IBM SevOne Network Performance Management (NPM) vs Wireshark comparison

"It's a great solution for highlighting and discovering useful information regarding our network's elements."

"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."

"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 out of the box reports and workflows are pretty good and they meet our requirements well."

"It's given us the ability to create various real-time network performance reports and distribute them to any colleague who can access these reports immediately."

"SevOne’s data collection functionality is very good. From a collection point of view, we pull SNMP data, which is simple. It is easy to manipulate the pull in the estate. It is really simple compared to some of the other products that we have used. However, for deferred data, i.e., things that we import or don't pull directly, we tend to have a preplanned integration. So, its Universal Collector is really useful."

"One of the solution's biggest strengths is its capacity management performance, with out-of-the-box reports through NMS, as well as its ability to collect NetFlow-related data from devices. The collection of network performance and flow data is important because we have many critical business applications."

"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 in-house. We don’t have to carry the data all over the globe. Also, I am impressed with the tool's flow reporting and Wi-Fi."

"You can use Wireshark to see the traffic packet format, the IP layers, the fields, and the enabled flags."

"Being able to dissect email data and figure out what is inside email messages was the most valuable feature. Such a feature is pretty helpful for an ongoing forensic investigation or when there is a potential insider threat that you are trying to investigate. It allows you to see the network activity of the users you are investigating. It also gives you more visibility into your network. It was very easy to set up. There is a lot of information out there on Google and YouTube about how to use it. There is also community support. If you have any trouble, it is pretty easy to find an answer online. You will have to do some digging only if you have a very specific use case."

"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."

"Setup is very easy. It's also possible to change source code and compile if you want to change something in the code, because it's free."

"It is a stable product. I would rate the stability a ten out of ten."

"Wireshark helps us to understand network traffic."

"Wireshark is a good tool to start with network analyzing and packet capturing."

"I can save the traffic and analysis when I want to. Also, it's especially helpful to follow the stream (TCP, UDP, etc.)."

"The user management features need to be improved. It would be nice if we had more granular control, or layers of control, out of the box."

"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."

"There are a lot of pain points. My main problem is that we don't have a high availability system. There are 20 peers. We're going to lose the end-of-life appliances that are old. If we lose a peer and it doesn't come back, we lose all that data. The reason we don't have high availability is because it's double the charge."

"SevOne could improve its flexibility because it isn't fully customizable and its out-of-the-box configuration doesn't cover all use cases."

"The GUI: both the dashboard/user view and the admin tool."

"SevOne should work with the graphs legend functionality."

"In terms of having a complete view of our network performance, I would rate it a nine out of 10. The reason for not giving it a 10 is that there is no packet capture associated with SevOne, but we do have other tools in place to do that."

"One area that requires a little bit of improvement is the topology of visualization and being able to map out connections, end-to-end. It's able to do that, but it's not as impressive as we would like it to be. We would like to understand the different interface types and the connection points better, through the visualization. Heatmaps also need further development."

"Wireshark gets stuck when it is a larger file."

"The initial setup depends upon the basics. You need to have a clear understanding of the basics."

"With Wireshark, you cannot download and utilize the packet in automation."

"Whenever we select one of the packets, in terms of the number of bytes, for example, there are three planes, and in the detailed plane, I have to count the number of bytes manually."

"I would like better control of bandwidth from the service provider."

"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."

"It is not an easy program. You will need to study to use it to its full capabilities (follow a course)."

"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."

"It is inexpensive compared to other monitoring tools."

"Choose a SevOne partner who can provide SevOne as a service and can deliver professional services and maintenance."

"There are cheaper solutions available."

"For the value that you get from SevOne, it's worth the price. There are a lot of cheaper alternatives on the market, and even free options. But they require more staff, more resources, and engineers with more advanced knowledge of monitoring. That's what makes SevOne worth the price."

"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."

"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."

"Wireshark is open source and gives great value and functionality to the network investigation."

"The tool is free."

"Wireshark is free of charge, and there's no license involved."

"The solution is open source so is free."

"Wireshark is an open-source product, so it's free to use."

"This is an open-source product that can be used free of charge."

"I've never personally had to pay for it, making it a highly valuable internet resource that's accessible for use. While they offer some paid versions, our firm has utilized the free version for the past three years."

"It's free."