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."

"The comprehensiveness of this solution's collection of network performance and flow data is one of the basics in the field for what it does. It meets all of our needs. So for all those areas, for the most straightforward collection capabilities, right up to NetFlow and even telemetry, it meets all those demands. Not only just basic or fundamental SNMP collection capability, but the product also supports what we need for the future with telemetry streaming. So it's very comprehensive."

"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."

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

"SevOne has rich API capabilities, giving us the flexibility to control what we collect and customize the collection, creation, and manipulation of now metrics as necessary."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"I find Wireshark a very useful tool. Its best feature is that it allows me to deeply understand what's going on at the packet level, as well as any adverse signatures that I can analyze. When I need to create an IPS rule, I need to check the traffic deeply to get more insights about the actual traffic, what's the name of certain flags, etc., and I'm able to do all that through Wireshark. The tool is also user-friendly."

"The best part about Wireshark, in my opinion, is its ability to analyze packet capture files."

"It helps in analyzing if something looks suspicious, such as a brute force attack or scanning from somewhere."

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

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

"The transmission and reception issues are valuable."

"The options that are required to get the details for the packet drops are good."

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

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 reports are easy to configure but they are a bit outdated in terms of appearance and visualization."

"NMS has several areas for improvement. It should be more user-friendly inside of NMS for some of the functionality in there. It's been getting better the last version or two, but the there have been bugs in there whenever I've gone to new versions."

"The customizations are very hard. The person doing it has to be very good at analytics and has to be very good in all languages"

"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..."

"Software upgrades can be tricky is not easy."

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

"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."

"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."

"You need good network connectivity to download during the setup, otherwise, it might take a while."

"I have not used Wireshark to an advanced point where I could provide a detailed opinion on improvements needed."

"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."

"Its user interface was a little less friendly. They can make its user interface a little bit more friendly. It is for technical people, and most of the technical people would be able to figure it out, but it would be good to improve its user interface. They can maybe build artificial intelligence into it. Currently, it takes a lot of manpower to analyze and dissect all the data."

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

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

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

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

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

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

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

"It is an open-source solution."

"We are using a freeware version of this solution, so there are no licence costs involved."

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

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