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IBM SevOne Network Performance Management (NPM) vs Kentik comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Oct 10, 2024
 

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 (41st), Log Management (46th), Cloud Monitoring Software (31st)
Kentik
Ranking in Network Monitoring Software
40th
Average Rating
9.2
Reviews Sentiment
7.4
Number of Reviews
13
Ranking in other categories
Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) Protection (21st)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of December 2024, in the Network Monitoring Software category, the mindshare of IBM SevOne Network Performance Management (NPM) is 1.1%, up from 1.1% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Kentik is 0.9%, 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

"I like SevOne's network flow reporting."
"Its ability to monitor practically any type of network device via SNMP is most valuable. This is the main functionality that we're using. If a network device exposes a metric, such as interface utilization, SevOne will monitor it for us."
"We have benefited mainly from the use of the dashboard interface. It makes the network visually interesting for other people who are not in the network. A lot of people are not network techies who understand streams in the network. Based on location, we have streams coming in and out. They can see visually when there is some problem. They don't need to understand all the network technology behind it to be able to understand if everything is working well or if there is a problem."
"One of the most valuable features is the graphs, which you can build instantly. I have used some open-source platforms in the past, but they are not as good. With SevOne, the sampling in the graph can be every few seconds, not just every few minutes, and that's really helpful. It's really fast."
"It's a great solution for highlighting and discovering useful information regarding our network's elements."
"Scalability. I have never had to worry about how to handle really big environments."
"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 modules and the performance management reports that come with data insights are two of the most valuable features. I also find the reports for Wi-Fi, Netflow, LAN, and WAN for monitoring to be very good."
"One of the valuable features is the intuitive nature of building out reports, and then triggering actions based on specific metrics from those reports. It has a really good UI and the ability to surface data through the reporting functions is pretty good. That's helped a lot in the security space."
"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."
"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 also using Kentik to ingest metrics. It's a useful feature, and its response time, whenever we're pulling back the data, is higher than our on-prem solution."
"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."
"Having the API access allows us to do a great deal of automation around a lot of our reporting and management tools."
"Monitoring operational efficiency is easy."
"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."
 

Cons

"There are some tweaks and enhancements that I've already requested. One is to be able to make changes per device rather than as a global setting. That has to do with naming. It's minor."
"Would benefit with the addition of AI modules for proactive data insights."
"The method of searching for SIP and the way to create the groups."
"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."
"High-frequency polling is data-intensive because you're pulling more. If SevOne could figure out a way to manage the impact of high-frequency polling on the system, that would be very popular."
"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."
"The GUI: both the dashboard/user view and the admin tool."
"With the administrative management of the appliance, if some object appears from SevOne because something changed in the network or whatever, then as an administrator you will not be aware. If you are using this object in a report, this object will disappear from the report and you will not be aware of it. So, if you have 1,000 reports, you cannot always check these reports everyday to see if objects are missing or information has disappeared. We don't have any information on alerts, saying that something is happening there and maybe we need to take action. If an object was replaced by another one, or if a link was replaced by another one, then the graph needs to be changed because it doesn't exist in the graph anymore. However, we don't have this information."
"The only downside to Kentik, something that I don't like, is that it's great that it shows you where these anomalies lie, but it's not actionable. Kentik is valuable, don't get me wrong, but if it had an actionable piece to it..."
"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."
"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."
"Sometimes, the tool has complications, so we must deal with the additional support from the tool's end."
"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 consider the pricing model as an area for improvement."
"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."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Many tools price things based on the number of KPIs that you're collecting around a device. In many cases, there could be hundreds of metrics that you need to collect. SevOne provides device-level pricing. That gives us the flexibility to turn on, and expand on, the metrics that we're collecting around those devices, without taking a financial hit."
"There are cheaper solutions available."
"The pricing has not evolved with the market, which is one of the reasons we are moving to a new product."
"There are different options available for licensing, with the per-device option being more expensive but more flexible."
"Choose a SevOne partner who can provide SevOne as a service and can deliver professional services and maintenance."
"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."
"Prices per license are not huge, but they exist."
"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
Manufacturing Company
15%
Computer Software Company
15%
Financial Services Firm
15%
Educational Organization
5%
Computer Software Company
20%
Financial Services Firm
11%
Manufacturing Company
10%
Retailer
7%
 

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
 

Learn More

 

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: December 2024.
824,053 professionals have used our research since 2012.