NETSCOUT nGeniusONE Reviews

Most of the time, the use case is if, for example, the network is slow or an application is slow and you don't know why, and you need something to look for the root cause of the problem. With NETSCOUT, it's very easy to check where the problem is located. You can uncover if it is in the network or the application or the server.

It's easy to use and easy to pinpoint where the problems are if ever something is slow. 

Most of the time the customers are complaining that the system is slow and you need to know why something is slow. It will give you insight into the underlying issue, which is very helpful.

The installation process is straightforward. 

Technical support is very good.

The solution could do more for security. It should offer more security-related features. 

We have had NETSCOUT for a long time. In the past, it was part of Fluke Networks, and then Fluke Networks was bought by NETSCOUT. Then, we were working together with NETSCOUT,  acting as a reseller for NETSCOUT solutions. We have been working with them for more than 10 years and of course before that, with Fluke Networks.

Technical support has been good. They do not need to improve it. We've been satisfied with the level of service on offer. 

The initial setup is very straightforward. It's not overly complex or difficult. I found the process to be very simple. 

It's a hybrid solution. You can use both cloud and on-premises deployment models. 

We are not the users of this solution. Rather, we are the reseller. We are a local reseller for these kinds of products within Belgium. We also have a company in the Netherlands, it's for the Benelux region. We have customers in Benelux and we are acting as a reseller and we sell the solutions and the support which we do ourselves. For me personally, I'm located in Belgium. I handle the Belgium market and Luxembourg, however, I have colleagues in the Netherlands and they do the Netherlands market.

I'd rate the solution at an eight out of ten. I've been pretty pleased with its capabilities overall.

I would recommend the solution to other users and organizations.

This solution has been implemented at banks and retailers to focus on network-based application performance management.

Aligning the solution with a visibility layer (taps, aggregation taps, and packet brokers - Ixia and Cubro), NMs system (Sintrex) we were able to deliver information relating to various applications and their behaviour.

Creating an environment where you triage a problem quickly and provide valuable information allows for improved MTTR.

This allows for a cross-silo approach, enhanced visibility, which enhances IT to better service the business.

We have partnered with Netscout over many years with various solutions - TruView, nGeniusOne, Infinistream, XG, etc.

With the focus on customer-defined applications and triggers we have been able to provide important information to clients regarding their application performance.

It has played an integral part in providing valuable information in a critical arena.

The ability to use pre-defined applications and configure client-specific applications allows for a comprehensive solution that enables all teams within the IT organization.

The combination of triggers with the ability to generate alarms.

The ability of the dashboards is useful for discover, mapping and understanding of application behaviour.

The ability to define client-specific applications.

If required, you can view up to a millisecond of what the behavior of the application is.

The ability to give insight into assigning the problem, with relevant information, to the correct team.

Detailed reporting that can be built with various perspectives and metrics.

Various dashboards can be built to service various applications or security teams.

The initial deployment is tedious and requires a lot of build, deployment and configuration time. Experience is key to a successful deployment.

It is critical to work with the network team to understand how the data flows across the estate to ensure that you tap, aggregate, de-capsulate, de-crypt, and de-duplicate correctly.

From these points, you need to ensure that the logical strategy and configuration suits the correct reporting and visibility as to ensure that you get the most out of any potential logical context.

It is also important to ensure that you spend time to understand the applications you want to profile and work with the application owners to ensure that everything is aligned correctly.

We have been using this solution at multiple clients for many years.

In general, the stability is good, but we have had one or two incidents where specialized support was required.

The solution can scale in most directions, bandwidth, hardware, virtual taps, etc.

We have a good relationship with the vendor. They are always willing to help, but due to the complexity of the environment solving problems can take some time.

We have previously made use of nMetrics, Spyke and older versions of the Netscout product range and still make use of ExtraHop Reveal (x).

We do however try to fit the need of the customer to the best solution and the vendor they prefer.

Initial setup and configuration is complex and tedious and requires a methodical approach with experienced engineers.

For complex implementations, we rely on the vendor for more support.

The return on investment is directly linked to the deployment, configuration, and management of the solution.

If you make it a priority, you will experience good ROI.

It is important to spread the cost across the various IT silos as this solution works as an umbrella to provide information to all teams.

Try to target major aggregation points in your network to deliver the best potential data to the solution. You can from that point start to target specific areas to resolve specific issues or gain particular insight into certain areas.

