NETSCOUT nGeniusONE Reviews

We're using the tool to monitor our LTE and 3G core networks, as well as our 5G connection.

We're in the wireless space and it does help us with our deployments, especially when we launch new services. We have a lot better visibility.

The solution is very helpful. We're in the support side of the house, doing operations. It makes our workflow a lot easier, being able to very quickly - in near real-time - trace things for our customers when they report issues. It helps us get to root cause quickly. A lot of the issues that we face are interlocution between different vendors. This helps us capture that data and provide it to both vendors, as well as analyze it, ourselves, against the specs. It has cut our overall troubleshooting time. These vendor interlocution situations have gone from a couple of weeks to a couple of days.

We have seen a measurable decrease in mean time to know and mean time to repair. I would estimate it at about 20 percent, overall.

The fact that it's able to capture and store packets from the wires is very useful for troubleshooting with our vendors, when issues do come up. It's valuable that we have that overall data for them.

I'd like to see more data expert capabilities. That's one of the big things we're looking forward to, with the release of the KAFKA exports, and expanding the kind of data we can both import and export with the system.

Also, for individual subscriber tracings, sometimes it does not capture all the messages. There is a little bit of room for improvement there.

It's very stable. It's very rare that there are any issues that are attributable to the NETSCOUT product.

My impressions of the scalability of the solution are positive. We've grown greatly as a company, and it's kept up with our needs.

Technical support is very good. Our support engineers from NETSCOUT have been very easy to work with, and always very helpful.

Our move to a new solution was based on the user reports we get. When we heard about traces not being available or tools being unreliable, we started looking at different vendors. 

We had NETSCOUT before and switched to another vendor, The Now Factory, which has since been acquired by IBM. The user feedback was pretty immediate. We switched to that solution, and within six months it was very clear that it wasn't the right path and we actually switched back to NETSCOUT for a lot of our network monitoring needs.

The initial setup was pretty straightforward. It's a stand-alone product so we didn't have to spend much time getting ready. We got the probes deployed and the system, and that was great.

We did it ourselves.

I'd say we've seen return on investment. It's helped us, just from a customer satisfaction point of view. Fixing customer issues faster translates to better retention. Overall, I think the solution has helped us retain more of our customers.

Cost is probably the biggest drawback. Compared to some of the newer vendors that have popped up in the space, it's definitely more on the expensive side. It shows its value, though, in the reliability of the solution, the support that we get from NETSCOUT. It's been able to keep its value, even in the face of the cheaper competition.

It's a very good, stable solution. The people behind this know LTE very well, they know how the data flows and what we're looking at. The product, as a whole, works very well for the wireless carrier.

We don't have the single pane of glass view yet, but we are very excited about being where we can get that end-to-end. We're using RS and nGeniusOne right now, which are two different views, but we want to get to nSA and have the single pane.

In terms of our application network uptime, at least in the way that we're using it, I wouldn't say that the solution has helped directly. When we have had problems, it's helped us get the vendors the information they need. But overall, I don't think the application itself has directly affected uptime, in our case.

I would rate the solution a ten out of ten. It does what it needs to do, and it works really well at that functionality.

We use NETSCOUT nGeniusOne to troubleshoot our network. At US Cellular, we have our voice over IP network and we try to figure out the impact to the customer.

The solution most definitely provides us with increased visibility while conducting an IT deployment. It allows us to understand changes that we're making in the network, as well as our network's performance day-to-day and hour-to-hour.

We're also able to see customer impact before the customer complains. Often, in a legacy network, we were used to customers calling in to our call center complaining about the service, but now we're actually identifying problems even before the customer notices. 

It helps us get to the root cause quickly, allowing us to drill down into the problem to actually see what service is impacted. It has provided a measurable decrease in mean time to know and mean time to repair. Being able to identify the problem more quickly and having the customizable dashboards make a large difference, making us much quicker than we ever were.

In addition, the solution has absolutely helped us increase our application network uptime. Being able to see the response in near-real-time, we utilize the five-minute increments in the dashboards and the tools frequently. If we're performing our work and we see an impact, we can deal with it much faster than with our old legacy tools, which were sometimes an hour or two in delay.

For me, the most valuable features are the dashboards which we use to highlight the overall impact to the customers, and being able to drill down into the nitty-gritty of the customer experience.

