SolarWinds NetFlow Traffic Analyzer vs Wireshark comparison

"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 ability to look for any increases in bandwidth over time so that we can plan before it becomes critical."

"What my organization likes best about SolarWinds NetFlow Traffic Analyzer is its easy deployment. It's also well-integrated in terms of monitoring because my organization also uses a SolarWinds solution for monitoring. You can connect SolarWinds NetFlow Traffic Analyzer directly to that monitoring tool to get information. My organization also finds the default graphs that appear before the configuration in SolarWinds NetFlow Traffic Analyzer very useful."

"The initial setup was straightforward."

"It helps us know when a branch is down because it has a graphic presentation of all the locations a node represents."

"What I like the most is the bandwidth assessment."

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

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

"It has a good syntax to put the commands in and get information out of."

"I find Wireshark a very useful tool. Its best feature is that it allows me to deeply understand what's going on at the packet level, as well as any adverse signatures that I can analyze. When I need to create an IPS rule, I need to check the traffic deeply to get more insights about the actual traffic, what's the name of certain flags, etc., and I'm able to do all that through Wireshark. The tool is also user-friendly."

"Wireshark saves a lot of time, especially with network troubleshooting."

"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."

"It helps in analyzing if something looks suspicious, such as a brute force attack or scanning from somewhere."

"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 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."

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

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

"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."

"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."

"There is a lack of documentation ......as well as a lack of dashboards."

"The pricing is expensive."

"The plotting of the device on the map is not appropriate."

"Customer Support is quite complex."

"I wish the filters were a little bit more prepopulated."

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

"There is a disadvantage when it comes to sampling intervals. Additionally, I've heard from a colleague that Wireshark might be less effective in the voice domain."

"DNS could be improved."

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

"I would like to see Wireshark improve the ease of application of the command. The command is very powerful, but not easy to apply."

"The decryption of encrypted packets could be better."

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

"The pricing is reasonable."

"Pricing for SolarWinds NetFlow Traffic Analyzer is very high. I have a customer that needs the solution but doesn't have the budget for SolarWinds NetFlow Traffic Analyzer because the problem is that you can't use the solution only. You have to buy requirements such as the SolarWinds NPM first, and some companies don't have the budget for all the required components and modules. SolarWinds NetFlow Traffic Analyzer can cost up to $10,000, and some customers don't have that budget. Another product has all the modules that SolarWinds NetFlow Traffic Analyzer has, with a very low price, that can be a replacement, which is ManageEngine NetFlow Analyzer. PRTG is another solution that can replace SolarWinds NetFlow Traffic Analyzer."

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

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

"NetFlow Traffic Analyzer is reasonably priced."

"It is an open-source solution."

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

"The tool is free."

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

"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."

"I am using the free version of this solution."

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

"The solution is open source so is free."