Kentik vs vRealize Network Insight comparison

Kentik and VMware are both solutions in the Network Monitoring Software category. Kentik is ranked #34 with an average rating of 9.0, while VMware is ranked #38 with an average rating of 8.7. Kentik holds a 0.8% mindshare in NMS, compared to VMware’s 0.6% mindshare. Additionally, 100% of Kentik users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 89% of VMware users who would recommend it.

Kentik

Read 16 Kentik reviews

1,512 Views
1,149 Comparison Views

100% willing to recommend

vRealize Network Insight

Read 46 vRealize Network Insight reviews

1,784 Views
1,284 Comparison Views

89% willing to recommend

Kentik

vRealize Network Insight

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Oct 10, 2024

vRealize Network Insight and Kentik compete in network performance management, focusing on visualization and analysis of network data. vRealize appears to have the upper hand in comprehensive network flow visualization and integration with VMware NSX, while Kentik stands out in real-time traffic analysis and DDoS alert handling capabilities.

Features: vRealize Network Insight excels in comprehensive visualization of network flows, assisting with microsegmentation, and integrates seamlessly with NSX. It is also praised for its intuitive design and natural language queries. Conversely, Kentik is recognized for robust NetFlow visualization and traffic analysis, effective DDoS alert handling, and real-time visibility across network infrastructures, along with API integration that enhances traffic pattern insights.

Room for Improvement: vRealize Network Insight users suggest improved integration with more third-party services and enhanced user-friendliness due to complex interfaces and pricing structures. Kentik could offer more actionable insights for traffic anomalies and deeper application performance integration. Both products are noted for high costs, with suggestions for more flexible and cost-effective pricing.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: vRealize Network Insight is typically deployed on-premises with strong technical support attributed to VMware's backing. Kentik offers deployment flexibility in private clouds, receiving favorable feedback for reliable support, although its interface could be more user-friendly. Both benefit from strong assistance, with Kentik users reporting lower support engagement needs.

Pricing and ROI: vRealize Network Insight is perceived as expensive yet valuable for reducing operational time and costs, improving labor efficiency through network management. Kentik's pricing is steep, especially for larger deployments, but offers scalability with flexible licensing based on device volume. Both tools provide high ROI by simplifying network management, though users suggest potential cost improvements.

To learn more, read our detailed Kentik vs. vRealize Network Insight Report (Updated: July 2025).

Buyer's Guide

Kentik vs. vRealize Network Insight

July 2025

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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

Kentik

Ranking in Network Monitoring Software

34th

Average Rating

9.2

Reviews Sentiment

7.3

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) Protection (15th)

vRealize Network Insight

Ranking in Network Monitoring Software

38th

Average Rating

8.6

Reviews Sentiment

7.6

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

IT Infrastructure Monitoring (41st)

Mindshare comparison

As of July 2025, in the Network Monitoring Software category, the mindshare of Kentik is 0.8%, up from 0.6% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of vRealize Network Insight is 0.6%, down from 0.9% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Network Monitoring Software

Featured Reviews

ADRIANA SALDARRIAGA TOBON

Sales Manager at IFX NEtworks

Client experience and cybersecurity have improved with an easy setup

The solution is valuable for client experience, especially in the financial sector. The most important feature is cybersecurity. The pricing is good, but the functionality is the most important aspect for clients. The solution is easy to deploy and requires only one person to set up, making it easy and quick. Overall, the ease of use and the fact that it meets client expectations are major positives.

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NiteshKumar1

Principle consultant at Infosys

The tool's configuration is easy and artifacts are easily accessible through professional services and the web

The product is highly regarded, and many customers have been using it along with other VMware products like vSphere and VMware vCloud Usage Insight. However, recently, there's been a trend among customers, especially those using VMware for a considerable period, to explore the potential of migrating to the public cloud. The common concern among these customers is how the VMware products will perform in the public cloud environment. Migrating instances from VMware to different platforms is not easy, especially when dealing with many instances across multiple customers. Customers are keen to maintain the functionality of their existing VMware products but prefer to run them on the public cloud instead of on-premise servers. Our clients for vRealize Network Insight are enterprise businesses. I rate it a nine out of ten.

