NETSCOUT nGeniusONE Reviews

We're using it for server health, data analytics, and network monitoring on a daily basis. We also use it for proactive monitoring of remote sites. We have around 180 sites, and we monitor their bandwidth and application usage. In terms of SaaS, that's something we're working on too, and hopefully we'll get it to where we want it to be.

It definitely provides us with increased visibility while conducting an IT deployment. It's been pretty useful for some of our cases, especially hardware refresh, where it's been a pretty amazing tool.

It has also definitely helped with detection of anomalies. We've been able to identify a handful of issues within our network. It's been pretty useful. As for root cause, there have been more than a few occasions where we've been able to identify issues right away. We have also seen a measurable decrease in mean time to know and mean time to repair. There have been a number of situations where, if we didn't have this, we would have been scratching our heads trying to figure them out.

In addition, it has cut our overall troubleshooting time. Last year we had quite an outage that went for a couple of weeks. If we had had this solution implemented the way it's working now, I'm pretty sure it would have just taken us days, instead of weeks.

• Data threat detection
• Network analytics
• Overall bandwidth monitoring

We also definitely love the single pane of glass view. It's everything there in one single dashboard.

The feature I am looking for is the Arbor technology, especially to run in parallel with our firewall. That's one thing that I've definitely wanted and, eventually, it's getting there.

So far, the stability has been good. There have been a few issues, mainly because we haven't been using it long. I've been having to catch up and upgrade and bring it from the floor up, so hopefully it will become a great tool.

Looking forward, I believe we'll see that the more we add to it, the more and more our network will get better.

Technical support has been pretty amazing with me. Every time I call, every time I contact my SE, they answer right away, so I've been pretty happy with that.

In our company, I know we have other tools, but as a network monitor, for the port situation, per node, I don't know what else was used.

I had to start from scratch. It took me time to comprehend how everything works, but eventually, I found it's pretty easy to understand and set up.

It was deployed long before I got into my job, but the people that I've been working with were the original deployers. I'm pretty sure they worked with somebody.

Reach out, contact NETSCOUT. It's an amazing tool, it has a lot of integrations, and it's definitely worth looking at.

We still haven't gotten that deep into the dependency mapping, but we intend to start getting to it. Similarly, we're planning to start looking into unified communication application performance. We just got our license for it and we're going to try to implement it. I've only been using the solution for six months. My impression so far is that it's been pretty amazing.

As things stand right now, I would give the solution an eight out of ten. I still have quite a few things to learn. Once I get to know its full capabilities, I will probably give it a ten.

The solution helps to troubleshoot and put our hands on the weak points of customer networks. 

NETSCOUT nGeniusONE's pricing is higher compared to the competitors. It is more than 15-18 percent of competitor costs. It also needs to add AI features. 

I have been working with the solution for eight to nine months. 

NETSCOUT nGeniusONE is stable. 

NETSCOUT nGeniusONE's tech support is good. 

Positive

The tool's installation is straightforward if you are familiar with the product. It is complex if you don't have user training. 

The solution suits enterprise customers. Small businesses will find the cost high and the tool's capability unsuitable. I rate it an eight out of ten. 

We have multiple use cases such as for remote locations, the monitoring of critical applications, and the WAN network. Apart from that, we use it for security alerts, to give us visibility into unknown traffic. I used to do integration with multiple different platforms to monitor critical storage sites for the business. 

Those are the key factors so that we can identify what traffic is passing across our remote sites.

If an outage happens, the tool helps us to identify the performance of the specific application and enables us to identify the issue. It helps improve our mean time to repair.

nGeniusONE has also been able to reduce outage time. Whenever there is an outage, it's quickly able to identify it and, without pointing fingers, we can prove that it is not the network environment. It helps us understand there is another reason and helps us move towards other areas for troubleshooting and fixing issues. That's a major factor where the tool is helping in applications that have the most business impact. We're able to diagnose and fix issues at the earliest, while avoiding large outage times and the associated business loss.

The solution transforms packet wire data into real-time data that is ready to act on. That's great for our multiple network services because it provides more insight into aggregation areas, and gives a unified view of the applications. From the application point of view, ultimately we need to discover the applications and configure it and then explore the options. This is a difference between network services and application services, but I'm most involved with network services.

