SolarWinds NetFlow Traffic Analyzer vs Wireshark comparison

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

"I like that it is able to monitor multiple devices and it's vendor-agnostic."

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

"The integration with other SolarWinds products is good."

"This solution gives us important information about the utilization of protocols, particularly in terms of how often they are used."

"What I like about SolarWinds NetFlow Traffic Analyzer is that it's useful for analyzing traffic. It also has an application visibility feature that lets you control applications."

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

"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."

"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 ability to decrypt traffic and the abundance of filters available are both valuable features."

"The options that are required to get the details for the packet drops are good."

"Setup is very easy. It's also possible to change source code and compile if you want to change something in the code, because it's free."

"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."

"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."

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

"It has good basic features."

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

"Technical support needs improvement."

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

"The problem is that SolarWinds is trying to bolt in too much and that can leave bugs, which you have to then sort out, leaving the product unstable. SolarWinds needs to try and slow down and improve the stability of the product, as opposed to bringing out more and more features."

"SolarWinds NetFlow Traffic Analyzer could improve its flexibility and integration with AI to provide analytics beyond just showing up/down statuses and traffic volumes."

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

"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."

"I would like to see better customization capabilities."

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

"The solution has a steep learning curve. There are so many filters and features that are frequently being updated, it takes research, experience and familiarity to be able to use them. It could be a lot more user-friendly."

"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."

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

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

"This product needs to improve the UI."

"Wireshark could make the filtering rules easier to apply and offer a drag-and-drop option as opposed to type and text."

"We would like the product to be developed so that it doesn't rely on internet access for installation. We would like to see all of the components required to be integrated into the installer."

"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."

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

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

"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."

"The pricing is really good."

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

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

"The pricing is reasonable."

"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."

"It is free."

"Wireshark is open-source and 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's free."

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

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