This is not so much application-specific but rather is about the user experience: How the user experience has degraded is what I would like to see more in the tool. A lot of tools highlight what's going on but they don't actually pinpoint the user experience. It would be good if there were a small message or something highlighting what the user experience is like and any degradation that's actually occurring.

For the most part, it's pretty stable. We've had some instances where we've had to have boxes restarted, probes restarted. But overall, the performance has really held up.

After today's conversation, here at NETSCOUT Engage 2019, it seems like it's highly scalable. I always knew it was scalable but with the new enhancements coming, it's really good.

We have NETSCOUT personnel who are assigned to USA Cellular. We have an associate, Joe Dockery, who is always at our disposal. We get good help.

Get as much training as you can go to. Get your hands on the product as much as you can. There's a lot of information there and it's confusing at times if you're not familiar with the product. And rely on your NETSCOUT support. A lot of things that you might be looking for are already there, you just might not know how to get to them.

In terms of the solution cutting our overall troubleshooting time, the answer is "yes and no." While it provides a lot of insight as far as the data goes, and the impact, our organization is still trying to learn how to troubleshoot effectively. In most of the cases it's a matter of either user experience or knowledge.

I would rate nGenius as an eight out of ten. There's a lot of data. After hearing where NETSCOUT is going with the ability to actually isolate a problem quickly, it is good to see them working on that. It's really been the struggle: To show the user where the problem lies. There's a little too much investigation that the user has to do at this point.

We're using it for server health, data analytics, and network monitoring on a daily basis. We also use it for proactive monitoring of remote sites. We have around 180 sites, and we monitor their bandwidth and application usage. In terms of SaaS, that's something we're working on too, and hopefully we'll get it to where we want it to be.

It definitely provides us with increased visibility while conducting an IT deployment. It's been pretty useful for some of our cases, especially hardware refresh, where it's been a pretty amazing tool.

It has also definitely helped with detection of anomalies. We've been able to identify a handful of issues within our network. It's been pretty useful. As for root cause, there have been more than a few occasions where we've been able to identify issues right away. We have also seen a measurable decrease in mean time to know and mean time to repair. There have been a number of situations where, if we didn't have this, we would have been scratching our heads trying to figure them out.

In addition, it has cut our overall troubleshooting time. Last year we had quite an outage that went for a couple of weeks. If we had had this solution implemented the way it's working now, I'm pretty sure it would have just taken us days, instead of weeks.

• Data threat detection
• Network analytics
• Overall bandwidth monitoring

We also definitely love the single pane of glass view. It's everything there in one single dashboard.

The feature I am looking for is the Arbor technology, especially to run in parallel with our firewall. That's one thing that I've definitely wanted and, eventually, it's getting there.

So far, the stability has been good. There have been a few issues, mainly because we haven't been using it long. I've been having to catch up and upgrade and bring it from the floor up, so hopefully it will become a great tool.

Looking forward, I believe we'll see that the more we add to it, the more and more our network will get better.

Technical support has been pretty amazing with me. Every time I call, every time I contact my SE, they answer right away, so I've been pretty happy with that.

In our company, I know we have other tools, but as a network monitor, for the port situation, per node, I don't know what else was used.

I had to start from scratch. It took me time to comprehend how everything works, but eventually, I found it's pretty easy to understand and set up.

It was deployed long before I got into my job, but the people that I've been working with were the original deployers. I'm pretty sure they worked with somebody.

Reach out, contact NETSCOUT. It's an amazing tool, it has a lot of integrations, and it's definitely worth looking at.

We still haven't gotten that deep into the dependency mapping, but we intend to start getting to it. Similarly, we're planning to start looking into unified communication application performance. We just got our license for it and we're going to try to implement it. I've only been using the solution for six months. My impression so far is that it's been pretty amazing.

As things stand right now, I would give the solution an eight out of ten. I still have quite a few things to learn. Once I get to know its full capabilities, I will probably give it a ten.

One use case that we purchased it for is deep packet inspection at a 10-gig level. Prior to that, we only had deep packet inspection up to one gig.

We are utilizing the tool right now for deep packet inspection, and for everyday dashboard monitoring to show our customers what their current traffic is, how their everyday business needs are consuming their traffic, and what kind of traffic is specifically on their network.

