Statseeker Reviews

It is a good monitoring tool. It does the job.

It helps us track the status of over 1200 devices in multiple geographical locations.

Integration including ability to do network diagrams.

We have been using this solution for three years.

We had a stability issue. It seems to occasionally hiccup with duplicate IPs.

There weren't really any issues with scalability.

Technical support, at least for me, has been good. No complaints on technical support.

I was using SolarWinds NPM/NCM. This department was already using Statseeker and didn’t want to change.

It’s getting better, but it still requires some low-level Unix command line tweaking occasionally. I’ve seen two Statseeker techs work several hours to fix it.

Interface counting/reporting with Juniper switches adds TWO interfaces for every single interface. That is killing our licensing. I’ve had to tweak removing some interfaces that I don’t want to track.

I worked with SolarWinds for ten years.

Know Unix. It’s a must.

SNMP monitoring for up/down locations and bandwidth monitoring: We are able to see problems before they start.

We can be proactive with our calls to customers to see what’s going on in their location before they might even know there is a problem.

The tool is pretty good as it is. It monitors everything we need it to on a day-to-day basis. You know, if I had to complain about anything, it would be the documentation. The videos are good but I’m a manual-reader kind of guy. A comprehensive document, including how-to’s, would be a great addition.

When it comes to documentation I think of Cisco as being the gold-standard.

You can go to their website, search for what you need and within a few click be at a document that will explain, step-by-step what you need to do.

Statseekers’ videos are useful for the basics but when you start getting into details I find there isn’t a lot of documentation.

Of course this might just be a matter of me not being able to find it on the website.  Which again comes down to me being able to search the available documentation. Either by an index-type search or clicking on a screenshot of a Statseeker screenshot and getting some sort of help context.

We have used the solution for two years.

We haven't encountered any issues with stability. I have to say Statseeker has been the most stable of all the applications we use for monitoring.

We have not yet encountered any issues with scalability. We’re still a small customer and I only monitor 20,000 or so interfaces.

We have always been using Statseeker.

Our network is a little special so we have to use a host file, which is burdensome but manageable.

The product seems comparable to other similar solutions, but I don’t pay the bills. I just get to spend the money.

There is no high availability over multiple locations (datacenters) and if you want to maintain what is monitored, I suggest you use the host file. Automatic has never really worked the way I expected it to.

I work in a distributed simulation. It's a much smaller network and it is a closed one. It's classified and it's behind encryption devices. You can't actually get there from the outside.

We had a unique situation here. We are using this solution with distributed simulation for military purposes. Packet loss is equated with a lack of credibility in your simulation. You basically can't trust the data if you lose packets.

After a lot of testing and verification, we decided that we cannot afford more than 1% packet loss. You can't say zero, because zero isn't possible to achieve. We tested and we said that if 1% packet loss is all we have, then that's what we can live with.

The question we had was how we can measure the 1% data loss in a distributed environment. We instrumented all of the sites with this solution. There are about 25 sites in the hub. The interface is going to decide. We're collecting data on that. I worked with the development team in Australia to give us a script that exports the data for us so we can actually obtain the data. We made our own dashboard out of it. It's a dashboard, or a line chart, that shows the usage on each interface, but all of the lines are on one graph.

Statseeker didn't have that capability. I don't know if they have that now. Rather than looking at 25 charts and trying to figure out which one might be going over 50 MB, we put all of the charts into one chart. We had one inbound and one outbound chart, and we normalized it to 50 MB so we would see, at one glance, if somebody is overriding. One person overriding ruins the whole experiment. This was a unique use of Statseeker.

It's different than what most IT enterprise people use it for. They look at their environments one at a time. They look at one connection from a server to a client. In our case, we wanted to see all of it combined into one. We can't afford any losses. even at the most insignificant site, a loss means losing the credibility of the event.

It's very expensive to set these up. It costs a couple million dollars for each experiment that runs only for two weeks out of the year. We can't afford any loss during that time. The best choice for that was Statseeker. We exported the data in real time and we're putting it on our dashboard charts ourselves.

One of the things we talked about with the developers, who are very smart guys, brilliant engineers, is to improve the dashboard. The dashboard they have is great, but is doesn’t have the multiple line charts combined into one.

If they could offer that, then we wouldn't need to do that unofficially on the outside. We wrote the software ourselves in Java and did it ourselves. If they had something like that in a dashboard to have all the lines combined, that would help us.

One other thing that is a problem for us is the Certificate of Networthiness requirement that they have in the military, in the Department of Defense networks. It means that your product has to meet certain tests and requirements to be credible, and to make sure it's not spyware or anything like that. It was difficult for me to get Statseeker on this network, because it didn't have such a certificate.

