Our clients use the solution for visibility. They use it to understand the traffic and store years' worth of traffic in metadata. They can use it to score application performance on a rating scale of one to ten. The clients also use the tool for accounting, capacity planning, and security purposes.
The product is extremely valuable and provides a lot of functionalities and visibility to organizations
What is our primary use case?
What is most valuable?
The score-based application performance ratings help the network team. Often, customers have a siloed environment for security, applications, and servers. The network team is always asked to do troubleshooting. Being able to know how well an application worked in the past and what's happening today is really helpful. If someone has a complaint and the network team says that the problem is not on their side, they must be able to demonstrate it accurately.
The network team is often given the least budget and the least number of employees. So, they must be able to troubleshoot and pinpoint problems as fast as possible. If it’s a network issue, they must fix it. However, if it is a cloud problem, an ISP problem, or a problem within the server or application environment, they must be able to demonstrate it clearly. It is the real benefit they get from the solution.
Some of our customers are financial institutions. They use the tool for traffic accounting, especially when they get charged by ISPs or carriers for the amount of traffic they are using. In South Africa, we have banks that pay the service providers to allow customers to use their banking apps for free. The bank pays for it, not the customers. So, they need to compare to ensure they are paying for what has been used. Viavi enables them to do that. It is pretty much the best there is in the world. There is nothing to beat it. The product is extremely valuable and provides a lot of functionalities. It's really impressive.
What needs improvement?
Customers must understand what Viavi offers. The product offers so much value that it hasn’t been able to demonstrate it to the customers. The product must start using a bit more machine learning and AI, especially for security.
For how long have I used the solution?
I have been using the solution for about three to four years.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
The tool is very stable. If there are problems, it has fantastic internal troubleshooting that we can use to understand the problems.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
The product can be scaled for the largest company. It depends on how much a company is willing to spend. Large companies spend ten million dollars. We have medium and enterprise-level customers. What is considered a large company in South Africa might be considered small in the USA.
How are customer service and support?
The support is very good.
How would you rate customer service and support?
Positive
How was the initial setup?
There are two phases of deployment. Phase one is initial implementation. It’s extremely easy. I rate the ease of initial implementation a ten out of ten. If we need all the other bells and whistles, there is work to be done. It's not absolutely difficult, but there's a lot of complexities. We have to know what we're doing. The provides provides a lot more functionality than anybody else. I rate the whole deployment process a seven out of ten.
It's very easy to set it up. In two days, we can have extremely impressive information out of it. It can be deployed in a hybrid environment. There is a big focus on AWS. Azure can also be used. We get extra metadata from Azure and AWS that we thread into the information we correlate.
What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?
The tool is very pricey. It is a challenge. I rate the pricing a ten out of ten.
What other advice do I have?
We are the main distributors of Viavi in South Africa. Overall, I rate the product a ten out of ten.
Which deployment model are you using for this solution?
Hybrid Cloud
If public cloud, private cloud, or hybrid cloud, which cloud provider do you use?
Amazon Web Services (AWS)
