We performed a comparison between SolarWinds NPM and Wireshark based on real PeerSpot user reviews.
Find out what your peers are saying about Zabbix, Datadog, Auvik and others in Network Monitoring Software."The single dashboard is a valuable feature."
"We can manage the entire system across the network and troubleshoot the pain points."
"Monitoring capabilities are at a high level and it is easy to see utilization, access ports, and CPU memory in real time or through a lens for long-term visualization."
"The most valuable features of SolarWinds NPM are network performance monitoring and the overall benefit for servers."
"This solution offers a very good view of our network and allows us to effectively monitor performance."
"There are a lot of options for customization of the dashboard, alerts, and reports."
"The ability to quickly identify downtime is the most valuable."
"The product is lightweight in terms of memory use, requiring only 10 megabytes or less."
"I like that SolarWinds NPM is a strong tool for monitoring network devices, switches, and routers. It's also a user-friendly tool. My team also likes how scalable it is."
"SolarWinds is reasonably priced."
"It gives us the ability to pinpoint problems and to communicate network problems with software and hardware vendors."
"The initial setup is simple."
"The strongest feature of this solution, is the ability it gives us to carry out deep-packet inspections on our network, particularly when a function isn't performing as it should."
"The product is simple to implement."
"The transmission and reception issues are valuable."
"What's best about Wireshark is that it doesn't require installation. It supports cards and monitoring permissions and is sufficient for appending and capturing activities. You won't need to install other tools to use Wireshark, so this saves you time. You can capture packets at any time from your laptop through Wireshark."
"I have found the most valuable feature you can design your sniffer the way you want to."
"You can use Wireshark to see the traffic packet format, the IP layers, the fields, and the enabled flags."
"The technical support needs improvement."
"The Wi-Fi side needs improvement."
"The product is scalable, but at a cost. Extra modules have to be purchased for each extra server. The initial set up isn't complex, but will require someone who is experienced with the network monitoring system"
"The root cause analysis and installation faults are not clear."
"The console could be more user-friendly. It would be better if SolarWinds updated the user interface."
"We decided that we were no longer going to trust that their products have not been capitalized."
"One of the challenges with SolarWinds is that in order to pull the data, we have to have a lot of false positives."
"The solution could be more secure."
"Each model has different features, so clients need to purchase a separate model for SQL monitoring, database monitoring, network traffic analyzer, HTTP traffic, etc. So each feature they need is in a different model, but customers would prefer an all-in-one solution."
"Time: A worldwide deployment can be confusing for dispersed users with non-local times. Each node should have a local time (with summer offset if appropriate) & each user should view & report in their local time."
"The Wireshark search function shows green for a correct search and red for an incorrect search. If there were a way to provide a description about what a search - and the similar ones which are available - can do, while a person is typing it, it would make the product easier to use and simultaneously decrease the learning curve."
"Big trace files (more than 1,000,000 packets) can be slow, but then you can use "TraceWrangler" (also free) to help with slicing and dicing the data."
"We'd like to be able to extract the output into an Excel table."
"There is a disadvantage when it comes to sampling intervals. Additionally, I've heard from a colleague that Wireshark might be less effective in the voice domain."
"Wireshark gets stuck when it is a larger file."
"Wireshark is similar to an OS defense tool, meaning that it runs on an OS such as Ubuntu and Fedora, but I'm unsure if it's compatible with Windows or if it's a straightforward process to run it on Windows. Right now, my team needs to run Wireshark from a dongle to use it, so it's an OS-dependable tool, and that's an area for improvement. I was unable to use Wireshark on Windows, and I couldn't capture it, as I'm unsure how to configure the wireless card into monitoring mode on Windows. The process was straightforward on Linux, but it wasn't the case on Windows OS. It seems Wireshark isn't compatible with all OS. For example, you can analyze the log, and you can analyze it on the Windows server, but you can't do a capture in Windows. Configuring Wireshark for Windows isn't as easy as configuring it for Linux."
"The product is great but I wish there were more of an emphasis on the command line tools."
"I would like to see Wireshark improve the ease of application of the command. The command is very powerful, but not easy to apply."
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SolarWinds NPM is ranked 4th in Network Monitoring Software with 147 reviews while Wireshark is ranked 4th in Network Troubleshooting with 61 reviews. SolarWinds NPM is rated 8.2, while Wireshark is rated 9.0. The top reviewer of SolarWinds NPM writes "High-level, comprehensive, and proactive monitoring in a user-friendly interface". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Wireshark writes "User-friendly with an easy setup and a nice interface". SolarWinds NPM is most compared with Zabbix, PRTG Network Monitor, ManageEngine OpManager, ThousandEyes and WhatsUp Gold, whereas Wireshark is most compared with Zabbix, Nagios XI, Colasoft Capsa, ClearSight Analyzer and Microsoft Network Monitor.
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