SolarWinds NetFlow Traffic Analyzer vs Wireshark comparison

"This tool provides insights into top utilization applications or it identifies which circuit or application is consuming the most on the complete one-gig circuit traffic path."

"The most valuable feature is the ability to look for any increases in bandwidth over time so that we can plan before it becomes critical."

"I like the solution because it has good documentation and training online."

"We conduct network traffic analysis for a couple of key reasons. First, we look for traffic anomalies, such as unexpected increases or decreases in network traffic within specific segments. This helps us determine if the network needs to be re-architected."

"What people found most valuable in SolarWinds NetFlow Traffic Analyzer is its report customization feature."

"We have already seen a return on our investment by going with ThousandEyes."

"The bandwidth indicates the utilization of the devices; if any issue occurs, it triggers an alert for me."

"Essentially, it gives us a tool where we can manage our business proactively instead of reactively."

"I have found the most valuable feature you can design your sniffer the way you want to."

"The GUI is easy to use."

"Wireshark does exactly what I want and leaves me with no need to look elsewhere."

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

"Wireshark helps us to understand network traffic."

"Wireshark is more advanced and has many features."

"You can use Wireshark to see the traffic packet format, the IP layers, the fields, and the enabled flags."

"The solution is open-source and free to use, and there is a paid tier with more features if a company needs a bit more."

"The pricing is expensive."

"As people always complain about the pricing for SolarWinds NetFlow Traffic Analyzer, it's an area for improvement in the solution. People find it expensive. Another area for improvement in SolarWinds NetFlow Traffic Analyzer is support, as it could be better."

"I would like to see more training videos and additional material for learning how to use this solution."

"Technical support could be improved with quicker response times."

"This solution would benefit from having more security-based communications between the actual devices and the software itself."

"If your network is on SolarWinds, and you notice that the traffic is bad because it says "user downloading a heavy file," it doesn't indicate which endpoint is downloading those heavy files. SolarWinds doesn't have the tools to be able to handle this kind of situation. You can just notice through your network device that the traffic is becoming overwhelming or heavy, but you cannot go inside and get more details related to the endpoint where it is happening. We would like SolarWinds to be able to handle this kind of situation and even manage the traffic inside a network from the endpoint to the network device. These would be good enhancements. It is mostly stable. The problem comes only when we want to add another SolarWinds model. SolarWinds has so many models, and sometimes when we want to add other models on the platforms that are reserved for our firm, it freezes. When this happens, we have to create a new VM for that model."

"The Atlas module that is used for building the network map is very bad."

"Deployment needs improvement. The process is complicated, requiring attention to infrastructure settings and installation of components like the origin application server, platform, close storage, and policy agents."

"Not always simple to setup and get the filtering right when capturing 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."

"Wireshark could be improved with a delay option when getting data automatically. It could also work faster."

"We'd like to be able to extract the output into an Excel table."

"This product needs to improve the UI."

"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."

"The product has been using the same GUI for many years."

"Wireshark's UI isn't easy to handle and doesn't have as nice a view as Omnipeek."

"The solution's licensing is high-priced."

"We pay yearly, and we are happy with its price."

"While the pricing is fair, it could be better."

"The licensing for this solution is based on the number of nodes."

"The pricing is reasonable."

"I don't have information on the licensing cost for SolarWinds NetFlow Traffic Analyzer because it's bundled with another SolarWinds solution. My organization has seven different models and pays for the license yearly. My organization also had to deploy additional pollers, but the cost wasn't very expensive, though I can't give the exact numbers."

"NetFlow Traffic Analyzer is reasonably priced."

"We have licenses for SolarWinds NetFlow Traffic Analyzer. In terms of pricing, its license is not that expensive versus other tools such as HP."

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

"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."

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

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

"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."

"It is free."