IBM SevOne Network Performance Management (NPM) vs Wireshark comparison

"SevOne provides support for all universal connectors. They internally work with other data sources to get features implemented. We have an SD-WAN implementation and use other app data to monitor performance. If you pull that data into one centralized location, that is very useful for management."

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

"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."

"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."

"We find that the reporting is particularly valuable in terms of not only communicating with our peer teams but also with the executives."

"With this tool it is interesting to show the info to the client and explain where the traffic is."

"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."

"Flexible architecture: You can extend the system and its capacity by attaching another cluster pair."

"Wireshark saves a lot of time, especially with network troubleshooting."

"I use the filters very often, to determine what type of traffic I am looking for. The use of filter allows traffic to be segmented so that a value can be looked at individually apart from the other traffic."

"If you're dealing with troubleshooting network, voice issues, or network operations, having a tool like Wireshark to dive into packet details is important. The initial setup is straightforward. Anyone starting out or looking to deploy it on your personal PC or machine can do it easily."

"Wireshark is very user-friendly; even someone with basic IT knowledge can use it."

"The transmission and reception issues are valuable."

"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."

"The most valuable feature is the traffic gate, which shows which IPs are getting more bandwidth or traffic."

"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."

"I'm not really sure if this was the software's fault or a server issue, but a couple of years back the disks were failing on our SevOne physical server every month and the server would go down. The secondary server took over from the primary until the disk issue was resolved. That was annoying."

"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."

"We need to be thinking about streaming telemetry protocols. They already have the port for enhanced visualization, which they already have through Data Insight."

"The reporting of NMS is good, but it could be better."

"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."

"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."

"Telemetry is hot these days, and IBM can improve SevOne's support for telemetry correction. Reporting is another feature that could be better. It provides the bare minimum functionality, which is good enough for most engineers, but the management isn't advanced. The new portal provides a much lighter view and better visualization, but the management is not so good."

"There is room for improvement in the integration with different vendors and the reporting capabilities."

"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."

"Wireshark could be improved with a delay option when getting data automatically."

"I wish the filters were a little bit more prepopulated."

"The speed of the Internet could be improved, especially its performance."

"Wireshark could make the filtering rules easier to apply and offer a drag-and-drop option as opposed to type and text."

"You need some basic knowledge to work with Wireshark. Maybe it could be more user-friendly just for new users. Just for the new generation."

"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."

"A blocking point is the high upfront cost because it is challenging to get it accepted and the purchase approved."

"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."

"Have a bank of licenses, because it is about the number of objects (RAM, ports, CPU, etc.)."

"The pricing has not evolved with the market, which is one of the reasons we are moving to a new product."

"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."

"There are cheaper solutions available."

"The pricing has been fair."

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

"It is free to download and install. It runs on multiple platforms, so how can you go wrong?"

"I am using the free version of this solution."

"The tool is free."

"It is an open-source solution."

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

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

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

"It's free."