It also definitely provides the right people in our organization with the right information in a single-pane-of-glass view. That's 100 percent true. We have different infrastructures from different vendors. If we had just Cisco, for example, we would only need to focus on the different Cisco tools. But with Bluecoat or Symantec, we need to focus on their tools. Because of TCP/IP, we can measure all the packet data in a single dashboard and we can show it in a single, unified view of all different infrastructures.

Another advantage is the increased visibility while conducting an IT deployment. Wherever we have the internet streams running across, we can see the entire site; what is happening and what other things are going on. We get more insight from the usual wired or wireless data.

Using it we also get to root cause quickly. We have massive business transactions happening continuously during the Christmas season. We were able to have increased traffic loads. However, the business transactions were also dependent on our vendors. If a vendor was unable to handle that much traffic load, we were able to prove, with the help of nGenius' reporting module, what number of transactions were crossing the network and which ones the vendor rejected.

We have also seen an increase in application uptime. For one or two applications it's 50 to 60 percent better.

And to some extent it has consolidated tools, however not at the application level. Rather, it has done so at the TCP or packet level. The consolidation has definitely saved us money, on the order of 20 to 30 percent.

In addition, when it comes to visibility across IT silos, the solution helps to bridge the gap between the application folks and the network folks. The network folks have always been siloed within the network infrastructure, and the application folks have also been siloed in the different components. NETSCOUT helps to bring every team into the single pane of glass to identify and isolate who is missing data across the applications or the infrastructure.

It's a consolidated, single tool that talks to multiple platforms. It's not vendor-proprietary; it's independent. Its provides interoperability with different products, whether they are routing products, switching products, wireless, wired, load balancing, or proxy. It works with anything you can name. 

It's TCP/IP-based which is helpful for us to interact with any TCP/IP platform and capture the data and provide visibility to the teams.

The solution’s ability to transform packet wire data into well-structured, contextual data,
on a scale of one to 10, is an eight, because it supports that interoperability. There is no dependency on a specific vendor or platform. It interacts with multiple vendors. That's a key factor that other tools are not able to provide. We have other tools within our environment, but this tool helps us to collect the packet data and transform it into a more readable, graphical format. That helps us make a quick decision within any type of project.

I would like to see improvement in the user experience. It's hard to manage it. We need a dedicated, highly-qualified person, compared to similar tools. Obviously, it's in a higher bracket, salary-wise. That's something the NETSCOUT team needs to focus on. It's a completely niche-skill technology, where we need to have the skills to manage, maintain, and deploy it.

When it comes to implementation, if they could provide some templates or some suggestions it would be helpful because this is a complex solution. Perhaps NETSCOUT could offer predefined Professional Services through which they could guide companies. In our scenario, I and my team have complete expertise for most of the things that are involved, and we were able to do it. But for other companies, if NETSCOUT could come up with some templates or some guidelines in Professional Services, it would be great in helping to get the solution deployed.

I have been using NETSCOUT nGeniusONE for more than six years.

The solution is great. It's a solid rock.

From the solution point of view, the licensing and architecture are scalable, but for hardware, when there is physical infrastructure, they probably need to improve on large-scale deployment. They need to focus on how a large number of databases can be effectively managed. And they need to improve the performance of the hardware.

We have between 10 and 15 teams using the solution. Each team's role is NOC support or SOC and, on the business team, there are people doing capacity analysis and people using it for reporting. For deployment and maintenance of the solution there are three or four involved, who are tool administrators.

We're using it fully in our organization. It's covering more than 90 percent. Increased usage depends on the infrastructure visibility. We may look at some expansion, but not immediately.

Their support team, during and since deployment, has been great; a nine out of 10. They stepped up whenever we required them, no matter what. They have provided feedback and support and have helped us.

nGeniusONE is the first solution we have used in this area.

I'm the architect of the complete solution. I ran the entire process from day one. I designed and deployed and have operated it, and it's a little bit complex. 

When we started doing the network deployment,the architecture, we needed to understand the enterprise architecture and where the main NETSCOUT deployment needed to capture it. It was not only in a specific area. It was all the applications relying on the packet data. It included on-premises, off-premises, remote sites, and cloud. It was capturing on a large, enterprise-level scale. We had to understand the architecture and then understand the application dependency then design the NETSCOUT solution accordingly. 

