NETSCOUT nGeniusONE Reviews

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. 

We used to use it for application debugging, in particular SMS and MMS, but lately, we've been turning towards using it for OpenStack and cloud-issue debugging.

In a network deployment, it provides us with increased visibility.

From the service assurance perspective, in SMS in particular, they use it very heavily to proactively try to hit issues. There are a lot of times where NETSCOUT will catch something spinning up the SA organization and then, in turn, spinning up the operations organization to go catch and kill it; or it comes over to network development. So it's used fairly extensively.

We use it on the cloud side more from a reactive perspective and it's certainly helped us catch and kill a couple of issues that we wouldn't have been able to otherwise. 

It helps us get to root cause quickly. We had an OpenStack Cinder issue, a storage-type issue, and we chased our tails on that for quite some time until we managed to get the data over to a NETSCOUT probe. Then we were able to very rapidly figure out what the heck was going on.

When we can get the data into the tool, we absolutely see a decrease in mean time to know and mean time to repair, and similarly for overall troubleshooting time. With that Cinder issue, we spun our wheels for almost two weeks before we managed to get the data over to the tool and, once we did, we solved it fast. So it can be days or weeks of saved time.

In terms of application uptime, it's deployed and leveraged for almost all the applications in our organization: VoLTE, SMS, MMS, etc. So as heavily as the service assurance groups and operations use it, I'd say that they consider it pretty essential at this point.

Among the valuable features, if it's TAP'ed well, are the density of the data that you can get and the relatively high veracity or accuracy rate that we see from it.

In terms of additional features, Bruce Kelly was talking about the NFV and 5G aspects of it, in monitoring all the APIs for all of those functions. We're really looking forward to seeing that so that we can give better visibility into the functioning of the cloud and the orchestrator itself.

There is room for improvement in its stability and by expanding into the cloud and orchestration sphere, which I think is on the roadmap.

The stability is only fair. It goes down a lot.

It scales out fairly widely, horizontally. And with the new virtual one, we'll be doing it a lot wider. So it has good scalability.

Technical support is good. We've got good onsite support and those guys are generally available.

We knew we needed to invest in a new solution because we couldn't fix things.

We see ROI through the ability to fix and to keep the perception that our network is up 100 percent. That is absolutely critical. It keeps the customers coming in.

We also looked at Empirix.

Consider what your applications are for this and purchase your features accordingly.

Regarding the single pane of glass view, we don't think we've really fully deployed it from a cloud perspective, but from a VoLTE perspective, I know they're starting to get on top of it. From an SMS perspective, we found it very useful.

I'll give it an eight out of ten as it stands today. It's very useful, but we do see some stability concerns. There is a lot of maintenance around the probes, and I think there needs to be more development done in the cloud sphere.

Network troubleshooting is our primary use case.

nGeniusONE provides us with increased visibility while conducting a deployment. I'm not on the IT side, I'm on the carrier side, but it provides that increased visibility for us.

From the standpoint of VoLTE and related things, it's providing visibility into the network and how it operates. It has also improved our ability to troubleshoot end-customer issues.

One of the valuable features is permanent user perspective, getting to the one pane of glass, so that they can use one tool for multiple purposes.

In terms of the single pane of glass view, NETSCOUT has many tools. I think NG1 provides that single pane for a lot of things, but users are still using several different applications within the NETSCOUT realm of applications, and more integration would be helpful.

Our biggest area of concern right now, supporting the applications, is that while NETSCOUT does a good job of monitoring the network and the applications, we need more visibility into system health and performance monitoring. We need something that will monitor the tool that monitors the network.

Stability, for us, has been an issue but, to some degree, I think that's from a standpoint of capacity. People are wanting more from the system than what we originally deployed it for, so it's pushed it to its limit. As a result, we're deploying additional capacity.

It seems to be scalable. We have a pretty big installation. Once we get capacity in place, I think it will resolve a lot of our issues.

