SolarWinds NetFlow Traffic Analyzer vs Wireshark comparison

"So far, it is a very stable product."

"The integration with other SolarWinds products is good."

"The bandwidth monitoring functionality is one of the most important features for our customers. When the customer notices that their bandwidth usage is too high for some reason, they will use the traffic analysis within SolarWinds NTA to identify which protocols (e.g. HTTPS) or applications are using up the bandwidth."

"The most valuable feature is the alarm that is set up to trigger based on bandwidth utilization."

"It is great at telling you if your devices are working and it keeps an eye on your network's overall performance."

"The software management tools are very useful for our customers."

"SolarWinds has improved our organization because whenever a device is down, we get an alert."

"NTA's most valuable feature is traffic analysis and visibility."

"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."

"Wireshark is very user-friendly; even someone with basic IT knowledge can use it."

"Wireshark has a lot of features. It's a powerful tool if you're familiar with it. You can see everything on the network with it."

"The strongest feature of this solution, is the ability it gives us to carry out deep-packet inspections on our network, particularly when a function isn't performing as it should."

"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."

"What's best about Wireshark is that it doesn't require installation. It supports cards and monitoring permissions and is sufficient for appending and capturing activities. You won't need to install other tools to use Wireshark, so this saves you time. You can capture packets at any time from your laptop through Wireshark."

"The feature to incorporate Voice over IP (VoIP) incidents into network traffic analysis is valuable. Capturing voice or SIP communication allows for examination of interactions between SIP clients and SIP servers. This helps the team investigate or analyze issues related to call center servers and operators."

"Wireshark's best features are that it lets us see what traffic is in the network and what data should be encrypted."

"They should work on the configuration of the Log Analyzer feature."

"The licensing should be more realistic so that we can adjust the number of nodes according to my needs, rather than in fixed increments."

"The solution needs better log management and log coordination with tools."

"I would like to see better customization capabilities."

"NTA's documentation for the implementation phase needs some enhancement."

"Customer Support is quite complex."

"The analysis can utilize algorithms like K-means clustering or associative neural networks for predictions rather than relying on generative AI, which is more suited for text."

"The tool itself is very complicated, so training is required to handle it effectively."

"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."

"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."

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

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

"Big trace files (more than 1,000,000 packets) can be slow, but then you can use "TraceWrangler" (also free) to help with slicing and dicing the data."

"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."

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

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

"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."

"The pricing is really good."

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

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

"Licensing for SolarWinds NetFlow Traffic Analyzer is paid yearly, and there are no additional costs that you need to pay apart from the standard licensing fees because you don't need to purchase another solution to make SolarWinds NetFlow Traffic Analyzer work. Pricing for SolarWinds NetFlow Traffic Analyzer is more expensive than other solutions."

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

"The price of this solution is exceptional."

"NetFlow Traffic Analyzer is reasonably priced."

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

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

"It's free."

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

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

"It is free."

"The solution is open source so is free."

"It is an open-source solution."