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NETSCOUT nGeniusONE vs vRealize Network Insight comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Oct 10, 2024

Review summaries and opinions

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Categories and Ranking

NETSCOUT nGeniusONE
Ranking in Network Monitoring Software
31st
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
6.7
Number of Reviews
50
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
vRealize Network Insight
Ranking in Network Monitoring Software
38th
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
7.6
Number of Reviews
46
Ranking in other categories
IT Infrastructure Monitoring (41st)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of July 2025, in the Network Monitoring Software category, the mindshare of NETSCOUT nGeniusONE is 1.5%, down from 1.6% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of vRealize Network Insight is 0.6%, down from 0.9% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Network Monitoring Software
 

Featured Reviews

Ruslan Melnyk - PeerSpot reviewer
Useful for network performance monitoring
My manager can explain the use cases attached to the product. I am a unit leader in my company, and I don't sell the product directly to our partners or customers. In my company, I manage certain processes and a team while building, developing, and providing them with a direction for the market. NETSCOUT nGeniusONE is a good solution for network performance monitoring since it is not cloud-based. My company sells NETSCOUT nGeniusONE in eight to ten countries. I think the solution is not good for capacity planning, but it is better to help find problems in applications because not every infrastructure is good at managing working applications. I think it is a solution meant for applications. The tool is useful for solving problems attached to applications. The tool's real-time network monitoring capability was used when the product was more reactive. In our company, if we use real-time monitoring, then we need to deal with raw traffic. In our company, if we don't see any problem in the real-time systems, we have the possibility to rely on the tool since it acts like a time machine for us, which can allow us to get back to the areas of problem and solve them. I recommend the product to those who plan to use it. For many users, it can be a good monitoring system that can be scaled up in the future. I think it is a good product to start with when working systems in an environment. NETSCOUT nGeniusONE is another tool used to manage raw traffic, and I find it to integrate well into our customers' network. I am not using it actively on the system. I use the tool for network packet brokers. I rate the tool a ten out of ten.
NiteshKumar1 - PeerSpot reviewer
The tool's configuration is easy and artifacts are easily accessible through professional services and the web
The product is highly regarded, and many customers have been using it along with other VMware products like vSphere and VMware vCloud Usage Insight. However, recently, there's been a trend among customers, especially those using VMware for a considerable period, to explore the potential of migrating to the public cloud. The common concern among these customers is how the VMware products will perform in the public cloud environment. Migrating instances from VMware to different platforms is not easy, especially when dealing with many instances across multiple customers. Customers are keen to maintain the functionality of their existing VMware products but prefer to run them on the public cloud instead of on-premise servers. Our clients for vRealize Network Insight are enterprise businesses. I rate it a nine out of ten.

Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Pros

"Packet decode and bandwidth analysis reports are the two most valuable features."
"The support is good."
"Deep packet inspection is probably the strongest feature."
"We've saved a lot of time in triaging. We have found root cause identities on packet captures and have been able to feed that information back to a specific vendor, because a lot of our technology is emerging. So, we're able to give that feedback to our vendors and have them solve the problems that they need to fix, and they have the evidence to do so."
"The quick drill-down views are similar to Wireshark views. Those are quite nice, with the views on how you interpret some of the data. The granularity of how far you can drill down into milliseconds or microseconds is a very nice feature. It actually stores quite a lot of data in its database."
"Deep packet inspection is a very useful tool as it works in real time and uses serial packet-level analysis."
"It's a consolidated, single tool that talks to multiple platforms. It's not vendor-proprietary; it's independent. It provides interoperability with different products, whether they are routing products, switching products, wireless, wired, load balancing, or proxy. It works with anything you can name."
"The visual and graphical interfaces in the display that it provides for us to show our senior leadership. We can show them what is actually happening, instead of a spreadsheet."
"The gradual way the Network Insight shows you all the relevant information about your networks. It's pretty good. You can really dig deep deep inside and see where the problem is, where it comes from, what you have inside, how did you configure it. Also, it has alerts so you can have pretty much quite a big overview about your network. This is really something good."
"The best feature of this application is its ability to capture everything within the same application, as well as capture all the traffic."
"One of the most valuable features is the ability to look at the traffic flows, to look at NetFlow data."
"The most valuable feature for us is that insight into what our network is really doing - it's a fairly complex network. Not having to go through thousands of lines of network configuration to find firewall ports that were open or closed, for various ports, was very valuable. It went out and found everything we need very quickly."
"It especially helps with deploying NSX, that you're not having to manually chase down and figure out what you need to do to microsegment VMs. This gives a nice option where you can say, "Hey, this VM, show me what flows are there." I can export it out and then import it as an NSX rule and job done."
"It allows you to see traffic that you couldn't otherwise see, which is traffic within your Layer 3-bounded network, meaning east-west traffic. It's hard to get that any other way."
"As a troubleshooting tool, it's a level-3 troubleshooting-skills tool and it's very easy to use and very easy to find the information that you need."
"The most valuable feature for me is the different views that you can get when selecting an application or a VLAN. It shows you the traffic flows. It gives you a visual representation of something that, in text, just may not make as much sense."
 

