NETSCOUT nGeniusONE Reviews

We have an extended operations team in India with engineers running the day-to-day tools to monitor around 150 sites across the globe. We have the MPLS and DIA for the bandwidth initiation. If there is a bandwidth alert, the engineers will look into it and take the necessary actions.

It is mostly deployed on-prem. We have a few NETSCOUT applications (five percent) that we have moved off to the AWS Cloud. We were in the process of migrating one of our data centers to the cloud. We just started working on that.

We have a direct internet connection (DIA) on most of the sites and nGeniusONE helped us with reviewing bandwidth depletion from the sites. Most of them were utilizing like 30 Mbps, but we were adding 100 Mbps. We went and collected data from all the sites using nGeniusONE, then we initiated a project for refacing the Mbps bandwidth, which gave us business revenue improvements. We reduced most of the sites' bandwidth and a lot of our spending (on unused bandwidth). This solution has saved us more than $50,000 a month and freed up 30 percent of our bandwidth.

It's able to give me real-time data. We were working on a project a couple of days ago where we were able to compare the nGeniusONE data and the packet data. Initially, the network team was using the nGeniusONE tool. However, right now, most application owners and the application team have access to nGeniusONE. They want to see how the application performs under real-time. Therefore, we are definitely moving towards have the application team use it as well. The management is also really happy.

Especially with the pandemic situation, we asked most users to work from home. We set up a lot of SSL VPN clients on the AWS Cloud. We were just using the nGeniusONE to monitor the bandwidth and the packet flow to the data center. Then, users were reporting a lot of issues connecting through the SSL VPN client. So, we did some analysis using nGeniusONE. We tweaked and removed a lot of the bottlenecks, allowing the user to work from home comfortably. We also set it up AWS cloud to give us more back and forth data and users connected through SSL VPN. Based on that, we increased the licensing count on the SSL VPN because we saw a lot of users connecting through one region's VPN. Therefore, nGeniusONE has definitely helped us a lot during this pandemic time.

This solution is good about providing us with increased visibility while conducting an IT deployment. We set up a lot of wireless connections for our R&D users to get real-time data across the globe when they access the data center. nGeniusONE showed us how the traffic is going through the MPLS, and we can move that traffic to the DIA.

Using the nGeniousONE, we found out that most of our sites were not marking the traffic. Therefore, we took the packet capture from nGeniusONE to Cisco and worked with them to fix it.

We use it VoIP, video, and monitoring the contact center application performance. It has helped us with uptime and the user experience.

We are a system integrator, and I recommend NETSCOUT nGeniusONE to our customers.

NETSCOUT nGeniusONE helps us by providing root cause analysis when it comes to latency and performance issues. The real-time traffic intelligence is very useful for analyzing data in real time, particularly with comparison between real-time and historical packet levels.

Presently, our use case is general network usage. Also, we employ the use of the ASI extender for specific unique protocols to our company.

I use the NETSCOUT nGeniusONE product with the ATA plugin.

We use it every day for triaging of events. We can eliminate whether or not the network was at fault within a matter of minutes. Because the network team always gets blamed for slowness or something not working, so we always have that evidence putting that to bed.

The solution provides the right people in our organization with the right information in a single pane of glass view. We can point it based as a service if we want to or specify user access as to who needs it, then they can grab it when they need to.

A lot of times we can see the issue without going to a PCAP, whether there is an error code in the service monitor drill down. For other apps, we do have to go to a PCAP, but we can identify that. Our team has been pretty well-trained in that as to what to look for.

We do have unified communication (UC) application performance enabled. We don't use it a lot. We haven't had a lot of use cases go to it. We do have a dashboard that runs and looks at our overall MOS scores for our phones. We have seen it in a use case where in previous versions we had a situation analysis alert that pointed to some inappropriately configured QoS mappings on a switchboard through a drill down. So, we have used it to isolate certain problems. However, these days with a lot of calls traversing mobile phones and stuff like that, UC has become a little bit of the norm for some expected QoS mismatches.

We have multiple use cases such as for remote locations, the monitoring of critical applications, and the WAN network. Apart from that, we use it for security alerts, to give us visibility into unknown traffic. I used to do integration with multiple different platforms to monitor critical storage sites for the business. 

Those are the key factors so that we can identify what traffic is passing across our remote sites.

If an outage happens, the tool helps us to identify the performance of the specific application and enables us to identify the issue. It helps improve our mean time to repair.

nGeniusONE has also been able to reduce outage time. Whenever there is an outage, it's quickly able to identify it and, without pointing fingers, we can prove that it is not the network environment. It helps us understand there is another reason and helps us move towards other areas for troubleshooting and fixing issues. That's a major factor where the tool is helping in applications that have the most business impact. We're able to diagnose and fix issues at the earliest, while avoiding large outage times and the associated business loss.

The solution transforms packet wire data into real-time data that is ready to act on. That's great for our multiple network services because it provides more insight into aggregation areas, and gives a unified view of the applications. From the application point of view, ultimately we need to discover the applications and configure it and then explore the options. This is a difference between network services and application services, but I'm most involved with network services.

It also definitely provides the right people in our organization with the right information in a single-pane-of-glass view. That's 100 percent true. We have different infrastructures from different vendors. If we had just Cisco, for example, we would only need to focus on the different Cisco tools. But with Bluecoat or Symantec, we need to focus on their tools. Because of TCP/IP, we can measure all the packet data in a single dashboard and we can show it in a single, unified view of all different infrastructures.

Another advantage is the increased visibility while conducting an IT deployment. Wherever we have the internet streams running across, we can see the entire site; what is happening and what other things are going on. We get more insight from the usual wired or wireless data.

Using it we also get to root cause quickly. We have massive business transactions happening continuously during the Christmas season. We were able to have increased traffic loads. However, the business transactions were also dependent on our vendors. If a vendor was unable to handle that much traffic load, we were able to prove, with the help of nGenius' reporting module, what number of transactions were crossing the network and which ones the vendor rejected.

We have also seen an increase in application uptime. For one or two applications it's 50 to 60 percent better.

And to some extent it has consolidated tools, however not at the application level. Rather, it has done so at the TCP or packet level. The consolidation has definitely saved us money, on the order of 20 to 30 percent.

In addition, when it comes to visibility across IT silos, the solution helps to bridge the gap between the application folks and the network folks. The network folks have always been siloed within the network infrastructure, and the application folks have also been siloed in the different components. NETSCOUT helps to bring every team into the single pane of glass to identify and isolate who is missing data across the applications or the infrastructure.

Our primary use case for NETSCOUT nGeniusONE is to provide a holistic view of a core banking solution's current networks. It helps pinpoint faults and checks the overall infrastructure to ensure smooth operations.

With NETSCOUT nGeniusONE, the organization was able to achieve real-time data visibility for critical systems, which is crucial for core banking operations. This helps in identifying and resolving network issues promptly.

The most valuable features of the solution stem from its ability to deal with raw traffic and the fact that you can use it anytime to analyze and find problems, which may not be current ones but issues from a few hours ago. In our company, we see everything when we analyze raw traffic with the tool.

NETSCOUT nGeniusONE is a complex product since it deals in areas like network packet brokers and packet analysis, making the tool complicated for end users. The aforementioned area can be considered for improvement in the product.

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.

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.