Do not forget applications traverse North-South as well as East-West and in layers of those. Think about your typical WAN breakout, Layer 2 connections, Virtualized environments, and servers supported by back-to-back connections (eg. web server supported by DB server, with a direct connection).

Sintrex Flow Module, ExtraHop Reveal (x) - the reason we went with nGeniusOne was because the client has that they require a specific solutiion that NetScout answers, already deployed other Netscout solutions or that they had a specific function in mind (eg. InfiniStream tagging)

It is always important to understand the problems you are trying to solve, what insight you are trying to gain and that this is a solution for the business, not just a specific IT silo or team. 

It's deployed at a customer in the banking environment and it monitors the perimeter edge in the data center. It's used for visibility inside the environment as well. The traffic is only being sent via TAP data currently. We don't have any NetFlow data to the system, as yet. We have the NETSCOUT TruView system in and that performs for TAP data and NetFlow to monitor the branches.

For some of the applications we've managed to drill down and get more granular data, because it provides such small granularity — a microsecond or a millisecond of data — that you can actually get finer response-time detail out of it. That helps a lot.

It has improved some of the visibility of some of the unified communications with the ability to drill down into finer time increments in the packet data. We are able to search through those and get those Wireshark-types of views, with some extra flexibility and visibility on packet data or wire data.

The quick drill-down views are similar to Wireshark views. Those are quite nice, with the views on how you interpret some of the data. The granularity of how far you can drill down into milliseconds or microseconds is a very nice feature. It actually stores quite a lot of data in its database. It enables drilling down for reporting.

The solution transforms packet wire data into real-time data that is ready to act on. We've set some of the alerts to alert on it. We can look at that packet data, or we'll use scenario-based alerts, to then further drill down and see what the system has picked up as an anomaly or a scenario that's being analyzed by the system. We can investigate it further and see how we can resolve the issue or alert on it for the client.

We received some documentation to integrate it with ServiceNow. We're busy looking at that for the near future to integrate into that or another vendor's ticket system, and then alert on things in real-time, so there's less delay from our interpreting of data first. And then we can act on it.

They can improve still on the workflows, document their workflows that are commonly used.

Also, if you do backups of the system or try to do configuration changes, there are a lot of different formats that you need to separately interpret. It doesn't flow nicely. With config backup, for example, there are a few variants that you have to collect. Otherwise, you have to use the system backup, which we haven't restored yet, so I don't know exactly how that process works.

There are one or two things for the grids that would be nice to have. And it would be nice to be able to change some of the metrics, here and there, on the normal overviews.

Currently it's working. We had a lot of issues in the beginning with patches that we had to load, but that was more of the teething and learning how to configure the system as well. It's not quite the same as the TruView which has end-user response metrics. The nGeniusONE doesn't quite do the same thing.

It's a more technical tool compared to what we're used to, or what the client is used to with TruView. For some of the stuff we've seen we have had to build multiple sections or multiple pages to get a view of the environment or branch or application.

On a scale of one to 10, the solution's ability to transform packet wire data into well-structured, contextual data is a seven. There is room for improvement. It goes back to the workflows. We don't know some of the workflows yet, and it's not something that you can just read up in the manual. There is some stuff in the help manual and online, but it's to a point where you need to purchase extra training and services from them. You can't just go and read up on it yourself and learn from A to Z and then, if you require extra training or certification, you could go further in-depth into that. That's part of the business model, I assume.

Also, it's not always the case that the solution provides the right people in our organization with the right information in a single pane of glass view. There are times where we would want to get a different view on some of the service dashboards. We can't really get all the views that we would want on a single pane of glass.

Overall, there is room for improvement, but so far it is a useful system.

We deployed NETSCOUT nGeniusONE last year around April, so it's just over a year now.

Currently we're running quite stable. There were a few hiccups in the beginning with stuff not working. But currently we're running more or less stable. We are running on version 6.2.2. There are a few useful things in 6.3, but we were advised not to go that route yet because it's not 100 percent stable. Our sales engineer said to hold on, just to see how some of their other clients experience it and see how many issues are still being noted in the system before we move over to that newer version.

We'll probably increase visibility in future because it needs to replace TruView. Currently we are only using packet TAP data. Later on, as NetFlow and those things evolve, we will need to move over to NetFlow collectors on the system as well. Currently we're using them on TruView.

And we need to expand to some of the newer data centers that the client has moved into, as well as the cloud section. We need to expand into those as soon as the client has a bit more budget and they are happy that the system is working and the views and the consolidated views are giving them what they want. Then they'll expand more on the system.