Also, the nGeniusONE is providing TAPs for all of our core traffic and is sending it to our security team for them to sort through and look for security risks. That is actually probably the single biggest purpose we're using it for.

We did a big shift in how we do some of our internal business. To see what the impact would be, we got a baseline of our day-to-day traffic and performance. Then, as we did a proof of concept of the new solution that we were working on, we could see how much that was going to change our performance and our growth, per user, and that enabled us to ramp up bandwidth and resources as needed for that big change.

We wouldn't have been able to prepare our network in a way that would have kept everything functioning properly, without that information.

There are so many valuable features. Deep packet inspection is probably the strongest, but also its ability to slab certain traffic and give visibility into traffic at an application-layer level.

The way that our company is set up, we provide that type of information to the agencies we support. They're basically our customers - government agencies - and they want to know information about their applications' performance, and the health of their applications, usage, troubleshooting, etc.

In addition, it is user-friendly.

The areas it covers are so vast that the improvement would be in the user's understanding of what it can do. Having that information available to customers more easily might be helpful, although I believe it is available to customers easily through their website.

There are so many pieces of their product that integrate with one another that perhaps a recommendation for improvement would be some sort of bigger overview and map to help understand how all their pieces integrate together. On the plus side, they always have resources available, instantly, when you have a question about it. It's not like that information can't be found.

It's very stable. We've never had any problems with it.

The newer technology scales very well, especially in the virtual environment. Some of the hardware that I purchased four or five years ago, since it's a hardware-based system, limits how it can grow and scale. But truthfully, five years for a deep packet inspection tool like this is quite good.

There are some hardware components that communicate to the nGeniusONE that I'm likely to be upgrading within the next few years. My traffic has grown to the point where I need more and, since it's hardware-based, it can only scale so far.

nGeniusONE itself scales very well. It's cloud-based.

We are moving to a virtualized environment in our data center, and NETSCOUT is making very scalable nGenius solutions so that we'll have some virtual instances of it. Our plan is to expand that into our virtualized environment and be able to have some inspection of the traffic that stays in our data center. We've already started that process. Our bottleneck is the internal resources to do it. It will probably be done by the end of next year.

We have a relationship with a NETSCOUT engineer, so I usually just email him or call him, or email or call our rep, and they get us an engineer right away. I think that type of direct relationship with an engineer at NETSCOUT is a common scenario because in speaking with him, he talks about similar interaction with other customers in this region.

I have used their support via a ticket. Their response is quick, and they usually just get us right over to the local engineer. It can usually be resolved without escalating.

We used a solution by SolarWinds, and we also used a solution by another provider. We realized we needed to change when we had a distributed denial of services attack that spanned greater than one gig.

The initial setup was straightforward. They had a lot of automation in place that could take configuration files, etc., and automatically incorporate them into their system. The way that the tool communicates using normal SNMP communication made it a super-easy install. It was very easy to get online.

I have a hardware version of it here, and with getting everything wrapped and cabled and connected, we had it online in about three days.

We had an implementation strategy mostly because we had a business case on what we wanted it for. So we had a strategic plan in place to get it up and running and providing us the information we needed as quickly as possible. We proposed the strategic plan to NETSCOUT and their Professional Services were able to meet everything that we needed.

There were three people involved in the deployment. We had the NETSCOUT Professional Services engineer, and we had two resources from my company, one of whom was really just a backup. Their roles were to deliver the strategic plan to the NETSCOUT engineer and to receive onsite training as services were turned up.

We had Professional Services help us with it and it was a breeze. It was easy to set up. Their Professional Services were the only ones needed.

For the business case that I mentioned above, when we took a baseline of our traffic to show the changes and the differences, there was a big return on investment.

But giving our customers the power to have some visibility into their own traffic has been a huge return on investment. Not only are they able to identify their needs and their growth, and take up less of my resources' time to do an investigation into what they need - so it has saved resource time; but we're also able to identify their growth patterns at an earlier time, so we're not spending money on things that will need to be replaced.

Their pricing is very competitive with other solutions. I'm getting to the point to where I'm going to have to upgrade my licensing level, and it's a pretty big hop. But what I like about NETSCOUT's licensing is that it's shared across all their platforms. They don't create a new licensing scheme for every one of their products. So for nGeniusONE, you buy a certain license level and it works on all of their products.