The main driver was VoLTE, but also getting to a single pane of glass, so that we can have one tool to monitor end-to-end performance. Before nGeniusONE we used Empirix and we still have that solution in place today for some things.

To some degree, the initial setup was complex because of the nature of the application. But, as things go, I wouldn't describe it as any more complex than anything else.

We worked directly with NETSCOUT.

I don't have access to the numbers to give a black and white answer, but I think that our company will get that return on investment over time.

I didn't get to choose. I support what the business chooses. I've supported several applications in this area, and my experience with NETSCOUT has been positive to date.

I've been speaking to people who were having some technical issues with our NETSCOUT deployment, but when it works it absolutely helps us get to root cause more quickly.

I would rate it pretty close to a ten out of ten. It's a very complex application and system, and the support from our NETSCOUT resources has been stellar.

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.

The primary use case is diagnosing real-time communications for all the Voice over IP on our network. We use this solution for unified communication application performance, specifically for performance monitoring, but especially for the troubleshooting.

It has helped with the operations teams, who have been able to collect information and troubleshoot with the application. So, it has been a benefit for the lower tier support.

It has helped identify issues more quickly.

It gives me the MOS, latency, and jitter. 

It captures RTP, so I am capable of ingesting and listening to the RTP side of it.

95 percent of the solution helps us get to the root cause quickly.

I would love to have them reassemble fragmented packets. That would be a very big plus in my book.

While it does give me increased visibility while conducting IT deployments, I have experience some limitations with it.

We have jumbo frames, which can get fragmented. They don't bring together everything that I need for me to work right. If I could get an end-to-end, then it would give me a good view of how everything would be in my particular call flow.

We have a lot of timeouts when we are trying to assemble data packets together or trying to pull down a view of one particular call. However, overall, it performs adequately.

I don't directly use their technical support.

Initially, it was a little cumbersome to set up. Once we figured out the nuances of what we wanted, it was fairly simple to set up and set our cards, so we got to things a bit quicker.

Ensure that you get all your DAPS in at the right spots for your data. Learn how to build your cards to have a quick view and quick selection of where you want to troubleshoot.

I believe other departments within our organization use this solution for proactive monitoring of SaaS applications or remote sites.

• Reporting
• Analyzing
• Troubleshooting
• Evidence gathering

It's easy to detect unwanted traffic with all the detection tools available.

It needs a better GUI, and especially it needs to be more user-friendly.

We've used if for four years, five months.

We had issues with capacity planning.

7/10 because they have limited numbers of engineers who can handle the ticket created.

We previously used SolarWinds Netflow Traffic Analyzer, and switched because Netscout is more granular.

It's complex because you have to first identify the traffic flow, and then the capacity of the appliance.

We used a partner.

• Type 1 - up to 50 interfaces
• Type 2 - up to 10000 interfacs

SolarWinds Network Traffic Analyzer. Netscout is more detailed than SolarWinds Network Traffic Analyzer.

The platform's data analysis feature needs improvement. There is currently less visibility or GUI to analyse the packet for troubleshooting purposes. In comparison, it is easy to analyse the packets using the solutions like Wireshark.

We have been using NETSCOUT nGeniusONE for three months.

Stability-wise, the platform works fine.

It is an easy-to-scale platform.

The platform's technical support services are good.

Neutral

The platform is expensive.

Compared with other competitors, NETSCOUT nGeniusONE is not easy to use in terms of interface, functionality, and performance.

If you are not a technical expert, do not use the platform. I rate it a three out of ten.

My primary use case of this solution is the monitoring of network devices, security devices, servers, and so on.

There is a need to reduce the complexity of this solution.

The stability of this product is ok.

Technical support for this product has been ok, with no issues.

The initial setup was complex, and deployment took around six months.

I used consultants for deployment.

This product is suitable for high-level enterprises, but I would not recommend it for small-to-medium enterprises. I would rate this solution as five out of ten.