NETSCOUT nGeniusONE Reviews

The primary use case is to monitor our network.

This solution provide us with increased visibility while conducting an IT deployment.

When we have any type of outage, and we dig into it, we are able to tell what the root cause is instead of having to go through Wireshark, etc. 

Packet decode and bandwidth analysis reports are the two most valuable features.

The product was lacking for awhile when they did the Arbor acquisition. I was waiting to see more security stuff, which they did eventually add, and is now impressive.

The stability is excellent.

The scalability is excellent. The company allows you to add more to what you already have. Not all companies do this.

We have an on staff SE. He is one of the top guys around and excellent to work with. I deal with him all the time.

I wasn't around for the initial setup.

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.

We are looking at Pulseway at the moment.

I'm a big advocate of NETSCOUT. They're always thinking ahead, and that's what I like. I would recommend taking a look at NETSCOUT.

Overall, when we get to the point that we need to, the dependency mapping will be excellent.

We actually like the single pane of glass view. I don't know if we will ever be able to get to it, because of the organization that I work with.

Once we get it implemented correctly, I think the solution will help to increase our application or network uptime. As of right now, that is why I'm pushing for product integration within my organization, which has been difficult.

We use it for our network capacity performance, for the entire ICM backbone core.

In addition, our company uses the solution for unified communication application performance. While it's not my team, there is another team responsible for capacity performance for video and they are using the same NETSCOUT toolset for wireless, wire line, and video.

I manage the entire building, so I have the responsibility for extending network capacity if we hit a limitation. It gives us the possibility of increasing the capacity wherever it is required. We have over 55,000 employees across Canada, from the Atlantic to Vancouver, so I use the tool on a daily basis to do my analysis.

It helps us get to root cause quickly. When we have a problem or people are reporting latency on their network, my guys are, of course, checking for the dates, specific times, and IP. We can get all the information that we are looking for, in detail. While my guys are not responsible for finding root cause, the solution is quite helpful in finding it.

In addition, it has cut our overall troubleshooting time for my network guys, when there's a real network problem. It has increased our network uptime as well.

The valuable features include 

• packet analysis
• packet capture
• it's easy to use. 

The single pane of glass view is a challenge. I like the graphics, they're easy to understand, but when more digging is required, it's more complicated to get what I'm expecting. Since the challenge for me is the dashboard, I would appreciate having a better view from the dashboard. What I don't know is whether the issue is that our configuration needs work. We probably don't do the mapping and the dependency configuration properly and that may be the reason why my dashboard is not crystal clear.

The solution is pretty stable.

It's also pretty scalable, there is no problem with that. It can be expensive, but if you have a good configuration, based on what you are looking for, it's okay, it's manageable.

The technical support is very good. We are well supported by the team. Even with the PULSE - I am new on this team, I have been here less than a year - they were there all the time, on a regular basis, to provide support on that completely new application for us. We were asking very simple questions and they were always there for us. It's been a great collaboration.

The initial setup would be complex for me, since I don't have that kind of talent, but it was pretty simple for my guys.

On my team, we are doing the implementation. Other teams within the company are using third-parties to do the deployment. But on my side, it's all internal people.

We're losing a thousand per minute when we're down. Being able to know where the problem is more quickly, we're going to save a lot of money.

I'm not a big fan of pushing a particular vendor, but it is a very good product: pretty stable, pretty scalable, with a very good and solid engineering team behind it. They are available and listen to customer needs and are always willing to do more to improve their products. But because I don't like to push a product too much, I prefer that people see and try it to see if they like it, to see if it fits their needs.

The tool itself is just fantastic. We've been using it since 2001 or 2002. We are a big fan of the product.

If we are satisfied with what we have, we don't ask for more. It's always about problem resolution or product improvement. We used to have regular, weekly calls with our NETSCOUT rep and, as soon they had a new product, a new version, new updates, they would share them with us, and we would know if we wanted to go in that direction or not. Today, we are quite happy and satisfied with what we have.

We don't yet use the solution for proactive monitoring of SaaS applications or remote sites. We are working on the deployment of PULSE. I can easily imagine that with that new solution deployed in production, we will be able to do more and more proactively. It's not because it's not available with nGeniusONE, it's just that I have no one to check and be proactive.

