IBM SevOne Network Performance Management (NPM) vs Wireshark comparison

"The out of the box reports and workflows are pretty good and they meet our requirements well."

"One of the most valuable features is the graphs, which you can build instantly. I have used some open-source platforms in the past, but they are not as good. With SevOne, the sampling in the graph can be every few seconds, not just every few minutes, and that's really helpful. It's really fast."

"Another useful feature is that SevOne gives you real-time insights into your network performance. It polls every five minutes. That is important for our customers because there are some network teams that are always monitoring their networks."

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

"One of the solution's biggest strengths is its capacity management performance, with out-of-the-box reports through NMS, as well as its ability to collect NetFlow-related data from devices. The collection of network performance and flow data is important because we have many critical business applications."

"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."

"The automation feature is good because if your CMDB is OK and it is already in sync, then the automation part is good to go."

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

"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."

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

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

"The initial setup is simple."

"The session-level filtering features are valuable."

"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."

"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."

"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."

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

"We previously have had discussions on some reporting enhancements. So, we raised a feature request, which was delivered from SevOne."

"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."

"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."

"Their virtualization solution is not compatible with our Kubernetes environment, which is one of the reasons we are ending our relationship with them."

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

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

"One area that requires a little bit of improvement is the topology of visualization and being able to map out connections, end-to-end. It's able to do that, but it's not as impressive as we would like it to be. We would like to understand the different interface types and the connection points better, through the visualization. Heatmaps also need further development."

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

"With Wireshark, you cannot download and utilize the packet in automation."

"You need some basic knowledge to work with Wireshark. Maybe it could be more user-friendly just for new users. Just for the new generation."

"It is difficult to scale this solution."

"The speed of the Internet could be improved, especially its performance."

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

"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."

"A room for improvement in Wireshark is its ease of use for beginners. It could be better. Another room for improvement in the tool is for it to provide more details about the traffic load. At the moment, Wireshark is adequate for me, so there isn't anything I'd like added to it in its next version."

"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."

"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."

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

"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."

"There are cheaper solutions available."

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

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

"The solution is open source so is free."

"It is an open-source solution."

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

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

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

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