IBM SevOne Network Performance Management (NPM) vs Wireshark comparison

"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."

"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."

"The most valuable feature is the NMS because that's the core of the system. Without the NMS, the other tools aren't that usable."

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

"We have benefited mainly from the use of the dashboard interface. It makes the network visually interesting for other people who are not in the network. A lot of people are not network techies who understand streams in the network. Based on location, we have streams coming in and out. They can see visually when there is some problem. They don't need to understand all the network technology behind it to be able to understand if everything is working well or if there is a problem."

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

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

"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."

"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."

"The filter option provided by Wireshark is its most valuable feature...Scalability-wise, I rate the solution a ten out of ten."

"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 gives us the ability to pinpoint problems and to communicate network problems with software and hardware vendors."

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

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

"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."

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

"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."

"Would benefit with the addition of AI modules for proactive data insights."

"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."

"High-frequency polling is data-intensive because you're pulling more. If SevOne could figure out a way to manage the impact of high-frequency polling on the system, that would be very popular."

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

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

"User-friendly, multi-tenancy."

"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."

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

"The Wireshark search function shows green for a correct search and red for an incorrect search. If there were a way to provide a description about what a search - and the similar ones which are available - can do, while a person is typing it, it would make the product easier to use and simultaneously decrease the learning curve."

"This product needs to improve the UI."

"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 product is great but I wish there were more of an emphasis on the command line tools."

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

"The solution has a steep learning curve. There are so many filters and features that are frequently being updated, it takes research, experience and familiarity to be able to use them. It could be a lot more user-friendly."

"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."

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

"It is inexpensive compared to other monitoring tools."

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

"There are cheaper solutions available."

"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."

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

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

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

"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."

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

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

"The tool is free."

"It is free."