We will see a decrease in mean time to know and mean time to repair, more and more in the coming months, with PULSE. It's more about a business impact. With PULSE, we will have that "radar view", a view of the network, the server, and the application. So instead of needing 15 resources on a call at 2 AM, and losing 45 minutes just to get everyone there to find out what the is problem, with the PULSE solution, we are going to decrease that MTTR dramatically.

Because nGeniusONE is pretty stable and scalable, I would say it's a good nine out of ten.

We use it mainly for north-south, and soon to be, again, east-west: Troubleshooting, visibility into the VoLTE cloud that we've designed. Initially, it was very small, baby clouds, per se, but now as we redesign and go to scale, so that we have the visibility we need, we need better tools. We have the infrastructure, but we need to take the next step into the virtual lane.

We use the solution for proactive monitoring of remote sites. We have 29 data centers where these clouds are built and we're moving out to edge and we will have even more.

It has provided us with increased visibility, not during deployment, but downstream, once we actually turn up services, whether it's microservices or a VNF.

During outages, and in terms of visibility into VNF and container behavior across the various versions of our cloud, it has helped our organization.

nGenius also helps us get to root cause quickly. Signaling is one example. We have challenges between applications that share the same baby clouds but that utilize storage differently than the network. We don't have that visibility now in some of our deployments. Our new deployments will have that visibility because we're not using copper for a lot of the east-west traffic in the cloud. We're actually moving to fiber so that we have that visibility. The next step will probably vSTREAM.

In addition, I believe it has cut overall troubleshooting times for the OSS and DevOps teams, and it has increased uptime. I'm not in the operations lane, but I know that is something that we have to have.

The most valuable features are visibility, real-time, on-demand.

I need more details on the vSTREAM and how that scales from a CPU perspective. I know that we can start with one virtual CPU, but at the same time, our clouds are still limited by compute nodes. That's an ongoing question and it's part of why we're here at NETSCOUT Engage 2019, to see how we architect that out.

I'd like to see improvement in scalability and the CPU perspective on the actual cloud nodes. It would be good to have a roadmap of what impact to our underlying cloud we will see as we add vSTREAM vCPUs.

We haven't had any problems with stability.

The scalability needs some work. From a probe perspective, we are limited to a certain amount of throughput on the devices themselves. Without having actual hooks into the bare metal hardware for the solutions, it's a bit of a "thumb in the air" as to when we hit our capacity or when our high watermark is. I'm not sure if our operations teams have that capacity under control. So when we have to scale, it's a very large expense.

I'm not aware of whether the initial setup is straightforward or complex. We have a standard template when we build them out.

A lot of it was internal or direct with NETSCOUT.

We've had ongoing RFPs back and forth for multiple years. As far as new solutions for our visibility needs go, as we're right in the middle of our cloud journey from an LTE to NFV to 5G, we're trying to get a grasp. We're always on the cusp, looking for the next set of roadmaps and how we integrate that into our network to provide for our customers.

Our shortlist included the usual culprits: Empirix, Gigamon, all of them in the same build with NETSCOUT. We still have a very vast mix of everything.

We can't ever walk into our builds or our support models blindly. This solution is one of many options, but it's obviously one of the better ones that we've worked with for years, and it's an integral portion of our architecture upfront.

"Single pane of glass" is a very overused cliche in our business for the past couple of years, same with "Agile." I like the idea of being able to stitch it all together. Our operations team definitely insist on it.

I would rate NETSCOUT a seven out of ten. Not to be a detractor, but I don't have the hands-on experience from an operations standpoint, so that's why I rate it a seven.

We use it for when an app team or somebody comes to us and tells us that we have a problem with a server, that they're experiencing slowness, or latency, or the like. We like to take two IPs end-to-end. It will give us a server IP and the client IP, and we can plug that into nGeniusOne to hopefully give us some kind of error codes or a breakdown of what's going on from the packet level of the transaction. Hopefully, it gives us an idea of what's wrong.