There were plenty of other options, other things that we were looking at. We looked at trying to accomplish the same thing with tools we already owned like SolarWinds vs nGeniusONE.

We went with nGeniusONE because NETSCOUT's roadmap in development met some of the strategic things we were trying to accomplish.

The advice I would like to have if I was implementing it for the first time is to have a good understanding of what you're trying to accomplish; not for one single thing, but for all the things that you would like to accomplish. Then, plan and design your NETSCOUT purchase accordingly so you're not just doing one piece here and one piece there and then trying to figure out the integration later.

In hindsight, NETSCOUT engineers have been really good at helping us put those pieces together, but it would have been helpful to spin it all up at the same time and to have had it strategically set up to move us to the future, where we needed to go.

If you count all of our customers we probably have over 100 people using it. Their roles include network operations, security operations, network engineering, and we have our agency monitoring.

Some of the shortcomings that we've had with our NETSCOUT products have been because of our own internal resources, not because of the product. We just don't have the time or the bandwidth to implement some of the things that we need. With that being said, I would give NETSCOUT a ten out of ten.

Our primary use for nGeniusONE is packet inspection.

It helps out with firewall issues. Aside from having the logs that are just on the firewall, we're able to get the traffic as it's going in between, throughout our network. It isolates end sources that are having issues, where we don't have any other tools that would be able to go down to an end-user's computer to find out what's going on.

It's catching quite a few things. Most of them really aren't a big deal and we should probably adjust our tolerances for them. A lot of the things are nice to know about but we really don't dig into them because they're not a huge deal.

As far as bigger issues go, it catches those on a weekly basis. That's how often we find something big enough that the only reason we know about it is because of the nGeniusONE. The bigger issues are mostly security-type issues: odd traffic leaving our network or coming into it, that has found its way past a firewall.

When we first got it, we used a lot of it for DDoS attacks to be able to find out where they were coming from, because we were able to actually see the packets and then get all the IPs. That enabled us to block sections of traffic that were constantly hitting us. After that it's server issues, router issues; just about everything.

Apart from the packet inspection, just being able to drill down into traffic is helpful to see where it's coming from, where it's going to, and everything that's going on with it.

We mainly use it for the packet inspection, but when we come across problems with traffic in general, we're able to isolate a source and the find out where, along the way, we're having the issues, because we're able to see deeply into the packet.

Starting off with the broad scope of everything that you're seeing, they have it set up pretty nicely, where you just keep drilling down into it by further clicks. It's pretty logical the way that it's set up. It's more like humans are meant to use it, instead of bots. I like it.

I'd like to see the nGeniusONE, the nGeniusPULSE, and the OptiView, their three separate products, work a little better together, a little more streamlined. We can hook up an OptiView to our system and it will bring it up on our nGeniusONE splash page where we can go and click on it. But we can't really use the OptiView functionality with the nGeniusONE functionality as far as throughput tests go.

If we wouldn't have to have multiple OptiViews throughout our system, and we could just have one that connects straight back and does all the functionality with nGeniusONE that two OptiViews do, that would be awesome.

Another thing that would help out is if they packaged the NetFlow monitor into nGeniusONE. Their NetFlow monitor works with nGeniusONE where you can actually get the netflow of pretty much anything you hook it up to. But it's a separate box that you have to buy. If there was a way that they could package that into nGeniusONE, it would be a complete package straight out of the box. It does a lot for you without it, but with the NetFlow monitor, in our situation, we'd be able to replace three other tools right off the bat.

We haven't had any issues with it going down or not working. The server that we're using is our own server and we have their software loaded onto it. All the issues that we've had have been our actual server. We had to replace our server once because it died on us. But as far as the software and the actual NETSCOUT appliances that we have going to the nGeniusONE go, like the Packet Flow Switch, etc., we haven't had any issues with them since I've been here, which is three years and counting. It hasn't had any downtime that was not scheduled.

We can definitely scale it higher. There's a lot more that we've found that we could be hooking the nGeniusONE up to. The possibility is there. The only issue we have is our bureaucracy.

As far as what it could be doing for us, if I had my way we'd have it taking care of everything. It's just a matter of getting it done. But the option is definitely there. We're using it mainly just for data center and core stuff, but the option is there to send it out to our distribution nodes as well.