I worked a little bit with the Statseeker team and I was able to write a statement. Basically, I vouched for it on my own volition, as an engineer. The network administrator said that he had something in the book for it, and nobody ever came back and looked at it.

I think Statseeker itself could do a better job in closing deals and they would have a bigger customer base if they could meet such a requirement. This requirement is very easy to meet. They're not doing anything wrong, but you have to illustrate and explain how you're collecting the data off the network.

They want to see how you're collecting traffic and how often. They want to know what kind of stuff you're sending back out; if it's HTTP, then it's their website. That could be very easily achieved by documenting that and applying for such a certificate. That could be available for all customers in the DOD. I think it would open a new market for Statseeker. It would potentially give them many more customers around the country, the United States, and foreign countries, as well, where that is required.

On the core part of the product, I really don't know how you could improve it. It's a very solid solution.

There have not been any stability issues. We follow the installation instructions exactly. We're not using it in a virtualized way. We're using it the way it's supposed to be used. We have not had any trouble, especially not on the small network that we have.

On our small network, there haven’t been any scalability issues. We're using 1,000 interfaces, and we're probably only monitoring 800 of them. On the other network that I was on before, it was much, much larger, and I also didn't observe any stability issues. Statseeker is a very robust solution. I can't say anything negative about it.

I have used technical support. There was a time when all of the calls had to go to Australia. That meant that we had to contact them at 2 p.m. our time. I often used my evening hours at home. I wasn't going to stay at work at 8 or 9 o'clock, depending on when these guys were available for a call. That was a little bit bothersome. But it got done.

If you need technical support on the spot, it would have been difficult. Because the product was so robust, I never really needed support too much. My technical questions were always toward a longer-term solution, not for something that I need to talk to Statseeker right now because I'm in a bind and I need to solve this problem. It's never been like that.

That's because of the product they have. In other words, if you live in the United States, there's a lot of Chevy, Ford and Chrysler dealerships, but there are only a few Honda dealerships and repair shops. There are fewer of those because you don't need them. Those cars don't go bad that much.

In this case, you didn't need a tech support person to be on the phone, ready to go, because the product doesn't show these kinds of issues. I would much rather have something that's robust and I don't have to call anyone, than something that's flaky and hokey and you can't figure it out and you end up having to talk to support to make it work. The approach is fundamentally different than most American-based companies, and I like it for that reason.

I worked on a different program with Lockheed Martin at Fort Knox back in 2011. This was a very large network, one of the largest in the world. It's called Recruiting Services Network (RSN). It has 29,000 users and I was asked to find out which links needed to have an upgrade. People were complaining across the board. I was the architect, and I was tasked to find out why we had so many complaints, who is overriding their bank, and so forth. I looked at a whole bunch of tools that they had there, and one of them was Statseeker.

They had already purchased it. I did a quick comparison between that solution and some other tools that were there. It was clear to me that this was the best tool for us. I got to use Statseeker extensively after that for the following two years.

I was involved in the installation and it was straightforward. It was very easy to do compared with other installations I have performed.

Unfortunately, everybody wants to virtualize these days. At this point, we're not running virtualized, because it shouldn't be done. I'm opposed to virtualization for network stuff. Because of the nature of the network, you're sharing processing power and all of that stuff.

I can see that the trend is going to eventually push Statseeker into a virtualized solution. That's a bad development, but I can just see it's going to be more and more of an issue that will come up. I'm wondering how they are going to deal with it. I hope it stays the way it is.

I think we currently have a small license compared to the one at my last job. This license is only for 1,000 devices/interfaces.

I heard that we're still using 4.0 with some patches applied. Because of the script we have, we didn't want to upgrade because the script might not work on the new version.

I heard licensing went up for the new product. I don't actually know if the licensing fee went up. For our 1,000 interfaces, it was around $1,800 when we bought it. That was more than adequate.

It's a great pricing strategy. If it's twice as much, however, then it's already getting a little expensive. It is a little bit expensive for how we use it.

My advice is to give it a chance. Look past the bells and whistles of competing products. What you're getting with Statseeker is a far superior tool, in terms of precision in having the true data available indefinitely and the ease of use.

Look past what you've seen before and give Statseeker a chance. Once you have done that, you are good to go and you won't want to use any other tool.

They have never put out a product, an update, or anything that didn't work. It always worked right away with these expectations.

My favorite feature is Traffic Analyzer (NetFlow). I use this part of the tool nearly every day to validate what traffic (source and destination) is communicating, how much bandwidth they are consuming and what protocols they are using. It assists in troubleshooting immensely. We use the alerting features to notify of performance issues, device outages, and firewall failover situations. We have used the historical data tool many times to review historical performance. Since it keeps all historical data, we can get pretty much everything we need.