The solution gives us increased visibility while conducting an IT deployment, depending on what the deployment is. As long as it's still monitoring in places that we're deploying something - for example, if it's in the DMZ, and it's going over a firewall - we have sniffers and tasks with this product deployed. In that case, we should be able to use it.

Another example would be when we're in the process of doing a lot of backups to the cloud. The teams come to us and they want a certain amount of bandwidth and a certain amount of resources, and they constantly ask us whether it's too much or too little, or can they use more overnight or at certain times. I can go back to my NETSCOUT reports and find out whether they're in trouble or actually have more capacity so they can ramp up their operations. It provides a view into that.

When we actually can use the product, we can see a measurable decrease in mean time to know or mean time to repair. It definitely has been something we wouldn't do otherwise, especially for capacity planning. We will get there when we have more proactive alarming and monitoring in place. It can greatly cut overall troubleshooting time once you know how to use it and it's properly and fully implemented.

Its troubleshooting capabilities are the most effective because we have it deployed in and out of our data centers, with our servers on-prem. And even now, going off-prem with Azure, we want to have visibility. For example, if one of our network pipes is getting plugged up by somebody using too much bandwidth, we can use the NETSCOUT tool to examine and find out what is going on.

I like the Dependency Mapping the solution provides, as long as it works. If you have it properly deployed it will. Being able to have dependencies is very critical in figuring out any path, and the more we can have that functionality it's nice because we can see if something's talking to multiple devices. We can see if one is actually the cause, rather than just "seeing blindly."

In terms of the single pane of glass view, when we build it out in the nGeniusOne platform, there are multiple tiles and, depending on what we're trying to examine, it doesn't all fit in one single pane of glass. It would be nice to have that functionality, but you really do have to categorize things because there is so much data.

The biggest thing is being able to provide net path. One of the products we use is SolarWinds, and it provides a very cool mapping of an agent from end-to-end. If NETSCOUT could somehow implement that into their design, whether it be sniffer-to-sniffer, or that kind of thing. I know they have some functionality along those lines, but if they could make it quicker and easier to get those net paths, it would be huge. I could quickly plug in problem IPs and get a full hosted view of where it's going from end-to-end. That would be really useful.

Finally, the GUI, the interface, has room for improvement. It's user-friendly to a degree, but when comparing it to other products, such as in the Cisco environment or SolarWinds, I found that I could just fumble my way through those tools very easily without training. Whereas with NETSCOUT, I need training in order to set stuff up because I would never figure that out on my own.

The stability has been pretty good. I haven't had any issues with the hardware, for the most part. It's a little tricky working with if you don't go through NETSCOUT for the packet flow switching. Right now, we use Gigamon, which we've had some older iterations of and some issues with. But as far as the hardware from NETSCOUT goes, we've had no issues.

The scalability is huge because certain ISPs have hundreds of these things out there monitoring their deployments, versus our having a few. It's very scalable.

Tech support started off poorly a few years ago, when we first implemented this, but I don't think we had the right resources on hand. In the last year, my company has worked directly with an OSC onsite, and the support has been much better.

We've actually had NETSCOUT for a long time, but originally it was implemented as a security tool, pre- and post-firewall, to just monitor traffic that way, to see how effective it was.

Now that firewalls have improved, and we use Check Point for that, it's been transitioned to the network team - to where I am - and now we're just using it as an NPM-type solution. It didn't really come in as a replacement. It was more, "Here are some assets that we want to use for network performance," so we're learning how to use it and deploy it better.

I don't know how they came to the decision to use NETSCOUT five years ago, but we kept it because we've had an investment with them.

The initial setup has been very complex. Just understanding our own environment, we definitely needed a dedicated resource, an OSC, to really figure out where we needed to deploy these things, what the capacity we needed to build out was, and what we needed to spend; what we currently had versus what we need. It has definitely been complex.

We've always gone straight through NETSCOUT in terms of the support and the hardware. We have never gone through a reseller.

We have seen some initial return on investment, on a small scale. We definitely hope to get more out of it once we implement it properly with the OSC. We're in the early stages.

