SolarWinds NetFlow Traffic Analyzer vs Wireshark comparison

"NTA gives you visibility so you can make good decisions regarding new devices and adding uplinks of traffic."

"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."

"The initial setup was straightforward."

"As it offers enterprise solutions, it has all the essential features for business."

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

"The solution's most valuable feature is its traffic analysis."

"It allows us to pinpoint which protocol is overloading the link."

"For managing the traffic, it provides you a response about whether the traffic is down, up, or heavy, which is a very powerful feature."

"Wireshark analyzes networks, captures traffic and decrypts information passed through the communication channels into a form that is readable and can thus be used to learn how network protocols work."

"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."

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

"Wireshark's best feature is that it's adaptive, which means it's the go-to tool for network-related developers."

"The best thing about Wireshark is the community/ecosystem."

"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 helped in the sense that it allowed the team to troubleshoot networks faster."

"Wireshark is the world's most powerful network protocol analyzer tool."

"What needs improvement in SolarWinds NetFlow Traffic Analyzer is performance because sometimes, my team struggles too much for the solution to perform correctly for a specific deployment in my organization. Having a more detailed view in SolarWinds NetFlow Traffic Analyzer is another area for improvement, but that's more part of the protocol than the actual solution."

"I would like to see more artificial intelligence capabilities."

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

"It is a scalable solution, but it is costly to scale. Therefore, I would rate scalability at eight out of ten."

"It does not flow. It cannot do our metric performance monitoring. So it is very limited. They can do it but in a very limited fashion. It is only good for SNMP-based alerts."

"Customer support is quite complex."

"One thing I have noticed is that it is very slow to pick the dynamics of the network, so that is something that could be improved."

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

"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."

"I would like better control of bandwidth from the service provider."

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

"It is difficult to scale this solution."

"The product is great but I wish there were more of an emphasis on the command line tools."

"The initial setup depends upon the basics. You need to have a clear understanding of the basics."

"Maximum buffer size of captured data should be unlimited and should allow ability to archive all old captures (not save option) in real time, it should support a destination location where old captures can be directed for long term storage."

"A room for improvement in Wireshark is its ease of use for beginners; it could be better."

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

"For our environment, we pay approximately $25,000 USD yearly."

"SolarWinds' pricing structure is the primary reason why some customers opt for another solution such as ManageEngine NetFlow Analyzer. In NTA, you are charged per port, meaning that if you have a 24-port switch you will be charged for 24 individual nodes. ManageEngine NetFlow Analyzer, on the other hand, charges per switch, such that if you add a switch, the entire switch will count as one single node."

"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."

"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."

"The pricing is really good."

"The pricing is reasonable."

"It's free."

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

"It is an open-source solution."

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

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

"It is free."

"The solution is open source so is free."

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