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IBM SevOne Network Performance Management (NPM) vs Kentik comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Oct 10, 2024

Review summaries and opinions

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Categories and Ranking

IBM SevOne Network Performa...
Ranking in Network Monitoring Software
41st
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
7.2
Number of Reviews
53
Ranking in other categories
Server Monitoring (19th), IT Infrastructure Monitoring (43rd), Log Management (46th), Cloud Monitoring Software (28th)
Kentik
Ranking in Network Monitoring Software
39th
Average Rating
9.2
Reviews Sentiment
7.4
Number of Reviews
14
Ranking in other categories
Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) Protection (21st)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of February 2025, in the Network Monitoring Software category, the mindshare of IBM SevOne Network Performance Management (NPM) is 1.0%, down from 1.0% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Kentik is 0.8%, up from 0.7% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Network Monitoring Software
 

Featured Reviews

Grzegorz Nowak - PeerSpot reviewer
Improves infrastructure planning by helping us analyze network traffic
We use SevOne to collect and report on network flows SevOne improves infrastructure planning by helping us analyze network traffic. We can look at bandwidth for specific endpoints on the customer's network and analyze traffic to identify issues. For example, maybe some connectors are unavailable.…
Ahmad Mohd Fahmin - PeerSpot reviewer
Makes monitoring of operational efficiency an easy process
If there is any integration, it will apply back to the source of information that was creating the delay, for example, a legacy system or because the network's configuration is not correct. My company has not yet used any AI features of the product, but we do plan to use it in the future. I recommend the tool to others. I rate the tool a nine out of ten.

Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Pros

"It also gives us the closest thing to real-time insight into network performance that we have, with just a 10-second delay. It's very important for us to know the health of the infrastructure very quickly."
"We've had great feedback from our customers about SevOne support. They're willing to set up a remote session upon request. You have to go through three tiers of support with most vendors, and they ask a lot of screening questions before they will do a remote session. You need to spend a lot of time before an engineer will host a remote session to look at your problematic system."
"SevOne has rich API capabilities, giving us the flexibility to control what we collect and customize the collection, creation, and manipulation of now metrics as necessary."
"The feature that I have found most valuable is the scale-up and scale-down. The scale-up is an operation where the CPU boosts-up and then the memory will boost-up. That works awesomely."
"The automation feature is good because if your CMDB is OK and it is already in sync, then the automation part is good to go."
"The monitoring of the network is very customizable. That is its unique feature."
"Data Insight reporting tool is the most valuable feature. They came up with it a couple of years ago. The most pleasing factor is the dark theme. You don't have a white background. It has templates that you can create for all kinds of reports that you can hit on the fly. It's much better printing of the reports. If you want to send PDFs to people, the reports are actually decent. Whereas for years, the old architecture of the PDFs was rubbish and even our customers said, "We have to manipulate your PDFs because they all have bad margin breaks. SevOne fixed that a couple of years ago with the new Data Insight. It's fantastic."
"The most valuable feature is the NMS because that's the core of the system. Without the NMS, the other tools aren't that usable."
"I really love the Data Explorer. I use it all the time to go in and craft exactly what I need to see. I'm able to then take that story and explain it to the executives. I've done that a couple of times and it is helpful."
"It offers a simple yet powerful feature of classifying applications, going beyond basic statistics."
"Monitoring operational efficiency is easy."
"The most valuable feature is being able to pull traffic patterns; to and from destinations. We're able to understand where our traffic is going, our top talkers from an AS set, as well as where our traffic's coming from."
"We're pretty happy with the API functionality. It's web, and it's very simple to set up queries. It has served us well and you don't need to be an expert on the API or the product to set these things up."
"Having the API access allows us to do a great deal of automation around a lot of our reporting and management tools."
"In terms of the solution’s real-time visibility across our network infrastructure, I have not been able to find any other monitoring or netflow visualization tool that gives me the kind of information I get from Kentik. If I need to take a deep-dive into something that I see, it's really easy for me to do that. Whereas with most other things, I have to use five or six other tools to get that kind of data, with Kentik, I have it all in one place."
"I am able to do a lot of work on the visualization end to create different visualizations and different ways to get information out of it."
 