The key thing for us is to get the VAR service up and running, which should be starting from today. They've sorted out their remote access. That took us a few months just to get into the banking environment with all the nondisclosures and security checks. We are quite happy to get that started and to see how they can assist us on the system. We want to do a sanity check on the system to see what we've missed.

We have an account with them and each engineer has an account where they can log TAC cases, and our sales engineer sees some of the stuff that we seldom hear and assists where he can. Otherwise, we work with the guys overseas. It depends which section of the system it is for unified communication. Cases have been escalated, eventually, to assist configuring some of the things.

We've had a few issues with one of the InfiniStream storage units, and that took a long time to resolve. The guys are still learning some of the things on the system themselves, but that eventually got resolved. But that may also depend on the support model we took.

Once you get to the higher-tier support guys, your issue normally gets resolved quite quickly.

We've been using TruView. We've known for a while that we would need to switch because it was an old Fluke Networks product which was bought by or moved to NETSCOUT. We knew at some point in time it was going end-of-life. We need to keep it up and running for as long as possible, at least another two or three years, until the end of the contract, and see how long it lasts after that. Slowly but surely we'll migrate to nGeniusONE as we expand visibility.

The setup was a bit complex, documentation-wise. There is a long list of documentation just to deploy the system, with a lot of variations. There's tons of documentation. Their portals reflect all the documentation and you need to go through various sections of the documentation to find what you're actually looking for.

We managed to get it in in a weekend. It was a relatively short time just to get the equipment in. The InfiniStream we took uses attached storage. It has an IPMI which wasn't mentioned in the original deployment documents. I managed to eventually find out what the base system is, a Supermicro server base. I then managed to get documentation around how to configure it and what the default IP address is for those. I had to configure that, because there are certain things that you can't do if you don't have that to update the firmware of your storage array — shut it down, restart it, those types of things. That wasn't on the original one-page install glossy.

It's a lot different than what we're used to in terms of the various sections that you need to configure. The workflow for some of the stuff could use some improvement. It sometimes feels like the system is silo-based or sectional-based, and that it was then all put in one system. There isn't just one place you can configure your application site or a quick-start "how-to." If you want to configure an application and then get it on your dashboard or your service views, it would be nice if it gave you an auto wizard which would say, "You want to configure an application? Okay, next." You would fill in what is required, click "next" to get you to the next step and keep on following the same workflow so that you can't really deviate. If you know which sections you want to configure, maybe then you would configure it manually, but a wizard-based workflow that's set out to be followed would be good.

As we learn stuff we've transferred the knowledge to our client and they have learned themselves as well, playing with the system. As they run into a workflow issue, then we try to assist or we contact our sales engineer to ask if there is a better workflow for some of this, and how to get to the pane that we would want to be on more quickly. For some of it, there was a quicker way, and for some of them the system is built in such a way that there is not a quicker way to get to some of the views.

It requires quite a lot of staff to set up and manage the tool; there's quite a learning curve. What we normally like to do is load it offsite, deploy the system, prepare it properly, get the base configuration on, and load at least some of the applications, but we didn't have the luxury of that kind of time. It took us a bit of time compared to what we've been used to on the TruView. We tried to configure the applications, but it's not quite the same. In workflows we've missed things here and there, things like going to a different view to associate applications to a site or an interface. We missed that at times. That's where the automated workflow wizard would help a lot, to make it easier for anyone to use the system, to climb in and start configuring it.

We're still busy streamlining and working on our alerting, to get those properly set up. NETSCOUT, from their side, is PoC-ing the VAR service to assist us for three or six months in streamlining the system, see where we're running short, and also to do system checks and see what else they're going to have to improve on the system.

We're not really a proactive system yet because we're still trying to define some of the things. The system is not at a scale where it can monitor each and every thing. There are a lot of things in the environment that we learn and get to know of on a daily basis, as they deploy new things. There are also things that we've not heard of because some of the environments are still silo-based.

I don't know what the client is looking at, because they can acquire from other vendors.  Because we're part of the networks team, we're more focused on the actual network component.

It's not an easy system, it's a very technical system. There are some views that you could get for a management or objective overview. Even our client mentioned that it's more a technical tool. That comes back to the workflows and the drill-down and the amount of time you spend to drill down into a scenario. That sometimes makes it too long in a real-time troubleshooting scenario or focus session. That makes it a bit difficult. If there's an outage in the environment they might start looking at you because they're waiting for you to provide information. I assume that would improve a bit when VAR service comes on board to show us what we're missing and how we can set up scenarios or extra alerting on the system to improve drill-down and the time to respond to or the time to resolve issues.