Cons

"We see it overload once in a while. It doesn't have built-in protection. Therefore, once it gets too much data, it tends to crash. Then, we have to recover it."
"Datadog is more stable than NETSCOUT nGeniusONE, being a SaaS-based solution compared to on-prem solutions like NETSCOUT."
"Initially, we were having a lot of issues with bugs when using version 6.1.1. There were a lot of problems with the dashboard causing confusion. We worked with our SE and the NETSCOUT engineering team to fix the visibility with the data. There should be a patch release to fix this issue. However, this seems to be working fine for us right now after the 6.2.2 upgrade."
"The GUI has gotten better over time but there could be some improvement in how the GUI is built."
"Its initial setup process is complicated."
"The dependency mapping is good, but I am hopeful that they will build some type of partnership and relationship with ServiceNow. I want to see NETSCOUT partner with ServiceNow so they can leverage Service Now Discovery and Service Mapping to automate the build of the service dependency mappings inside of nGeniusONE."
"There is currently less visibility or GUI to analyse the packet for troubleshooting purposes."
"The scalability needs some work. From a probe perspective, we are limited to a certain amount of throughput on the devices themselves. Without having actual hooks into the bare metal hardware for the solutions, it's a bit of a "thumb in the air" as to when we hit our capacity or when our high watermark is."
"I'd like to see better support for being able to search the hardware NetFlow data. It ingests fairly well, but you can't tell, in a lot of cases, what source the data came from. I'd like to see more support for picking specific sources. That way you could really make a compelling use case. There are also some difficulties where it can't exactly trace the path between source and destination but if you hit the reverse flow on the same search it shows the entire path."
"I want to be able to monitor a network flow that is approximately two weeks back, but I haven't found an easy way to do this."
"The IT infrastructure industry is expected to evolve towards a hybrid cloud model in the next five to ten years. In this model, most of the customer's resources reside on-premise within a private cloud setup, such as VMware. Another segment operates within public cloud environments like Azure and AWS, and a portion remains in traditional data centers. There should be seamless interoperability between public and private clouds. AWS and VMware need to work together to make it possible. Whether users interact with on-premise infrastructure or configure resources in the public cloud, the user experience must be seamless."
"Support could be much better."
"The compatibility with each and every component of the infrastructure is the main thing that I am looking for. I would like them to make sure that it's compatible with different kinds of storage systems, etc. I have seen the compatibility list. I feel it can be more compatible than it is right now."
"The product is slightly complex use, while still being user-friendly. It could use more training modules, as it is not a straightforward product."
"I want to see more in terms of microsegmentation. As of now, I can see the rules, but they are not in a readable format that I can convert to microsegmentation and can fit into NSX Manager."
"vRNI needs more remediation where it hooks into NSX."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The scalability becomes very expensive quickly."
"The product is too expensive compared to other products."
"Licensing is flexible, it's not tied to anything else. We can easily switch up the licensing piece... Obviously, NETSCOUT is a little bit in the higher range, but it gives you value for money. You get what you pay for."
"I rate the price of NETSCOUT nGeniusONE a four out of five."
"Cost is probably the biggest drawback. Compared to some of the newer vendors that have popped up in the space, it's definitely more on the expensive side... [But] it's been able to keep its value, even in the face of the cheaper competition."
"It is a little overall pricey and expensive, but you get what you pay for."
"Their pricing is very competitive with other solutions... But what I like about NETSCOUT's licensing is that it's shared across all their platforms. They don't create a new licensing scheme for every one of their products. So for nGeniusONE, you buy a certain license level, and it works on all of their products."
"The price is only for acquisition; it's not a licence."
"vRealize Network Insight is expensive."
"Cost always has room for improvement, you could always make it cheaper. But I think it's a good value for what you pay for it."
"It's an expensive product because we have a lot of nodes."
"It reduces costs. It takes something that may be challenging and makes it more usable and visual by being able to bring in tools, seeing what their impact is, such as microsegmentation and application rationalization, and seeing it quickly."
"It's a little expensive, but for what you're getting out of the product, you often see the trade-off. It depends on the type of licensing you have. It might be a little too pricey for some."
"The solution has reduced the time that we spend on other products. For example, with NSX, we were able to quickly find things that we would normally spend days trying to figure out."
"I rate vRealize Network Insight's pricing a seven point five out of ten."
"The solution has helped us to reduce time, increase performance, reduce costs, and even easily manage networks. We are probably seeing 10 to 20 percent labor savings because we are able to be very specific and focused on what we want to do. It ends up saving the customer money and makes us be more efficient on our cost deliveries."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
15%
Computer Software Company
14%
Manufacturing Company
10%
Government
8%
Computer Software Company
15%
Financial Services Firm
15%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Healthcare Company
8%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

Questions from the Community

Which is the best DDoS protection solution for a big ISP for monitoring and mitigating?
I would say if it’s an ISP that will build a scrubbing center, Netscout/Arbor is a good solution. In all other solutions, Imperva is a great choice.
What do you like most about NETSCOUT nGeniusONE?
Stability-wise, I rate the solution a ten out of ten.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for NETSCOUT nGeniusONE?
The pricing is a bit high yet not overly expensive. The cost depends on the size of the customer, as sizing controls the pricing.
What do you like most about vRealize Network Insight?
The tool's ease of configuration and use and the availability of information and artifacts through professional services and the web are key factors that customers find valuable.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for vRealize Network Insight?
Broadcom is known for increasing product prices, making them expensive compared to what people used to pay. I liken the subscription model to not truly owning what you pay for.
What needs improvement with vRealize Network Insight?
Right now, I do not see a specific area for improvement. My main concern is understanding the intentions of Broadcom, which has acquired VMware. Broadcom should improve by going back to what was wo...
 

Also Known As

NETSCOUT nGenius, nGeniusONE
Arkin
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Cerner Corporation
NTTi3, VCIX-NV, VMware Networking and Security Business Unit, Illumio, CompuNet
Find out what your peers are saying about NETSCOUT nGeniusONE vs. vRealize Network Insight and other solutions. Updated: July 2025.
861,524 professionals have used our research since 2012.