For any issues that we've ever had, we've gone directly through our sales engineer and directly with NETSCOUT. As far as customer service goes, getting everything set up, and with any issues we've had since we started using the nGeniusONE, they've always been great with helping out and getting us completely taken care of, without having to go to a third-party.

Typically the response time is same day, depending on when I call or send an email. I understand that they've got other clients, so 24-hour turnaround is what I've experienced. It's been really good, and that's going directly to our account rep and our sales engineer. The times that I've gone to NETSCOUT technical services, I have been on the phone waiting for an engineer to help me out for five minutes, if that. The customer service part has been really good.

The last issue was doing an upgrade on our nGeniusONE server. We were having some issues with getting the upgrade to take on the server from our end. It turned out that we missed an upgrade in between. That's when we called up the technical support and they actually had us upgraded in about 30 minutes after the phone call was made.

I can't remember the name of it, but it pretty much gave us packet flow and some type of visibility into them, but it was so spotty that it wasn't reliable. They had that solution in place for about eight years, but because it was so unreliable as far as getting the actual traffic that you wanted to see, and getting the information that you were trying to get out of it, that nobody really used it.

From what I understand from the people who were using the previous solution before I got here, when they got it set up people tried to use it and it was kind of a mess and the workflow going through it was just not very well thought out. Once you finally got into it, you could see some stuff, but you couldn't ever see, what you were trying to find. People just gave up on it and it sat there. They renewed the contract on it once and when that contract expired we started looking around and we came across NETSCOUT.

I know when they ended up getting the nGeniusONE, the main reason they got it was for the actual packet inspection. We originally had it set up on the outside of our edge firewall to get visibility into all the traffic that was coming in before the firewall blocked it. A lot of the firewalls at the time wouldn't give us that information. So we'd block traffic, but we could only see some of it, and if we were getting a DDoS attack on it, we wouldn't see everything that came through. That was one of the main reasons that they wanted the nGeniusONE, to see all that information.

We've since repurposed it from that, after we realized what kind of traffic we were seeing and where it was coming from. We were able to mitigate a lot of that and we don't have the effects of the DDoS attacks like we used to. So instead of monitoring a little bit of our inside and everything coming in, we've turned the nGeniusONE to monitor everything within our network, not really caring about anything trying to come in anymore because we've upgraded our firewalls as well. It's actually getting us a lot more functionality now than it did three years ago. It's been nice that we've been able to repurpose it, and doing that has actually been pretty easy.

I wasn't actually with the company when they did the initial setup for the nGeniusONE. That happened about a year before I started. I know that typically, you can have it up and going within a couple weeks.

We're currently in the process of repurposing it again and we're adding an SDN networking solution. We're getting into all those leaves and switches that are back there. We've torn it down and we're rebuilding it so we can get information about what's going on in there and in the rest of our data center. 

When they first got it, everyone loved what it did, seeing the outside traffic come in. When we moved it into the actual interior of the network, we were able to pick up a lot of issues before they really manifested: packets dropping and errors going across. We have been able to dig into stuff before it actually becomes a problem where people are really noticing that something is going on.

So it's cut down our troubleshooting time and response time to actual issues within the network itself. In my opinion, we've been able to solve problems before they've become a big issue. That's the main reason anybody would want visibility into their network: If you have fewer people yelling at you, you're doing your job.

There's a five-minute lag time for the dashboard to update itself, but we're able to see if there are any significant changes within every five to ten minutes. Before, our response time would be when an end user actually got to the point of getting annoyed with it and then called in. Typically, that would be 30 minutes down the road, after they'd tried all their troubleshooting, and then they would call in to our basic troubleshooting helpdesk and have to go through things with them for another 15 minutes. So as far as end users are concerned, we're able to work on issues about 45 minutes faster than before because we're able to see the problems that they'd be encountering before the users have to make their way through the channels to get them fixed.

If you're looking to implement it or to purchase, once you actually see the usability of it I think the decision will already be made. If you're looking at other similar options, I would definitely advise looking into NETSCOUT and the nGeniusONE, along with all the other NETSCOUT products; at least the ones we've used, the OptiView and the nGeniusPULSE. 

I really feel that anybody who has contacted NETSCOUT to look into purchasing it, and has seen demos and proofs of concept on their own networks, for the most part, will end up purchasing it, regardless of what anyone says. They'll be able to see exactly what it's doing for them and what they didn't have visibility into before. The product pretty much speaks for itself.

