IBM SevOne Network Performance Management (NPM) vs Wireshark comparison

"Fantastic – for money laid out vs. what you’re getting back, it's been great."

"Scalability. I have never had to worry about how to handle really big environments."

"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 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."

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

"Our ROI is excellent."

"Scalability. I have never had to worry about how to handle really big environments."

"But it is a good tool that works nicely; so far, we don't regret it."

"Wireshark is very good for network engineers; it's free software, you can install it very easily, and there are a lot of features."

"This is a tool that gives you a clear-cut idea about where the issue is, and where the packs are dropping."

"Wireshark's best feature is that it's adaptive, which means it's the go-to tool for network-related developers, as when the new protocol comes up, it's rapidly applied to the system, so I can just look into the packet."

"It is free, easy to use, getting better with every release."

"Packet-capture files can be hard to use due to their size. Wireshark has a tool called tshark that can parse the files with out opening them so that you can take large captures, say 2-10GB, and return only relevant information."

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

"Wireshark is a pretty good tool if somebody wants to learn packet analysis or just plain, simple debugging of network issues at an L2 or L3 level."

"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."

"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."

"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 needs a platform to add portals."

"Customer service is very bad. The support is a kind of blog where you leave your question or problem, then they try to resolve it as soon as possible."

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

"Software upgrades can be tricky."

"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 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."

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

"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 Wireshark search function shows green for a correct search and red for an incorrect search."

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

"One con is that this software is only an observer, not an interactive component of the network, meaning you cant change anything with it."

"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."

"Bigger memory footprint."

"It needs the ability to follow multiple interfaces for specific traffic from different network zones/virtual networks."

"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."

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

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

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

"There are cheaper solutions available."

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

"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."

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

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

"It is free."

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

"The tool is free."

"It is an open-source solution."

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