NETSCOUT nGeniusPULSE Reviews

We use this solution in finance for the oil and gas sector, mainly for troubleshooting and monitoring of cloud environments.

We do not use this solution for ourselves but we install it for customer use as value-added vendors. It has improved our services by allowing us to provide an excellent product that maintains our reputation.

The most valuable feature is the product's ability to collect all networking information. In the biggest enterprise, it takes around a maximum of 72 hours to collect all information about the devices and the users inside the LAN and WAN.

This capability is most important to building a correct database from ID and MAC address perspectives to make for fast troubleshooting and provide a complete view of the status of the network.

User interface and the dashboard are the two main features which convince customers to buy a product in the sectors I supply. For these sectors — which are enterprise finance and oil and gas — the price does not stop the organization from buying by itself. The clients are looking for the functionality that they need and to be sure that they have a minimum of — or even no — downtime on the network.

These capabilities are more important for them in helping to keep their operations running and the cost is less important. If the interface is better and looks like it is more inviting, easy to use, and has more features, it is more attractive to the customer. NETSCOUT can do better in their marketplace with an improved GUI interface and dashboards.

One issue that I would like to see resolved. They make a solution for monitoring and troubleshooting, but they didn't fix an issue with implementing it. You have to go yourself on the main devices and fix it, but it is not recommended. That is the main issue I feel they need to resolve right now.

The stability of the solution is excellent. We have not faced any problems since doing the implementation. Customers have not contacted us for a single functional issue.

During the past three years, we have not been contacted by a single customer who needed to inform us that they were scaling their environment. Any devices that the client adds to the environment is automatically acknowledged by the NETSCOUT product itself when it scans the network. It is automatic. As far as the scalability, we have not faced any issue with it for the entire time we have been working with the solution in a production environment. The product seems very scalable and automated toward that end.

We are in direct connection with customer support and also supply some customer support services. After implementation, our organization does a followup with the customer. If the customer were to have an issue that needed resolution, the customer contacts us and puts us in the loop while they send the issue to the vendor's customer support. Within around 24 hours to a maximum of 48 hours, the customer should have an answer to fix the issue direct from support.

After we finish the implementation, the relationship changes a little and the end-user and the vendor communicate directly. This is a small change in how the support is implemented but the client expectations should be the same for reply time and results. The customer or end-user needs to get back to us and tell us if they face any situation where their issue is not answered in less than 48 hours or if they have any problem with the solution. We have not had to contact NETSCOUT about a single issue of this sort.

We are in contact with the vendor throughout the implementation. This is mostly because the implementation is representing the vendor and they want to be sure we are doing our jobs for the customer and doing it correctly. After that, we remain in contact with the vendor only. We are contacted by the end-user only if there is an issue with the vendor's continued support. We have a technical debriefing with the vendor within 45 days to two months after the implementation is complete.

NETSCOUT is very professional and thorough. I think they deliver perfect support. 

I have experience working with OptiView XG for a while as well as NETSCOUT, but before I was working with either of these I was working with Fluke. When I was working with Fluke early on, I was working with Fluke solutions only. 

I didn't actually switch formally to NETSCOUT as we still offer the entire portfolio of Fluke products.

The installation of this product is very straightforward. Our deployment takes only three days from bringing the device inside the data center until we initiate the scan to begin to collect information for a complete view of the network status. It is a maximum of three days until the product is in production.

The customer can have a complete report on the network within a maximum of five working days. To clarify that, it is three days for the entire setup to the point of being able to initiate collection of all customer information on the network. When it is running, it takes another two days for the system to learn and begin to provide meaningful data to the customer. So, in three days it is installed, and in five working days, the customer is up and running with a fully functional system delivering reports. Everything is implemented and working properly.

We are a value-added distributor in the Middle East, and we are a distributor for NETSCOUT. We are the ones who do the implementations and deployments for our customers.

In our two main sectors, the deployments require only one administrator for each remote office. So our oil and gas client has 10 remote offices and each remote office has its own administrative engineering for troubleshooting and monitoring. In total, that sector has 10 administrators for maintenance of the processes. Our clients in the finance sector require only three administrative users for their system.

But, if you look at the endpoint of what that system does and what it services, for oil and gas it is collecting information for around 1,500 endpoints. That is the number of devices or points in between routers switches and the servers themselves. It is not collecting information for the end-user laptops. It is concerned with the infrastructure of the network and each device on LAN and WAN.

In the finance sector, there are fewer administrators as there are fewer offices, but there are about 750 devices.

That is administrative and maintenance information. From our side, for deployment, there were only two people: the product manager and the technical product manager. From the customer side, it took about three of their technical engineers. The complete staff for our deployment was five persons and that now continually services 1500 devices.

Cost is contracted on a yearly basis. Around 15% of the yearly contract is from the product cost itself. The rest is based on a number of other factors. There is no additional cost beyond the standard licensing.

If a customer were to ask me about this product, I would say to work with NETSCOUT. The product is very refined and easy to use. As I do not yet use SolarWinds, I can't make a comparison, but I can recommend the complete portfolio of NETSCOUT with confidence to any customer who asks me as a technical consultant.

The biggest lesson I have learned so far from working with this solution and the clients we distribute it to is that the customer should be aware of his team and their goals. It will be easy for us to orient the organization to the product. If a customer gives us a clear picture of what he's facing and wants to achieve, it is easier for us to present to him with the technical product which fit his requirements.

On a scale from one to ten, where one is the worst and ten is the best, I would rate nGeniusPULSE as an Eight. If they will make those improvements to those features, this could actually make this product a 10. 

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 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.