In terms of increasing usage, that's why we ended up getting OptiViews and the nGeniusPULSE devices and server, to take care of some of that load in a less expensive way. It's cheaper for us to be able to use nGeniusPULSE devices out on remote sites than to use a virtual NG1 out there, or to have multiple OptiViews. But if we need to dig down into stuff, we have the options there through NETSCOUT products. That's one thing that they've done well. If you don't have the money to put nGeniusONE devices out everywhere, you can get some of that functionality through different products at a cost that's more reasonable.

We have five people using it on a daily basis. Their role is pretty much monitoring, for the most part. We have it set up to get all of the traffic that we want for application services, etc. But for the most part, it's just a monitoring role, and when there is an issue we just dig down into it from there. They are the same people who are dealing with the maintenance.

I would rate it a nine out of ten and the reason is the integration issue with OptiView and the nGeniusPULSE. If they made it so that the nGeniusONE product would be able to do traffic testing with the OptiView, at that point it would be perfect, for what I use it for.

Our primary use case is troubleshooting. We use it to go take a look at application flows, to understand, when we have an issue, if there's some sort of latency or if there's a communication problem or if we're getting some abnormal behavior. Our first troubleshooting step, anytime we have an issue, is source and destination IPs and run a capture. It's the first tool that always gets called in when we're trying to troubleshoot an issue.

The biggest benefit is the ability to do low-level packet inspection. When I say packet inspection, I don't mean looking at payload, but just looking at your communication handshakes and the like. It reduces troubleshooting time because you can get a much better view into the communications path between servers, database servers, web servers, and understand what's going on. So the biggest impact is reducing time to recovery when we have a problem. It's the kind of thing such that when something is just flat-out broken, you can usually figure it out, but when you have degraded performance in applications, that's when it can be very valuable.

One of the things that we're doing is building the application flows into the dashboard, to monitor them that way. That will be one of the more valuable things to do. We are in the process of doing a PoC with one application, although we haven't actually built the workflow yet. There are some others that were built last year for some of the other more simplistic applications, but we're trying to look at the workflow for more complex applications, and do the analysis on how they're performing.

The other thing that is of high value is that we can go back and look at past performance. As long as we have data retention, which is typically only about three or four days, based on the amount of storage we have, we can go back and try to troubleshoot an issue that may have already corrected itself. We have the data back there to take a look and see what was going on at that time.

We do use it for doing a little bit of performance and capacity planning, but that's not its primary function.

The GUI has gotten better over time but there could be some improvement in how the GUI is built. That's one of the major areas of feedback I get from the users.

From a stability perspective, we have not had any issues. We haven't had it break or go down.

It's extremely scalable. We've had no issues with the scalability at this point.

Tech support has been good. We have a local pre-sales engineer and he's very helpful. He comes onsite on a regular basis, and we work with him if we're trying to do anything with new feature functions. He's helped us build some of the dashboards and done some training with the staff. He's readily available. He's local so he's here within a day or two if we need something. We're not bringing him in if we need a break-fix, we're bringing him in for enhancement of dashboards or application monitors.

Prior to this, we were just using Wireshark on laptops. We did have a product called GigaStor which we're using, but we've had a lot of issues with the stability of the product. It tends to crash, it's just not very usable.

The product was implemented about five years ago, and turn-up time was very quick. It only took us about a week to get it up and running. The implementation was, in the words of the person who did it, "pretty simple".

There isn't anything that we quantify in terms of ROI but it results in less time to resolution. Anytime engineers spend less time troubleshooting and, instead, are doing other work, they're able to be more productive. This solution reduces the amount of time that our folks have to spend doing troubleshooting because they can rapidly collect the data to solve problems.

It takes the process of collecting data from hours down to minutes.

Like any company, we always want better pricing. The pricing is okay, but it's not a cheap solution. When you want to deploy it across an enterprise as large as ours, you go into seven figures. It's not a cheap solution to get out there.

GigaStor was a product that was in-house, which we were not happy with. We really didn't do a competitive bake-off of nGeniusONE vs GigaStor, but we had experience with that product and we were not happy with it.