And, when rolling out everything, since it was not greenfield but brownfield, we needed to figure out the proper maintenance windows to not impact any of the production applications. Then we had to start educating the users how to use it and where to use it. After architecting it and deploying it, a large proportion of the focus was on bringing the users into the picture to make them familiar with the solution.

Deployment can take between six months and one year, in an environment like ours.

NETSCOUT provided some basic training through their portal, but since everything has gone live on the production system, we have also had some engagements with some of the NETSCOUT folks to get some assistance.

We have made on and off use of the NETSCOUT team. 

We save a lot of time. Before the solution was deployed, the teams used to spend more than a day on root cause analysis, and now they're spending only a couple of hours, and they're more aware of the next activities.

Licensing is flexible, it's not tied to anything else. We can easily switch up the licensing piece. Pricing is something that our budget team takes care of. Obviously, NETSCOUT is a little bit in the higher range, but it gives you value for money. You get what you pay for.

We did evaluate other solutions but NETSCOUT was better for our infrastructure.

With the visibility of the packet data, we can do whatever we need to do. It might be for the NOC or the SOC, but it helps our operations. We can dive into it and drill down into the information. Also, packet data was just packet data when we were using Wireshark, but when it comes to NetScout it provides business data as well. We can show actual numbers to the business team so they can understand and judge the quality of the network and the quality of the applications. We can show them solid proof with the data.

The automatic discovery and mapping of client-server relationships is a six or seven out of 10. It doesn't discover everything, but with it we do get some automatic discovery with the client-server. It doesn't get 100 percent of the data from the environment.

In terms of the dependency maps for visualizing the current state of the service and application environment, there are some limitations to the discovery maps due to our being a large enterprise. But if I focus on a small, specific area, it's great. It's able to discover the application dependencies and services dependencies, which have been used in that one, specific environment. For smaller areas, it's great, but for the larger portion of the infrastructure, it doesn't help a lot, so I need to break it down into individual areas.

We use NETSCOUT nGeniusOne to troubleshoot our network. At US Cellular, we have our voice over IP network and we try to figure out the impact to the customer.

The solution most definitely provides us with increased visibility while conducting an IT deployment. It allows us to understand changes that we're making in the network, as well as our network's performance day-to-day and hour-to-hour.

We're also able to see customer impact before the customer complains. Often, in a legacy network, we were used to customers calling in to our call center complaining about the service, but now we're actually identifying problems even before the customer notices. 

It helps us get to the root cause quickly, allowing us to drill down into the problem to actually see what service is impacted. It has provided a measurable decrease in mean time to know and mean time to repair. Being able to identify the problem more quickly and having the customizable dashboards make a large difference, making us much quicker than we ever were.

In addition, the solution has absolutely helped us increase our application network uptime. Being able to see the response in near-real-time, we utilize the five-minute increments in the dashboards and the tools frequently. If we're performing our work and we see an impact, we can deal with it much faster than with our old legacy tools, which were sometimes an hour or two in delay.

For me, the most valuable features are the dashboards which we use to highlight the overall impact to the customers, and being able to drill down into the nitty-gritty of the customer experience.

This is not so much application-specific but rather is about the user experience: How the user experience has degraded is what I would like to see more in the tool. A lot of tools highlight what's going on but they don't actually pinpoint the user experience. It would be good if there were a small message or something highlighting what the user experience is like and any degradation that's actually occurring.

For the most part, it's pretty stable. We've had some instances where we've had to have boxes restarted, probes restarted. But overall, the performance has really held up.

After today's conversation, here at NETSCOUT Engage 2019, it seems like it's highly scalable. I always knew it was scalable but with the new enhancements coming, it's really good.

We have NETSCOUT personnel who are assigned to USA Cellular. We have an associate, Joe Dockery, who is always at our disposal. We get good help.

Get as much training as you can go to. Get your hands on the product as much as you can. There's a lot of information there and it's confusing at times if you're not familiar with the product. And rely on your NETSCOUT support. A lot of things that you might be looking for are already there, you just might not know how to get to them.