It does auto-discover some of the stuff. I don't think we've really used everything that's available. We've used some of the auto-discovery for URLs or web-related links, as it picks them up. We've used some of those and then we further define it. I'm not sure if there's another way or extra things that can auto-discover. Normally we'll get an application and environment from the client, and then we'll define it from there, or we'll use TruView to look at the NetFlow data to see what ports, for example, are being used. Then we will interact with the client to further see what is there. Or we can use nGenius' packet data and pull down what ports are being used from there. Then we can go back to the client and say, "You said port 123," for example, "is being used. We see 123 and another port. Is this other port also part of your application, or what function does it have in your applications?"

As for whether nGeniusONE helps us to get to root cause quickly, it's "yes" and "no." It fits in more with some of the workflows that we're still learning or we may not have the correct workflow. We've learned quite a lot over the last year or so but there is some room to improve, or it might be something that we don't know about; how to navigate a bit faster and better. One thing the client did say, if you compare it to TruView, is that with TruView you get to most of your issues in three clicks. In nGenius you need a few more clicks just to get to where you want to be. And sometimes you need to take a different route through the system to navigate to a different view.

When it comes to seeing a measurable decrease in mean time to repair, or mean time to know, there might be some workflows we're missing, that we don't know. We've used the system now for just over a year, and we're constantly learning new ways to configure the system and new workflows and how to improve our troubleshooting time. But compared to our older TruView system, it takes a bit longer to navigate to certain sections of the system or down to where we want to be, to the packet data, or to drill down into some of the applications.

We use nGeniusONE for Microsoft Teams. There is a case that we want the VAR service to take on for us to tie up some of the communications from external to internal Teams calls as they pass through the firewall. We're going to look at that to see what the VAR can assist us with. The client needs to expand on some of its TAP-ing visibility as well when, in the near future, they change their design.

As far as I know the solution has not enabled us to consolidate tools, because our client uses various systems. An example is Dynatrace as an internal banking application that they use for Layer 7 and agent-based monitoring on some of the servers and applications. And we still use TruView. Then they're constantly expanding to see where they can add something to fill in gaps. They're busy PoC-ing ThousandEyes to get some visibility on a different front. On the network side, we monitor the network components to clear that and make sure that it runs, or assist if there are notable response-time issues, to try and resolve where the issue would be located.

From our company, which is from the vendor side, we have about five or six users. In our client's organization we're expanding every now and then, but currently there are about 50 users, maybe more.

Because of COVID, everything is standing still currently. We started building grids and consolidated views to see what we can display on the centralized screens to improve visibility for Office 365, and those types of things. We would like to get that extra NOC-type of visibility, or an overview of the environment for certain sections. The client's strategy was that the more people that have access to the system, the more people will call us to inform us that there's something wrong in the system or in the environment, before that system even alerts us. The user base plays a big role in how the organization runs.

The primary use case is to have the ability to detect issues that a customer would eventually see. It's a more proactive approach for making the customers have a better satisfaction in terms of their usage and performance.

It gives us quicker reaction times and more proactive diagnostics, especially in terms of needing to set up an alarm if a threshold was exceeded.

It gives us a deep package inspection. It provides that sort of visibility. It also has the ability to get the data in real-time.

This solution helps us get to root cause quickly, especially as we dive deep capturing packets.  

• The quick ability to troubleshoot.
• The ability to look forward.
• The ability to develop proactive solutions.

It is the ability to collect data and analyze it, especially key performance indicators. This is before a customer would call to the service center to complain that they have had bad coverage or a dropped call.

While it is good, the single pane of glass view is too high level. It is better for management or someone doing sanity checks. A lot of times, I need to go deeper into the additional screens to get what I want out of it.

We would like to have increased performance in the future. Eventually, we will need more horsepower.

We would like NETSCOUT to add additional topics to the data that it collects, because big data is important going forward.

It's very stable. 

When we first got the tool, there were some performance issues. Eventually, they worked out the issues through various upgrades and server hardware enhancements. That was a plus.

We do have two onsite NETSCOUT engineers, who are excellent. Especially when we encounter an issue, we tell them right away, "We have an issue. Can you fix it?"

We don't have to wait a few days for something to be solved.

The initial setup was a probably a little complex. We had to get things up and running, do field trials, fine tune the performance, then evaluate it under load, and fine tune it again.

