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CA Unified Communications Monitor vs NETSCOUT Network & Application Observability comparison

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Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Oct 12, 2026

Review summaries and opinions

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Categories and Ranking

CA Unified Communications M...
Ranking in Network Monitoring Software
86th
Ranking in IT Infrastructure Monitoring
63rd
Average Rating
6.6
Number of Reviews
2
Ranking in other categories
Unified Communications Monitoring (3rd)
NETSCOUT Network & Applicat...
Ranking in Network Monitoring Software
7th
Ranking in IT Infrastructure Monitoring
29th
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
6.8
Number of Reviews
92
Ranking in other categories
Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability (46th), Network Troubleshooting (12th), Digital Experience Monitoring (DEM) (11th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of November 2026, in the Network Monitoring Software category, the mindshare of CA Unified Communications Monitor is 0.5%, up from 0.3% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of NETSCOUT Network & Application Observability is 3.8%, up from 2.7% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Network Monitoring Software Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
NETSCOUT Network & Application Observability3.8%
CA Unified Communications Monitor0.5%
Other95.7%
Network Monitoring Software
 

Featured Reviews

reviewer1605927 - PeerSpot reviewer
Sr.Solutions Engineer | Project Manager at a tech services company with 11-50 employees
Meets the needs of the customer but all of the features need improvement
I do not choose the solution. The client does. I am an implementer. We are systems integrators. It is worth mentioning that the solution should be easy to install and offer the user exhibition capabilities. Also, a data sheet should be used to gather information about the product, to facilitate easy and simple implementation. I rate CA Unified Communications Monitor as a five out of ten.
HT
Newwork And Collaboration Supervisor at Nafeza
Monitoring has improved bandwidth insights and application diagnosis but setup and costs still need work
They need room for improvement about the spare parts. There are shortages in Egypt in their stock. We tried to make RMA for specific parts, and it took a long time. Comparing this to a vendor like Cisco, who provides any component next business day, NETSCOUT nGeniusONE took a long time. This needs more improvement. I believe it is expensive. They need to reduce its budget a little bit. Comparing to other solutions, it is very expensive.

Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Pros

"Good end-to-end monitoring"
"We use the solution to meet the needs of the customer."
"For us, it's very key to know the voice quality of the total solution, which is based on many components across many domains."
"The VoLTE model, call search and Media Monitor were essential when we launched VoLTE. We're relying heavily on them to troubleshoot our VoLTE calls."
"Sometimes it took a month to troubleshoot something that we can now do within days."
"It gives me the MOS, latency, and jitter."
"The generation of KPI-like information that feeds to the nGeniusONE (management) server is the most valuable feature."
"This solution provides us with increased visibility while conducting IT deployments, for example, if we have devices which have overloaded or links which have saturated, then this tool tells us exactly what is going on with that link or device, and very few tools do it at this level for things like DDoS."
"Deep packet inspection is a very useful tool as it works in real time and uses serial packet-level analysis."
"We have seen a measurable decrease in mean time to know and mean time to repair, and our overall troubleshooting time, in most cases, is down to a day, as opposed to multiple days."
"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."
 

Cons

"The solution should have automatic baseline detection."
"All the features and functions of the solution can be improved, specifically the user experience."
"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."
"The GUI has gotten better over time but there could be some improvement in how the GUI is built."
"Initially, we were having a lot of issues with bugs when using version 6.1.1. There were a lot of problems with the dashboard causing confusion. We worked with our SE and the NETSCOUT engineering team to fix the visibility with the data. There should be a patch release to fix this issue. However, this seems to be working fine for us right now after the 6.2.2 upgrade."
"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 the software stability before release."
"The scalability is difficult. Packet capture and packet broker are hard to do because you ultimately have to build a separate overlay network, so you can capture the packets."
"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."
"I would love to have them reassemble fragmented packets. That would be a very big plus in my book."
"The current solution is not easy to scale, because it is an appliance-based solution. So, you have to swap everything out."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

Information not available
"If you are able and you are willing to use everything that Netscout provides to you, it's probably a relatively fair price. The problem is that it's such a large and such a complex tool that I'm not sure that many companies would be able to use it entirely, the way it's expected to be used."
"Their pricing is very competitive with other solutions... But what I like about NETSCOUT's licensing is that it's shared across all their platforms. They don't create a new licensing scheme for every one of their products. So for nGeniusONE, you buy a certain license level, and it works on all of their products."
"It can be scalable. It just costs too much. With a company as big as ours, it gets too expensive to accommodate every single site."
"The platform is expensive."
"The license becomes cost prohibitive very quickly."
"Cost is probably the biggest drawback. Compared to some of the newer vendors that have popped up in the space, it's definitely more on the expensive side... [But] it's been able to keep its value, even in the face of the cheaper competition."
"It was pretty modest because you could get it in different ways. I think the six licenses, at that time, were about $1,000 each. But then again, I work for a school and educators tend to get discounts on things. So maybe it cost us about five or six hundred a copy."
"It can be expensive, but if you have a good configuration, based on what you are looking for, it's okay, it's manageable."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Construction Company
22%
Comms Service Provider
19%
Financial Services Firm
12%
Outsourcing Company
10%
Outsourcing Company
11%
Financial Services Firm
10%
Construction Company
10%
Manufacturing Company
9%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
No data available
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business26
Midsize Enterprise13
Large Enterprise59
 

Questions from the Community

Ask a question
Earn 20 points
Which is the best DDoS protection solution for a big ISP for monitoring and mitigating?
I would say if it’s an ISP that will build a scrubbing center, Netscout/Arbor is a good solution. In all other solutions, Imperva is a great choice.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for NETSCOUT nGeniusONE?
Regarding its high price, I give NETSCOUT nGeniusONE a seven.
What needs improvement with NETSCOUT nGeniusONE?
They need room for improvement about the spare parts. There are shortages in Egypt in their stock. We tried to make RMA for specific parts, and it took a long time. Comparing this to a vendor like ...
 

Also Known As

CA UC Monitor
NETSCOUT nGenius, NETSCOUT nGeniusONE, NETSCOUT nGeniusPULSE, NETSCOUT vSTREAM, NETSCOUT InfiniStreamNG, TruView
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

BBVA Compass
Cerner Corporation
Find out what your peers are saying about CA Unified Communications Monitor vs. NETSCOUT Network & Application Observability and other solutions. Updated: November 2026.
920,336 professionals have used our research since 2012.