. We also use the solution for proactive monitoring of remote sites, as we use it to monitor all the towers in our cellular network, as well as our core applications.

We're still in the beginning stages, learning how to use it.

It's a great monitoring tool. At a glance, we can get an idea of what's going on in our network.

Also, while I don't track it personally, I know that time to repair has been reduced and that it has cut our overall troubleshooting time.

The most valuable feature of this solution is being able to drill down into any kind of troubles that are reported to us, by use of identifiers.

Some of the filters could be easier to see and to set up. That's the only thing that I've ever had any trouble with. The ones that I've seen here, at NETSCOUT Engage 2019, are part of a newer version that we don't have yet, and it looks better. So, it may already have been fixed.

It's 100 percent stable.

The scalability is great.

I'm sure it's great, but I haven't had to deal with technical support. I'm a technician.

I assume the setup was straightforward. I'm a telecom tech. The engineers did all the setup and I only use the tool. I didn't help set it up.

I would recommend it. It's the best tool that I've used as far as troubleshooting quickly, at a glance, and for being able to drill down into any issues, any complaints we might have from customers.

I do know that we would like to get TrueCall, but we don't have that yet. We're working on it.

I would rate nGenius a nine out of ten because I don't rate anything a ten. There's always room for improvement.