In terms of the solution cutting our overall troubleshooting time, the answer is "yes and no." While it provides a lot of insight as far as the data goes, and the impact, our organization is still trying to learn how to troubleshoot effectively. In most of the cases it's a matter of either user experience or knowledge.

I would rate nGenius as an eight out of ten. There's a lot of data. After hearing where NETSCOUT is going with the ability to actually isolate a problem quickly, it is good to see them working on that. It's really been the struggle: To show the user where the problem lies. There's a little too much investigation that the user has to do at this point.

We use the solution when our customers have problems with their databases or communications. We use it to look at packages and packets and verify the behaviour of the NOC, the server, and the traffic, looking for a pattern that might identify the issue and what's happening now.

We started using the product because our customers had some problems with the network. We made changes to the network and made it stable. However, the customer told us there were still some errors. Then the people from the database told us the problem was the network, not the database. The only way to verify it was the database and not the network was by putting a sniffer in it. And that's why we use NETSCOUT.

The new version of the solution is like a grid, onto which we can put traffic and graph its behaviour for a certain amount of time. We can then use the behaviour, from one or two hours or maybe seven days, or 30 days. Looking at the results, allows us to verify whether anything is wrong. 

There is a big issue with the special way they use InfiniStream to store data. The InfiniStream has a certain capacity. So our customer centre asks why we don't store all the information that uses InfiniStream in Vblock or something like that. And NETSCOUT says that we need to store those data in a special way. And we use a special appliance called InfiniStream. So this kind of storage is not so big. For example, our customer has saved all the data, restored all the information, and backed it up elsewhere. For example, if something happened in the past month, we can see the package because the storage is a kind of FIFO. So we have a very limited space to see the previous days.

We've been using this solution for about six years.

The product is very good. We have very few problems. And if we do have any issues,  NETSCOUT gives us very good support. They have the right engineers that know the issues. And if anything is wrong with a device, you get an RMA. 

The solution is as scalable as we or our customer wish. But we don't plan to increase the usage for the moment because of the expense.

We have six people using the solution. 

We currently need three guys to deploy the solution and one to maintain it.

Tech support is good. We don't have any problem with that. I opened one case, and they solved it.

Positive

The initial setup was complex because we needed to know the package's source and destination when we tried to monitor certain conversations. So when we are tracing something or trying to fix one issue or error, we need to know precisely how the communication is, where the sources and the destinations are, etc. So we need to talk with the person that develops the applications, the database, and the network. , we need to know specifically the part of the network the package is going through. With all this information and with NETSCOUT, we can very easily solve the issue or try to find the error, but for specific communication.

When we started with the customer, NETSCOUT directly supported us with the implementation. And after that, we were all on our own. 

It took us six months to deploy the product.

I don't know exactly how the licencing works. I think it's about the ports from InfiniStream. For example, if you have five InfiniStreams, each InfiniStream has four ports, so I think you need to acquire a licence for 20 nodes.

We can get everything in a bundle. But the price is different if you acquire virtual InfiniStream or vSTREAM. But in the end, the price is only for acquisition; it's not a licence. The license is for the ports, one per InfiniStream.

I advise anyone wanting to use the solution to have one completely dedicated engineer. Here in Mexico, we have one engineer who's essential in many things. When a company acquires NETSCOUT, they need specific people responsible only for that and not involved with anything else.

On a scale of one to 10, I would give NETSCOUT nGeniusONE nine.

The primary use case is for network monitoring, event management, packet tracing, and forensics.

We have cut back on our troubleshooting, by isolating certain trouble areas. It has brought visibility to what requires replacement in the future.

We had a situation where a client said the network was the problem, because their reports weren't running from an automated server report. After multiple support groups tried to isolate and troubleshoot the situation, the incident came to us. We were able to isolate it with five minute clicks and determine that it was an access issue.

The visual and graphical interfaces in the display that it provides for us to show our senior leadership. We can show them what is actually happening, instead of a spreadsheet.

I like the single pane of glass view. A single pane of glass view of the network will help us address important needs more quickly based on our alarming.

The dependency mapping is very helpful and resourceful.

I would like to see nGeniusPULSE and AED (Arbor Edge Defense) integrated with the solution.

Some help screens would be nice, especially if we bring on new operators. It would be great to see if they have more helpful tips available.