We were looking at some of the Cisco stuff, and LiveAction, and SolarWinds, but NETSCOUT has its own little deep-dive triage packet part of the market that no one really, that I know of, touches. There is definitely still value there when considering.

If you want deep-dive, triage, packet-capture-type data, rather than just using Wireshark, it's very effective for that. It's definitely good for complex troubleshooting. There are other solutions, going into the cloud with the thin clients, and the vSTREAMs and vSCOUTs are definitely good, as is the nGeniusPULSE - I really like the PULSE product. We're not currently using that.

I think nGenius is very useful. You have to know your own environment, and see if it's good for you or not. My recommendation is mixed, to be honest. Depending on what you're looking for would determine whether I'd recommend it or not, which I actually have, to a colleague.

The solution can help us get to root cause more quickly, but not always. It is definitely a good stepping-stone, and when we have the visibility and the deployment properly implemented, it definitely can quickly get to a root cause.

We use the solution for proactive monitoring of remote sites to an extent. We have all of our sniffers, and all the stuff that's TAP-ed is in our central areas that get reported back from remote sites. As long as it crosses over one of those TAPs, it works. We're currently in the process of actually redefining and restructuring our build so that it does give baselines and some proactive monitoring, but we're not there yet.

For responding to issues, it can help the network uptime, especially when it comes to capacity, but as far as actually helping the stability of the network, I don't think it's really done that.

nGeniusOne is a seven out of ten, but improving. Originally, about a year or two ago, it was like a four out of ten for us because we weren't using it properly. When it's implemented properly, and the training is there to use the interface and have it work in your company, and people understand it, it can be very effective. As we do more and get it properly implemented, I think that score can even go up.

Visibility into the network is our primary use case.

We're just starting to use the solution for unified communication application performance, but we're not there yet.

The solution provides us with increased visibility while conducting an IT deployment.

It also helps us get to root cause quickly. We've had some voice issues, unified communication issues, over the last few months, and it gave insight that the voice team didn't have. We could actually pin it down to the point that we had a bad DSP box.

It has cut our overall troubleshooting time. It's taken the complexity of having to do SPAN sessions from the core and other places, by just going straight to this tool and applying the proper filters and getting the information.

The details it provides are among the most valuable features; the ability to drill down and get to the packet level.

I like the Dependency Mapping the solution provides. I wish there was a better way to show large groups, greater than 500, instead of just not displaying anything.

I would like to see it closer to more of an APM-type, or at least have that availability to compete with APM - the AppDynamics and solutions like that. I feel it's a natural step to at least have that available. 

Also, some integrations with ticketing systems like ServiceNow would be helpful.

Overall, it seems to function really well. We've only had one issue, but that was due to a power outage. It seems to perform well in a virtualized environment and I don't have anything bad to say about the stability.

I haven't had to use technical support yet.

The sales engineer helped me, and I got a lot of help from the website itself.

Be prepared to invest a lot of your own personal time to get the best use out of the system.

Regarding the single pane of glass view, you've got to have a lot of time on the console. Even though it's single pane, you've got to be able to at least get all the phrasing and catch stuff located properly.

I would give nGenius a seven out of ten. I think it could have an easier to understand interface. Other than that it would be a 10.

We use it for a lot of VoLTE monitoring and network monitoring in general. Most of our services are being monitored via NG1.

It gives us increased visibility while conducting an IT deployment. For example, once we launched VoLTE, we had other tools in the network that we were using for some other use cases, but in terms of MOS scoring and general monitoring of how the VoLTE calls were doing, we were using the Media Monitor.

We're not really using it to proactively capture outages, like Zero-day outages for example, when there is something completely new. But once we detect an outage, we can then use the tool to understand what it was and create an alarm, and that can be used for future similar outages so we can avoid them in the future.

It also helps us get to root cause quickly. We had an Rx Diameter issue at some point in IMS, and without the product it would have taken us more time to be able to troubleshoot and figure out what was happening. With the product, we were able to use Universal Monitor right away to figure out the actual error code and understand the issue from there.

In terms of unified communication, that's the VoLTE modules and the MOS scores. We used it heavily when we launch VoLTE. Currently, we have monitors set up per region so that we can monitor VoLTE. We also have it per event, so when we know something is happening on a big scale and we really need close-up monitoring, we set it up specifically for that area or region or the particular cells, to monitor that particular event.