With nGenius, the user interface is much better and the ability to collect data is better. The GigaStors are like a PC with Wireshark on steroids. It's a large device, you put it into a SPAN port, and it can collect a lot of data. But the problem is with the interface, with how you do the data analysis. It's not good. And, as I mentioned, we've had issues with the hardware reliability with that device as well. We've had a couple of them and they tend to have a lot of hard drive failures, which either corrupt or cause loss of data.

On the retail side of our business, where we don't have nGenius deployed, we still use those GigaStors on an ad-hoc basis. We have to go over to a switch and plug them in when there's an issue going on, which is not a very effective way of doing troubleshooting.

We're not really looking at any competitors at this point. We're happy with what we're getting out of nGenius.

We have a pre-sales engineer whom we engage with on a regular basis. That has been extremely helpful, having somebody who is not just tech support but who is very familiar with the product and can provide some training. The product requires some knowledge on how to use it.

You really need to be a more frequent user. That's probably part of our downfall as an organization: We don't have people using it enough to help build dashboards and application monitors. We use it in a reactive manner and I think there's more opportunity to be proactive in how you build application monitors within nGenius.

There isn't so much of a heavy learning curve for the user interface, it's how you build the dashboards. The user interface seems to be pretty good. It's gotten better over time. But it's understanding how you get into how the mechanics of how the product works, where you pull your dataflows from, and how you stitch them together to get an application dashboard.

I've been with the company about four years, and we've been using it as long as I've been here. There was a bunch of infrastructure that was put in prior to my getting here, all the TAPs and things to expand the footprint, but the footprint for nGenius is just in the PBM (pharmacy benefit manager) part of our business. We don't have it on our retail side.

We're continuing to roll it out. As we can get funding, we increase the footprint of the product. Today we're only tapping a portion of our environment. Our plan is to continue to expand it and, eventually, put it into retail.

It's used by our entire Operations staff. Some people are better than others, so it's probably somewhere in the neighborhood of 20 people who have access to it. It's not used on a regular basis by anyone. It's used if we have a request or a problem, as needed. The users are all network engineers. Some people are on the Operations side, and some folks are on the Engineering side, and some people are on the Architecture side. It goes across the whole swath of network engineers.

There is just one guy who maintains it, and it's only a part-time job for him. As we scale it across the operation I expect we will only have to marginally increase the number of people who work on it. The biggest effort will be, as we roll it out, in bringing in additional TAPs, tapping the switches and the routers that we want to. But once that's done, we just direct the data feeds into the backend and, at that point, it's just a matter of how much storage we have. It doesn't require a whole lot of care and feeding. In the time I've been here, we've done one or two upgrades. But they've all gone well with no issues.

The main application that we use is NetFlow: all the NetFlow traffic, monitoring, bandwidth utilization, top-talkers, etc.

We are using nGeniusONE to run our bandwidth capacity management reports. In the past, we used to be very reactive, we used to depend a lot on suppliers to tell us which sites are our hot sites, meaning, which have high bandwidth utilization. Now we do this in a much more proactive way and we are moving to a more predictive approach in that aspect, thanks to nGeniusONE.

The most important feature in my regular operations is the NetFlow traffic analysis. It also has a packet inspection or packet analysis although that's something that we use less. 

In addition, the ability to be able to do detailed traffic analysis such as top-talkers, application-specific monitoring, and understanding them through patterns, is helpful. We're also able to gain an understanding of voice calls, voice traffic, whether we have packet loss in a certain part of the network or jitter or high latency that might be impacting the network. All of those are nice functionalities.

Most of the functionality I mentioned above could be improved, to be honest.

Also, it's not intuitive, it's not simple to use. It is probably the only monitoring tool, out of all the ones that I have, that I really need an expert on, an expert from nGenius, a contractor that I have to pay, to manage the tool. And that's because it's simply not easy to use. NETSCOUT needs to focus on making it easier to use. I should not need to pay an expensive resource to be able to manage the tool for me. With any other tool, I'm able to do that management internally. They should focus on the user experience, not just on the capabilities that they can provide. User experience is important these days. That would be one area where it could be improved.

Another, which might be related, is that it's almost like "white elephant." There are so many features that it makes it hard to know it all. You end up paying for things that you don't use and probably don't even need. It might be better if NETSCOUT came up with a modular way to pay for what you're going to use and not pay for all of this "white elephant" without being able to take advantage of all of it.