Between the host analysis and session analysis, there is a limitation of one hour. This can hinder us if a situation occurred ten hours ago. Sometimes, you can't open up that window.

It is reliable.

Scalability is great. I am looking forward to seeing more.

The technical support has been very attentive and responsive to our needs when I have called.

The solution was deployed in-house.

We are starting to see ROI.

We have seen a measurable decrease in mean time to know (MTTK) and mean time to repair (MTTR).

This solution has cut our overall troubleshooting time.

The solution has helped us increase our application/network uptime.

Do a proof of concept. Get to know your account manager.

Over the years, it's been more for packet-capture troubleshooting. But in the last two or three years, we have been using it for application monitoring and expanded our usage because of voice over IP and the communications stuff. It has really expanded a lot, and we've creating dashboards and reports. Originally, it was just a reactive tool. If there was a problem, we'd go capture something and move on. But it has really expanded quite a bit in the last four or five years.

The solution gives us increased visibility while conducting an IT deployment. It's recording data all the time, so we have the "before" picture and the "after" picture. That's a big thing.

The Dependency Mapping is very helpful. When everything is instrumented correctly, and we can bring up a Dependency Mapping, sometimes it even surprises people in terms of what the applications are talking to and where the single failures might be.

In addition, in the troubleshooting area, we are able to zero in on an issue more quickly and get things working faster. In areas where we have instrumentation, we have seen a measurable decrease in mean time to know and mean time to repair.

The solution is very reliable.

The best feature is when we have it connected permanently via TAPs. That enables us to constantly collect data and then we can go back in time. Of course, we don't want a given problem to keep happening, but if we weren't able to use the solution to go back in time to when a problem happened, then we would have to hope the problem happens again so we can capture it and figure out what's going on. To be able to rewind, back in time, and see the problem as it happened, is very helpful.

In terms of additional features, they have the virtual clients here at NETSCOUT Engage 2019, and they have really expanded that. That type of coverage is going to be crucial. The COTS that they are doing now are a very good idea, to lower the price some. We work with them weekly, and if we uncover something, a feature that would be relevant, we usually report it. A lot of times it will get included.

Regarding room for improvement, on a network the size of ours, the loading times seem a little extensive, 20 or 30 seconds to load up some graphs. But there is a lot of data being crunched. That's all server hardware.

nGeniusONE is very stable. We have very few problems with it.

It scales well also. We are about up to 350 InfiniStreams. We have a multi-tier architecture for the NG1, locals and globals, and backup solutions and the failover solutions for disaster recovery work well.

Technical support is very responsive. We have two people onsite that we pay. They work for NETSCOUT and they're very helpful.

We've had NETSCOUT so long I can't even remember what previous solution we had. We did have a couple of areas where we had Riverbed Technology but we are phasing that out.

For an organization of our size, the setup was fairly complicated. We have a lot of equipment, a lot of tiers. We have a lot of security concerns so we had to shut down ports and we have firewalls and things like that. It may not have been complicated because of NETSCOUT, it just may have been complicated because of the environment.

We did not use any outside resources for the deployment, but we do have onsite people from NETSCOUT.

Take a good look at this. It's been good for us. I've looked at some other solutions and everybody has the same problems to fix. The way that NETSCOUT, the company, is integrating so you get to reuse the data, is good. One of the problems we had originally was that everybody was doing something else. If you are going to capture all this network wire data, why not use it for security and everything. It's all in there. That's a big opportunity with these guys. If you go out and get something for voice from one company, and something to work on your network issues from another company, it's really hard to work them together. You never get to that single pane of glass.

We use the solution for unified communication application performance but that's not really my area. People do use that constantly, and I don't think we'd be paying hundreds of thousands, or millions of dollars, if it didn't help with uptime and end-user experience.

I rate the product pretty highly, a nine out of ten. The biggest problem we have with this product is the expense. Also lately, the network traffic loads, getting up to 100 gigabytes, are taxing the hardware a little bit. That's a problem everywhere, so it's not really particular to NETSCOUT. They are responding to that. I rate them very highly.

Our primary use for nGeniusONE is packet inspection.