The solution has cut our overall troubleshooting time and has helped to increase our network uptime.

The most valuable feature is VoLTE, for sure. The VoLTE modul, call search and Media Monitor were essential when we launched VoLTE. We're relying heavily on them to troubleshoot our VoLTE calls.

There is a lot of the VoLTE, voice, video MOS, and customer experience that we'd like to do. There's a lot of throughput analysis where we're trying to understand, with the vendor, whether it's accurate or we need more work on it. Those are our top priorities.

NG1 has been stable for a while in our environment - at least we have what we needed. But with nBA, there's a lot of room for improvement.

Stability is a tricky question. It is stable, but the way we use it, we have a lot of tweaks and a lot of specific and detailed configurations on the InfiniStream. It's a very manual process to configure it right now. We're also looking into ways to automate that and, hopefully, eliminate the human error.

So it's stable, but once you start doing more and more with it, there is always something happening in the background that we're not sure of, that fails or something happens, and we have to troubleshoot it and understand it.

So far, on the NG1 side, it's been very easy to scale. We just go into InfiniStream if we need to and we can very easily link it to our same NG1.

In terms of actually needing to add new InfiniStream, this has been a challenge because we'd like to reduce costs. However, there are a lot of use cases where we absolutely have to have new hardware, which we don't like, but it is what it is.

Technical support is great. We have a dedicated team. We have two SEs onsite who work with us, plus the support engineer. With those three, we have great support.

I wasn't part of the initial setup, it was set up before my time. But I helped set up the NG1 part and it was fairly straightforward because we have very good SEs on site, plus the support team. Whenever we need something we reach out, and they support us right away.

Get a demo. The guys at NETSCOUT have been super-helpful. Any time we ask for something they simply say, "Let's show it to you." They come onsite, give us a demo, show it to us, and if we like it we deploy it. We also have a sandbox, where we get our real traffic into the product in the early stages. We do all of our testing and all of our new builds in there before rolling to production, and that really helps.

Regarding the single pane of glass view, we have different views because we use different tools for different use cases. We can't really say that we have it in our network yet, but if we can work toward that, it would be good.

We have not used the Dependency Mapping the solution provides because our connections and relationship are way too complex. It's hard to see it on a visual screen.

The solution helps us with network uptime. It helps with user experience to some degree. We still have some caveats that we're trying to work on with NETSCOUT. We're using nBA now for user experience and there's some cool stuff coming up. We're looking forward to it.

I would rate nGenius at eight out of ten, because of the support and all the feedback we get. And at events, we get direct contact with their executive.

This is our traffic analyzer replacement. We use it to provide some functionality for our operations to do live captures so they can manage instant management.

The big features we use are definitely the packet capture function, NetFlow collection, and the UC analyzer to monitor real-time communication in our environment.

This is a typical thing, but every time they do a major code upgrade, we get hit with some nasty bugs. Some of them literally stop the whole platform from collecting traffic data. They should really do more Q&A on software stability before release.

Other than those bugs I mentioned, we haven't encountered any issues with stability. The system has been rock solid. It's just stable.

As far as we can see, the scalability issue is mostly that we need to spend more time to tune the software to understand our environment a little better. Other than that, we haven't found any scalability issues. Scalability is related to the hardware sizing and I think we did a pretty good job on that front.

The tech support team has been helpful. They are easy to engage and they're willing to engage the resources that we need to communicate with. I have no complaint about them.

We did have a different solution in place before. We reviewed a couple of vendors and ended up with NETSCOUT after doing a PoC in our environment.

The initial setup was a little simpler than what we have with NETSCOUT now, because our environment grew.

We evaluated NIKSUN but the accounting was way worse than what we have with NETSCOUT.

You need to spend some time to make the system to fit into your environment. Once you get it there, it works pretty well.

I give it a nine out of ten. It's only to the point that we still need to do some feature requests for things we want to do. The toolset was there but, initially, it wasn't GUI-based, so it took some time for them to implement that.

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.