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Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"We're also using Kentik to ingest metrics. It's a useful feature, and its response time, whenever we're pulling back the data, is higher than our on-prem solution."

"Overall, the ease of use and the fact that it meets client expectations are major positives."

"Kentik excels in telemetry within data centers and works well in multi-vendor environments."

"Monitoring operational efficiency is easy."

"It offers a simple yet powerful feature of classifying applications, going beyond basic statistics."

"Having the API access allows us to do a great deal of automation around a lot of our reporting and management tools."

"We're pretty happy with the API functionality. It's web, and it's very simple to set up queries. It has served us well and you don't need to be an expert on the API or the product to set these things up."

"I really love the Data Explorer. I use it all the time to go in and craft exactly what I need to see. I'm able to then take that story and explain it to the executives. I've done that a couple of times and it is helpful."

More Kentik pros

"The solution helps reduce time to value, increase performance, provide deep visibility, and easily manage networks."

"It's very user-friendly in the sense that the querying is just regular language like you and I speak or write. You don't need to know any SQL-query type of language to be able to get what you want out of it."

"The most valuable feature is the visualization. It's really handy to be able to classify network objects as with applications and see the interaction between them."

"It has definitely helped us to meet compliance rules by assuring that all traffic is going to where it's supposed to go. It can be used to report that you are in compliance, as well as helping you get into compliance."

"The gradual way the Network Insight shows you all the relevant information about your networks. It's pretty good. You can really dig deep deep inside and see where the problem is, where it comes from, what you have inside, how did you configure it. Also, it has alerts so you can have pretty much quite a big overview about your network. This is really something good."

"The initial setup was straightforward."

"The graphical interface of this environment is so good with all the views, the graphics, and everything in them. It's really easy for me. It doesn't need an engineer to work on it. It's easy enough that anyone can get into the environment and look for issues or look at how communication is going on across the VMs. It's pretty much straightforward."

"As a troubleshooting tool, it's a level-3 troubleshooting-skills tool and it's very easy to use and very easy to find the information that you need."

More vRealize Network Insight pros

Cons

"In recent months, I've noticed that while the industry is trending towards AI, Kentik has room for improvement in this area."

"I've checked out the V4 version of the interface and it's still a little bit clunky for me to use. I still go back to the old interface. That's definitely one that they still need to work on. It doesn't seem like everything that you get in the V3, the older interface, is there. For instance, I was trying to add a user or do the administrative tasks in V4, and I couldn't figure out where I was supposed to do that."

"I would like to see them explore the area of cost analysis."

"Sometimes, the tool has complications, so we must deal with the additional support from the tool's end."

"We asked for a way, regarding the potential networks that exist, to hook Kentik up with external tools like peering DBs to correlate things together and see what we can do... This is all in the [next] beta now."

"I consider the pricing model as an area for improvement."

"We had faced some issues during an outage and were not able to get the desired results from Kentik tools. It took time to resolve these issues, which is why I give them eight points."

"I believe they're already working on this, but I would love for them to create better integrations from network flow data to application performance — tracing — so that we could overlay that data more readily. With more companies going hybrid, flow logs and flow data, whether it be VPC or on-prem, matched with application performance and trace data, is pretty important."

More Kentik cons

"In a very general way, I would like to see an improvement in interoperability with third-party product, from other vendors."

"vRNI needs more remediation where it hooks into NSX."

"The solution is very much viewer centric and it would be nice if it would transcend just the virtual infrastructure."

"The only reason I would not give it a nine or a 10 is for cost reasons. It seems to be one of those things that really belongs as part of the product inherently and not as an add-on. That would be my only concern."

"Support could be much better."

"I would like to see more reporting features, more dashboards."