I also think that it's a little too dependent on physical agents all over the place. If they were able to move a bit more to the virtual environment that would be better. I believe that we still depend too much on physical appliances to get the most out of the tool. And by the way, I recently found out that they do have some virtual environments that they can deploy but I'm not sure that it's widely known yet.

Those are the main areas that I would improve.

I haven't necessarily encountered issues from the stability perspective, but I certainly find it inconsistent in the way it drives reports. For example, if you follow the standard procedure to monitor size or to monitor bandwidth, you're going to find that for about 30 percent of them you will have to do some level of tweaking and customization to make it work. It seems to either have a number of bugs in the tool that we have been reporting and they have been fixing as they go, or it's just part of the functionality that we have to do things differently for a lot of sites. It's not stability, it's more from a standardization perspective. I think that they would do better if they simplified the rollout process.

I have not had any problems with scalability.

Technical support is great. But then again, I would expect it to be great because I'm paying a fortune just to have a dedicated contractor from NETSCOUT in my office, to be available. But I don't know if we'd have the same level of support, I don't know if it would be as easy to improve and patch and continue with the operation, if I were not paying for dedicated support. 

On a scale of zero to ten, I would say support is a five. I don't think many tools out there in the market require having a dedicated person just to support a monitoring tool.

Before NETSCOUT we were in the "prehistoric era" and we were not using another tool. NETSCOUT was the first tool that we started using for this purpose.

The initial setup was very complex and that relates, in part, to the simplicity issue that I mentioned earlier.

Not just the initial set up, even migrating from one version to another, like 5.3 to 5.5, was an entirely new setup from scratch. We had to change boxes, we had to change software, we were not able to migrate databases. We had to load everything from scratch. It's like we were installing the tool for the very first time. It was a very cumbersome process.

It all comes back to the user experience feedback that I provided earlier. That's the biggest opportunity area for NETSCOUT. It is not simple to deploy, not simple to operate, not simple to maintain.

Again, it's kind of a "white elephant." If you are able and you are willing to use everything that NETSCOUT provides to you, it's probably a relatively fair price. The problem is that it's such a large and such a complex tool that I'm not sure that many companies would be able to use it entirely, the way it's expected to be used.

So what I'm paying today, based on the value that I'm getting out of the tool, makes me believe that I'm overpaying. You pay for the entire thing whether you use it or not. And these days, that's not the wisest way to go.

There are a few other options that we are currently evaluating. They include:

• NETSCOUT vs SevOne
• NETSCOUT vs LiveAction
• NETSCOUT vs ManageEngine. 

Now, I understand that most of these tools are only providing a subset of what NETSCOUT can provide. I'm perfectly aware of that. But that's exactly what I meant before about the modularity. Right now, I feel that I'm overpaying for a huge product that I'm not fully leveraging and I'm not sure that I want to fully leverage. I would rather pay less money for a tool that is going to give me exactly what I need, even if it doesn't have all the functionality that NETSCOUT can provide.

This is our traffic analyzer replacement. We use it to provide some functionality for our operations to do live captures so they can manage instant management.

The big features we use are definitely the packet capture function, NetFlow collection, and the UC analyzer to monitor real-time communication in our environment.

This is a typical thing, but every time they do a major code upgrade, we get hit with some nasty bugs. Some of them literally stop the whole platform from collecting traffic data. They should really do more Q&A on software stability before release.

Other than those bugs I mentioned, we haven't encountered any issues with stability. The system has been rock solid. It's just stable.

As far as we can see, the scalability issue is mostly that we need to spend more time to tune the software to understand our environment a little better. Other than that, we haven't found any scalability issues. Scalability is related to the hardware sizing and I think we did a pretty good job on that front.

The tech support team has been helpful. They are easy to engage and they're willing to engage the resources that we need to communicate with. I have no complaint about them.

We did have a different solution in place before. We reviewed a couple of vendors and ended up with NETSCOUT after doing a PoC in our environment.

The initial setup was a little simpler than what we have with NETSCOUT now, because our environment grew.

We evaluated NIKSUN but the accounting was way worse than what we have with NETSCOUT.

You need to spend some time to make the system to fit into your environment. Once you get it there, it works pretty well.

I give it a nine out of ten. It's only to the point that we still need to do some feature requests for things we want to do. The toolset was there but, initially, it wasn't GUI-based, so it took some time for them to implement that.