NETSCOUT nGeniusONE 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.

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. 

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.

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 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.

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.