"When we talk about those micro-segmentation rules, there's an Export function. It is very macro-segmentation oriented instead. So if you choose an application, it will find the tiers within that application and say that it's communicating on, say, port 80 to a separate VLAN. There might be 200 machines in that other VLAN. You don't want to open port 80 at all of them. So we need a lot more granularity in those suggested firewall rules."

"There is room for improvement when it comes to pricing because we pay here in Brazil, and all the costs are based on the dollar."

More vRealize Network Insight cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"We have an annual contract with Kentik that we renew each year for a set number of licenses. We also have some burstable licenses which we can spin up and spin down, and those are paid as they are used."

"The tool is cheaply priced."

"We have spent less time investigating network flows, so it is absolutely cost-effective."

"The solution has reduced the time that we spend on other products. For example, with NSX, we were able to quickly find things that we would normally spend days trying to figure out."

"It's a little expensive, but for what you're getting out of the product, you often see the trade-off. It depends on the type of licensing you have. It might be a little too pricey for some."

"The solution has helped us to reduce time, increase performance, reduce costs, and even easily manage networks. We are probably seeing 10 to 20 percent labor savings because we are able to be very specific and focused on what we want to do. It ends up saving the customer money and makes us be more efficient on our cost deliveries."

"It reduces costs. It takes something that may be challenging and makes it more usable and visual by being able to bring in tools, seeing what their impact is, such as microsegmentation and application rationalization, and seeing it quickly."

"vRealize Network Insight is expensive."

"I rate vRealize Network Insight's pricing a seven point five out of ten."

"It has brought more money into our company."

More vRealize Network Insight pricing and cost advice

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Computer Software Company

14%

Financial Services Firm

12%

Comms Service Provider

Manufacturing Company

Computer Software Company

15%

Financial Services Firm

15%

Manufacturing Company

Healthcare Company

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

Questions from the Community

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Kentik?

I would say Kentik's pricing is not cheap. From my perspective as part of the technical team, I would not categorize it as expensive, but I know it is not cheap.

See all answers

What needs improvement with Kentik?

There's always room for improvements and better relations when using any kind of product. We faced some issues with Kentik UI and alerting, which we asked them to fix, and they succeeded. They have...

See all answers

What is your primary use case for Kentik?

We are using Kentik mostly for synthetic tests, and from one last year, network monitoring as well. We are using it for inter DC BGP tests and server monitoring as well.

See all answers

What do you like most about vRealize Network Insight?

The tool's ease of configuration and use and the availability of information and artifacts through professional services and the web are key factors that customers find valuable.

See all answers

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for vRealize Network Insight?

Broadcom is known for increasing product prices, making them expensive compared to what people used to pay. I liken the subscription model to not truly owning what you pay for.

See all answers

What needs improvement with vRealize Network Insight?

Right now, I do not see a specific area for improvement. My main concern is understanding the intentions of Broadcom, which has acquired VMware. Broadcom should improve by going back to what was wo...

See all answers

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Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Kentik

July 2025

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Buyer's Guide

vRealize Network Insight

June 2025

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Also Known As

No data available

Arkin

Overview

Kentik's AIOps Network Traffic Intelligence platform unifies network operations, performance, security, and business intelligence.

With a purpose-built big data engine delivered as public or private SaaS, Kentik captures a high-resolution view of actual network traffic data and enriches it with critical application and business data, so every network event or analysis can be tied to revenue & costs, customer & user experience, performance & risk.

Kentik

VMware vRealize Network Insight delivers intelligent operations for software-defined networking and security. It helps customers build an optimized, highly-available and secure network infrastructure across multi-cloud environments. It accelerates micro-segmentation planning and deployment, enables visibility across virtual and physical networks and provides operational views to manage and scale VMware NSX deployments.

VMware

Sample Customers

Pandora, Yelp, Neustar, Box, University of Washington, Zoom, Tata, and Cogent.

NTTi3, VCIX-NV, VMware Networking and Security Business Unit, Illumio, CompuNet

Buyer's Guide

Kentik vs. vRealize Network Insight

July 2025

Free Report: Kentik vs. vRealize Network Insight

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