It helps out with firewall issues. Aside from having the logs that are just on the firewall, we're able to get the traffic as it's going in between, throughout our network. It isolates end sources that are having issues, where we don't have any other tools that would be able to go down to an end-user's computer to find out what's going on.

It's catching quite a few things. Most of them really aren't a big deal and we should probably adjust our tolerances for them. A lot of the things are nice to know about but we really don't dig into them because they're not a huge deal.

As far as bigger issues go, it catches those on a weekly basis. That's how often we find something big enough that the only reason we know about it is because of the nGeniusONE. The bigger issues are mostly security-type issues: odd traffic leaving our network or coming into it, that has found its way past a firewall.

When we first got it, we used a lot of it for DDoS attacks to be able to find out where they were coming from, because we were able to actually see the packets and then get all the IPs. That enabled us to block sections of traffic that were constantly hitting us. After that it's server issues, router issues; just about everything.

Apart from the packet inspection, just being able to drill down into traffic is helpful to see where it's coming from, where it's going to, and everything that's going on with it.

We mainly use it for the packet inspection, but when we come across problems with traffic in general, we're able to isolate a source and the find out where, along the way, we're having the issues, because we're able to see deeply into the packet.

Starting off with the broad scope of everything that you're seeing, they have it set up pretty nicely, where you just keep drilling down into it by further clicks. It's pretty logical the way that it's set up. It's more like humans are meant to use it, instead of bots. I like it.

I'd like to see the nGeniusONE, the nGeniusPULSE, and the OptiView, their three separate products, work a little better together, a little more streamlined. We can hook up an OptiView to our system and it will bring it up on our nGeniusONE splash page where we can go and click on it. But we can't really use the OptiView functionality with the nGeniusONE functionality as far as throughput tests go.

If we wouldn't have to have multiple OptiViews throughout our system, and we could just have one that connects straight back and does all the functionality with nGeniusONE that two OptiViews do, that would be awesome.

Another thing that would help out is if they packaged the NetFlow monitor into nGeniusONE. Their NetFlow monitor works with nGeniusONE where you can actually get the netflow of pretty much anything you hook it up to. But it's a separate box that you have to buy. If there was a way that they could package that into nGeniusONE, it would be a complete package straight out of the box. It does a lot for you without it, but with the NetFlow monitor, in our situation, we'd be able to replace three other tools right off the bat.

We haven't had any issues with it going down or not working. The server that we're using is our own server and we have their software loaded onto it. All the issues that we've had have been our actual server. We had to replace our server once because it died on us. But as far as the software and the actual NETSCOUT appliances that we have going to the nGeniusONE go, like the Packet Flow Switch, etc., we haven't had any issues with them since I've been here, which is three years and counting. It hasn't had any downtime that was not scheduled.

We can definitely scale it higher. There's a lot more that we've found that we could be hooking the nGeniusONE up to. The possibility is there. The only issue we have is our bureaucracy.

As far as what it could be doing for us, if I had my way we'd have it taking care of everything. It's just a matter of getting it done. But the option is definitely there. We're using it mainly just for data center and core stuff, but the option is there to send it out to our distribution nodes as well.

For any issues that we've ever had, we've gone directly through our sales engineer and directly with NETSCOUT. As far as customer service goes, getting everything set up, and with any issues we've had since we started using the nGeniusONE, they've always been great with helping out and getting us completely taken care of, without having to go to a third-party.

Typically the response time is same day, depending on when I call or send an email. I understand that they've got other clients, so 24-hour turnaround is what I've experienced. It's been really good, and that's going directly to our account rep and our sales engineer. The times that I've gone to NETSCOUT technical services, I have been on the phone waiting for an engineer to help me out for five minutes, if that. The customer service part has been really good.

The last issue was doing an upgrade on our nGeniusONE server. We were having some issues with getting the upgrade to take on the server from our end. It turned out that we missed an upgrade in between. That's when we called up the technical support and they actually had us upgraded in about 30 minutes after the phone call was made.

I can't remember the name of it, but it pretty much gave us packet flow and some type of visibility into them, but it was so spotty that it wasn't reliable. They had that solution in place for about eight years, but because it was so unreliable as far as getting the actual traffic that you wanted to see, and getting the information that you were trying to get out of it, that nobody really used it.

