SolarWinds NetFlow Traffic Analyzer vs Wireshark comparison

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

"The integration with other SolarWinds products is good."

"I would rate NetFlow Traffic Analyzer's stability ten out of ten."

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

"The dashboard alerts me when a critical device goes off the network."

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

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

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

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

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

"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."

"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."

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

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

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

"It's easy to troubleshoot issues because there's a large online community."

"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."

"Currently, it shows only the top ten applications or ports in use, while the remaining data appears as 'remaining traffic,' causing confusion."

"It is very slow to pick the dynamics of the network."

"I'm expecting to see a little bit more artificial intelligence and machine learning algorithms. They need a bit more sophistication in that."

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

"Currently, it shows only the top ten applications or ports in use, while the remaining data appears as 'remaining traffic,' causing confusion."

"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."

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

"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 is restricted when any sort of encryption is involved, such as XSL encryption or DLX."

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

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

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

"A room for improvement in Wireshark is its ease of use for beginners. It could be better. Another room for improvement in the tool is for it to provide more details about the traffic load. At the moment, Wireshark is adequate for me, so there isn't anything I'd like added to it in its next version."

"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."

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

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

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

"NetFlow Traffic Analyzer is reasonably priced."

"The pricing is reasonable."

"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."

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

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

"The solution is open source so is free."

"Wireshark is an open-source product, so it's free to use."

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

"Wireshark is open-source and free of charge."

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

"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 software, so you can download it and use it for free with no licensing fees."