Cons

"When I started using it, I tried adding one of the BroadWorks application servers into SevOne... it created thousands and thousands of objects from that one application server and we immediately ran out of license... It would help, when new objects are discovered, if there were a way to categorize those objects and to pick the part of the object you need..."
"SevOne should work with the graphs legend functionality."
"The customizations are very hard. The person doing it has to be very good at analytics and has to be very good in all languages"
"The one area with room for improvement is probably administration. They added data insights to make a better user experience, but I'd like to see some improvements in the way the system's administered."
"Software upgrades can be tricky is not easy."
"Their virtualization solution is not compatible with our Kubernetes environment, which is one of the reasons we are ending our relationship with them."
"There is no service mode setup in this monitoring tool if you want to snooze alerts for any specific amount of time, to account for any activity change or major incident."
"We previously have had discussions on some reporting enhancements. So, we raised a feature request, which was delivered from SevOne."
"They're moving more in a direction where they are saying, "Hey, here's information that you may be interested in or may a need," before the question has to explicitly be asked. Continuing to move in that direction would be a good thing."
"The product could strive for more improvements to become closer to perfect."
"There is room for improvement around the usability of the API. It's a hugely complex task to call it and you need a lot of backing to be able to do it. I should say, as someone who's not in networking, maybe it's easier for people who are in networking, but for me that one part is not very user-friendly."
"I consider the pricing model as an area for improvement."
"We asked for a way, regarding the potential networks that exist, to hook Kentik up with external tools like peering DBs to correlate things together and see what we can do... This is all in the [next] beta now."
"I believe they're already working on this, but I would love for them to create better integrations from network flow data to application performance — tracing — so that we could overlay that data more readily. With more companies going hybrid, flow logs and flow data, whether it be VPC or on-prem, matched with application performance and trace data, is pretty important."
"I've checked out the V4 version of the interface and it's still a little bit clunky for me to use. I still go back to the old interface. That's definitely one that they still need to work on. It doesn't seem like everything that you get in the V3, the older interface, is there. For instance, I was trying to add a user or do the administrative tasks in V4, and I couldn't figure out where I was supposed to do that."
"I would like to see them explore the area of cost analysis."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"There are cheaper solutions available."
"Although I don't have exact details in terms of cost, my experience has been that SevOne is willing to make a deal with the customer."
"The tool is not expensive. We were able to negotiate with SevOne on pricing."
"A blocking point is the high upfront cost because it is challenging to get it accepted and the purchase approved."
"The pricing has been fair."
"The pricing has not evolved with the market, which is one of the reasons we are moving to a new product."
"Have a bank of licenses, because it is about the number of objects (RAM, ports, CPU, etc.)."
"Choose a SevOne partner who can provide SevOne as a service and can deliver professional services and maintenance."
"We have an annual contract with Kentik that we renew each year for a set number of licenses. We also have some burstable licenses which we can spin up and spin down, and those are paid as they are used."
"The tool is cheaply priced."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Computer Software Company
15%
Financial Services Firm
15%
Manufacturing Company
14%
Educational Organization
6%
Computer Software Company
19%
Financial Services Firm
12%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Retailer
6%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about SevOne Network Data Platform?
I like the tool’s scalability and real-time reports. Earlier, we struggled to give real-time reports to clients. I also like the tool’s deployment model where we can deploy it either on-premises or...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for SevOne Network Data Platform?
The tool is not expensive. We were able to negotiate with SevOne on pricing.
What needs improvement with SevOne Network Data Platform?
SevOne could improve its flexibility because it isn't fully customizable and its out-of-the-box configuration doesn't cover all use cases.
What do you like most about Kentik?
It offers a simple yet powerful feature of classifying applications, going beyond basic statistics.
What needs improvement with Kentik?
Sometimes, the tool has complications, so we must deal with the additional support from the tool's end. We have the L3 and L4 support, but we have to get expertise in a different time zone, which i...
 

Also Known As

SevOne
No data available
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

ATOS, Devereux, Spark New Zealand, Access4, Rogers Communication, Lumen (formerly known as CenturyLink)
Pandora, Yelp, Neustar, Box, University of Washington, Zoom, Tata, and Cogent. 
Find out what your peers are saying about IBM SevOne Network Performance Management (NPM) vs. Kentik and other solutions. Updated: January 2025.
832,138 professionals have used our research since 2012.