We worked closely with NETSCOUT for the deployment. 

We have our own IT department who channels the server, infrastructure, and networking. I'm on the engineering side, and we work directly side-by-side with NETSCOUT. 

We don't use a third party vendor.

Proactive versus a customer having a bad experience: That is the key point. Because you get a bad experience, and you lose customers. You always want tools to make your customer happy.

The solution gives us a forward looking vision. We develop custom applications on top of the data that we collect. It gives us that ability, which is an advantage.

It's definitely decreased troubleshooting time. We get a direct window into the infrastructure and various probes, especially the ability to capture certain KPIs that we look at. Normally, if we didn't have this tool, we would have to collect them under various vendor boxes. That takes time and experience.

Deep packet inspection is the key point for NETSCOUT versus the other competitive tools that we also use.

Take a look at it. If not, you're losing the opportunity to improve your performance in terms of its customer aspects.

Our primary use case for NETSCOUT nGeniusONE is to monitor what is coming in and out, then distinguish where we have problems in our network.

With the Vprobes, we quickly identified issues on the application servers, which we normally couldn't, where it usually would be a full circle round between our NOC and server people.

This solution provides us with increased visibility while conducting IT deployments.

We have seen a small decrease (10 to 20 percent) in our overall troubleshooting time.

The sessions, where everything is graphically displayed out, which allow people in our NOC to quickly figure things out.

The single pane of glass view makes life simpler.

The dependency mapping provides quicker analysis and quicker resolution. We are able to pinpoint problems quicker online.

I would like more in-depth convergence between all the applications, especially when I look for information through a data mine.

It has a lot of what I like to use, but some features are not there yet. It is sometimes even going down to older protocols still getting used in the world right now.

They need to improve using voice other SIP.

The stability is good, so far. We are probably five nines up.

It is definitely scalable, as long as we do things right.

The technical support has been superb, so far. We have a sales engineer who works directly with us. He has been awesome.

The biggest reason for the switch that we're going through right now is that it is a Solaris box running old C++ code. That definitely needs to be replaced, as that technology is dead. This is more of solidifying a two-vendor solution to make life easier for people working on troubleshooting.

The initial setup was straightforward. 

We have definitely seen ROI.

The primary use case is network monitoring for telecoms.

Everybody is using the same tool set. Therefore, we are speaking the same language.

Network faults are easily and quickly identified through dashboards and drill down.

It has versatility to correlate different traffic types and performance management statistics.

The single pane of glass view is very simple and good. For my users, having all the applications in one place is the aim.

We would like more encryption of customer data, because we have a very security conscious company. We have a lot of regulation coming in which requires us to make customer data private.

There is a lot more integration work that needs to be finalized for simpler tool set. The integration of many products into a much simpler single pane of glass is where we want to be.

The stability is good. We haven't had a major failure for years. Apart from the hardware's age, the software is pretty robust.

The current solution is not easy to scale, because it is an appliance-based solution. So, you have to swap everything out.

The technical support is OK. While it is not outstanding, we don't have any complaints.

We did not have another solution previously.

The initial setup is relatively straightforward, as any network integration can be. The complexity comes when you are trying to tune it.

We used a reseller for the deployment. They were very good. We have a good working relationship with them.

We have seen some ROI with the root cause analysis. It is quicker to root cause analysis. We are seeing increased network uptime, because if we're spotting, and if we're getting root cause analysis quicker, then we know what comes up quicker.

From my user community, I am getting the impression that something which use to take days has now gone to hours for troubleshooting.

The primary use case is network management.

We have an older product. We are just now installing the newer product. The older product was primarily used for troubleshooting, which is all I can discuss.

The product hasn't helped the way our organization functions.

Going forward, we will be using this solution for unified communication application performance: voice, video and data.

The most valuable feature is visibility.

In the past, the product has helped us get to root cause quickly.

We would like better end-to-end data flows. This is something that my users always complain about, as they don't know what the data flows are on the network. We have things, like Cisco NetFlow, but all you have is the two endpoints that you have captured from a probe. We would like to know every point along the line.

The stability is very good. We have had no issues.

The scalability is very good. We have had no issues. It has been very scalable.

We have two network operations centers. We support 34 nodes, and those nodes are being remotely monitored.

We have had very good support from the NETSCOUT team.

We deployed in-house.

It is very expensive, but it's well worth the money.

We probably won't use the single pane of glass view.

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.