When we have bandwidth spikes or outages, we use this tool to analyze what device or devices are causing the issue. Then, we evaluate the data and the case, and decide how to proceed with configuration changes to prevent the issue from recurring.

We would like to see improvements in reporting and multiple-user integration. Reporting has everything you can think of, but it can be cumbersome to set up and tweak the reports to get the exact data you want. When setting up multiple users with AD authentication, it is a bit tricky and problematic. I wish this had an easier integration.

I have used Statseeker for 14 months.

We have not had any issues with stability. This product has worked right out of the box. Once set up, we have upgraded a few times and never experienced any real issues with the tool.

We have not had any scalability issues. It has been able to successfully handle all the devices and information we have thrown at it.

The technical support guys are great to work with and know what they are doing. There are times when they are slow to respond, but I have always gotten my issue resolved.

We have used multiple solutions. We wanted something that would track everything on our network. The integration with the Traffic Analyzer (NetFlow) data we get from Statseeker really helped and it is awesome that they included this in the price. All other solutions seemed to want to charge extra for that feature. Ease of installation and setup was a bonus.

You install, add SNMP credentials, add devices and BAM. Done. Setting it up was easy, and, once you add a device, the data is there. No silly maps to play with and a simple dashboard were great. It also helped that they offer a full demo of the product. That allowed me to install the product and show management the capabilities. The week after I installed it, we used the tool to help identify an issue that we had been experiencing and it assisted greatly in resolving the issue.

Pricing is competitive. It’s not the cheapest solution, but it includes everything and does everything they claim. Be sure to be conservative on your port count, you will run over your licensing if you don’t. Estimate high so you can track all your ports.

We compared SolarWinds, Icinga, Snort, and MRTG.

Get their full trial, try it out and use it to solve your issues, you will not be disappointed.

Link transmit / receive graphs, errors, up status in one view.

We can quickly see at a glance the overall status of devices on the network. We can see which links are being heavily utilised at a glance and then investigate further if required. We can see what’s down very easily and we can tailor the monitoring screen to suit our needs.

The interface looks like a Windows 3.1 program. It needs a complete refresh. Sometimes it is difficult to see all the information you are after about a list of devices as it seems to only present what will fit on the first page and there is no way to scroll to the next page.

4 years.

Not that I am really aware of. The product is very stable and just sits there doing its thing (which is exactly what we want it doing).

We haven’t experienced any scalability issues, but that may be because we’re a relatively small organisation (less than 150 devices being monitored).

Quite good and helpful in the past. Training and briefing sessions are provided.

It was our first monitoring tool and we have kept it, but we also have an additional tool to complement Statseeker.

Straightforward. Doesn’t take long to setup and get operational.

We evaluated SolarWinds and ManageEngine.

Ensure you are clear on what you need the tool to do and get a proof of concept on your network to prove it. Make sure that the tool can be tailored to provide you with what you need, not just what comes out of the box.

The features that we use are as follows:

• The out of the box graphs are excellent to look at trends very quickly going back a few days to a year, this saves a lot of time when carrying out IM.
• The ability to change interface speeds so that some higher level of granularity can be seen.
• We consistently use the fast graphing function when conducting IM. It is really easy and intuitive to use so even non technical people can use it with little or no training.

We have used this product since the organization was established and it has been a integral part of our business as usual functions and I would suggest that if we stopped using it then this would have a negative impact on our operations.

Keep it simple, the product works so I would not over complicate it. The only thing I would add is to keep improving the Netflow analysis interface this is something that we find very useful.

We have used this application for nearly 13 years in a major network of around 700 WAN sites.

No, we find the product extremely stable, noting that as a health provider we don’t use the latest version or beta versions.

Not so far, we have around 2500 mainly Cisco devices in our current version and have not had any issues so far.

Statseeeker have been very good communicators and are always willing to assist. The truth is we set it up and it runs so we really don’t use any support but are thankful for the small number of times we have called on Statseeker support.

We also use a number other network tools such as CA eHealth, Cisco Prime, Splunk, etc. concurrently, some of these tools have real strengths but so does Statseeker as outlined above. From our experience, large networks requires more than one tool and a mix will give better results to the business.

The setup is pretty straightforward, the tool does an SNMP get from the MIBs and loads it up which is a very simple process.

As stated above, we concurrently use a number of tools and have looked at others but most have issues with licensing, scalability, complexity of setting it up, etc. We have found the Statseeker product to be very easy to set up, it runs and is easy to use so are very happy with it.

Make sure that your naming convention is kept the same to make it easier to search use all lower case as capitol letter are treated differently to lower case.

I would rate the product as 8 out of 10, it is a robust application that we use on a daily basis mainly for incident management.