IBM SevOne Network Performance Management (NPM) vs Wireshark comparison

"Based on my experience, the stability of IBM SevOne Network Performance Management (NPM) is excellent."

"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."

"The SMP and the xStats, which is for flat file integration, are both useful for integrating the various metrics that the device provides to monitor the performance of those systems."

"The network data collection has been very flexible for us. It's been thorough in areas that were lacking. They have a team that I've worked with to add other pieces to it. So if it's missing something out of the box, they work with me to add it. I was able to collect that data. It's not perfect, but it's pretty thorough."

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

"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."

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

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

"It has a good syntax to put the commands in and get information out of."

"I like the filtering feature as we can filter data easily. This feature is also available in tcpdump, but it's a simple piece of software. Wireshark is more advanced and has many features. It allows you to filter a lot of things. The output can be filtered easily. The most important feature is colorization. If I say, "Okay, this particular SMB protocol in red, it will show me red." It's easy to identify that protocol or capture data."

"The drill-down available for packet analysis is great. It gives a network security engineer insight into what is going on at the packet level and enables better troubleshooting."

"The solution is easy to install and use."

"It's easy to troubleshoot issues because there's a large online community."

"The feature to incorporate Voice over IP (VoIP) incidents into network traffic analysis is valuable. Capturing voice or SIP communication allows for examination of interactions between SIP clients and SIP servers. This helps the team investigate or analyze issues related to call center servers and operators."

"Wireshark's best features are that it lets us see what traffic is in the network and what data should be encrypted."

"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."

"SevOne should work with the graphs legend functionality."

"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."

"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..."

"User-friendly, multi-tenancy."

"The reports are easy to configure but they are a bit outdated in terms of appearance and visualization."

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

"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."

"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."

"It needs the ability to follow multiple interfaces for specific traffic from different network zones/virtual networks. It would help to understand how any packet is going through the network."

"I would like to see Wireshark improve the ease of application of the command. The command is very powerful, but not easy to apply."

"We'd like to be able to extract the output into an Excel table."

"The only thing that I don't like is sometimes there is an update, and something that I was using is either no longer there or it has changed."

"This product needs to improve the UI."

"It would be better if they offered a hybrid version like My Cloud Control."

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

"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."

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

"Prices per license are not huge, but they exist."

"There are different options available for licensing, with the per-device option being more expensive but more flexible."

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

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

"It is inexpensive compared to other monitoring tools."

"The tool is not expensive. We were able to negotiate with SevOne on pricing."

"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."

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

"Wireshark is open-source and free of charge."

"It's a stand-alone tool. If there is a commercial license for it I am unaware of it."

"It's free."

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

"Wireshark is free software, so you can download it and use it for free with no licensing fees."

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

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