From what I understand from the people who were using the previous solution before I got here, when they got it set up people tried to use it and it was kind of a mess and the workflow going through it was just not very well thought out. Once you finally got into it, you could see some stuff, but you couldn't ever see, what you were trying to find. People just gave up on it and it sat there. They renewed the contract on it once and when that contract expired we started looking around and we came across NETSCOUT.

I know when they ended up getting the nGeniusONE, the main reason they got it was for the actual packet inspection. We originally had it set up on the outside of our edge firewall to get visibility into all the traffic that was coming in before the firewall blocked it. A lot of the firewalls at the time wouldn't give us that information. So we'd block traffic, but we could only see some of it, and if we were getting a DDoS attack on it, we wouldn't see everything that came through. That was one of the main reasons that they wanted the nGeniusONE, to see all that information.

We've since repurposed it from that, after we realized what kind of traffic we were seeing and where it was coming from. We were able to mitigate a lot of that and we don't have the effects of the DDoS attacks like we used to. So instead of monitoring a little bit of our inside and everything coming in, we've turned the nGeniusONE to monitor everything within our network, not really caring about anything trying to come in anymore because we've upgraded our firewalls as well. It's actually getting us a lot more functionality now than it did three years ago. It's been nice that we've been able to repurpose it, and doing that has actually been pretty easy.

I wasn't actually with the company when they did the initial setup for the nGeniusONE. That happened about a year before I started. I know that typically, you can have it up and going within a couple weeks.

We're currently in the process of repurposing it again and we're adding an SDN networking solution. We're getting into all those leaves and switches that are back there. We've torn it down and we're rebuilding it so we can get information about what's going on in there and in the rest of our data center. 

When they first got it, everyone loved what it did, seeing the outside traffic come in. When we moved it into the actual interior of the network, we were able to pick up a lot of issues before they really manifested: packets dropping and errors going across. We have been able to dig into stuff before it actually becomes a problem where people are really noticing that something is going on.

So it's cut down our troubleshooting time and response time to actual issues within the network itself. In my opinion, we've been able to solve problems before they've become a big issue. That's the main reason anybody would want visibility into their network: If you have fewer people yelling at you, you're doing your job.

There's a five-minute lag time for the dashboard to update itself, but we're able to see if there are any significant changes within every five to ten minutes. Before, our response time would be when an end user actually got to the point of getting annoyed with it and then called in. Typically, that would be 30 minutes down the road, after they'd tried all their troubleshooting, and then they would call in to our basic troubleshooting helpdesk and have to go through things with them for another 15 minutes. So as far as end users are concerned, we're able to work on issues about 45 minutes faster than before because we're able to see the problems that they'd be encountering before the users have to make their way through the channels to get them fixed.

If you're looking to implement it or to purchase, once you actually see the usability of it I think the decision will already be made. If you're looking at other similar options, I would definitely advise looking into NETSCOUT and the nGeniusONE, along with all the other NETSCOUT products; at least the ones we've used, the OptiView and the nGeniusPULSE. 

I really feel that anybody who has contacted NETSCOUT to look into purchasing it, and has seen demos and proofs of concept on their own networks, for the most part, will end up purchasing it, regardless of what anyone says. They'll be able to see exactly what it's doing for them and what they didn't have visibility into before. The product pretty much speaks for itself.

In terms of increasing usage, that's why we ended up getting OptiViews and the nGeniusPULSE devices and server, to take care of some of that load in a less expensive way. It's cheaper for us to be able to use nGeniusPULSE devices out on remote sites than to use a virtual NG1 out there, or to have multiple OptiViews. But if we need to dig down into stuff, we have the options there through NETSCOUT products. That's one thing that they've done well. If you don't have the money to put nGeniusONE devices out everywhere, you can get some of that functionality through different products at a cost that's more reasonable.

We have five people using it on a daily basis. Their role is pretty much monitoring, for the most part. We have it set up to get all of the traffic that we want for application services, etc. But for the most part, it's just a monitoring role, and when there is an issue we just dig down into it from there. They are the same people who are dealing with the maintenance.

I would rate it a nine out of ten and the reason is the integration issue with OptiView and the nGeniusPULSE. If they made it so that the nGeniusONE product would be able to do traffic testing with the OptiView, at that point it would be perfect, for what I use it for.