IBM SevOne Network Performance Management (NPM) vs Wireshark comparison

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

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

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

"The most valuable feature as of late has been the API integration with ServiceNow."

"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."

"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 monitoring of the network is very customizable. That is its unique feature."

"I like SevOne's network flow reporting."

"The GUI is easy to use."

"The most valuable feature of Wireshark is the ability to choose a destination of flow that has not been working as expected."

"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 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."

"What's best about Wireshark is that it doesn't require installation. It supports cards and monitoring permissions and is sufficient for appending and capturing activities. You won't need to install other tools to use Wireshark, so this saves you time. You can capture packets at any time from your laptop through Wireshark."

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

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

"The session-level filtering features are valuable."

"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."

"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."

"The reports are easy to configure but they are a bit outdated in terms of appearance and visualization."

"SevOne should work with the graphs legend functionality."

"I would like to see live maps as an added feature. Also, build modules on AI and EML to provide better data insights that would proactively tell us what we should be looking after."

"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 tool needs improvement in non-Cisco SD-WAN."

"Some similar solutions offer end-to-end visibility."

"It is difficult to scale this solution."

"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."

"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."

"The system could be improved upon by adding a better and more powerful data processing engine."

"In the future, it would be nice to see color coding. It is just black and white."

"Sometimes I need to use tcpdump when I need to check the packets on CLI."

"We would like the product to be developed so that it doesn't rely on internet access for installation. We would like to see all of the components required to be integrated into the installer."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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 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."

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

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

"Wireshark is free software, so you don't have to pay any licensing fee. Individual people can use it and then donate to Wireshark."

"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."

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

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

"The solution is open source so is free."

"It's free."

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

"We're using the free version of Wireshark."