NETSCOUT nGeniusPULSE provides an efficient overview of application services and network performance with a single view, offering quick issue identification to reduce disruption.
| Product | Mindshare (%) |
|---|---|
| NETSCOUT nGeniusPULSE | 0.5% |
| Zabbix | 3.9% |
| SolarWinds NPM | 3.6% |
| Other | 92.0% |
NETSCOUT nGeniusPULSE is designed to offer comprehensive monitoring and maintenance of network traffic. It facilitates substantial bandwidth visibility and improves network uptime. With a user-friendly dashboard, it excels in troubleshooting to identify root causes swiftly. Although it effectively collects networking information in large enterprises, there is room for improvement in event notification granularity and reducing manual maintenance. Enhanced usability and better integration with tools like SolarWinds are desired for a more streamlined user experience.
What are the key features of NETSCOUT nGeniusPULSE?NETSCOUT nGeniusPULSE sees widespread use in sectors like finance and oil and gas, where monitoring application and service access across sites is critical. It supports the performance of unified communication applications and proactive SaaS monitoring, enhancing network stability and troubleshooting capabilities in secure environments.
NETSCOUT nGeniusPULSE was previously known as nGeniusPULSE.
| Author info | Rating | Review Summary |
|---|---|---|
| Ingeniero en Telecomunicaciones at a energy/utilities company with 1,001-5,000 employees | 3.5 | NETSCOUT nGeniusPULSE works well for traffic analysis with a user-friendly dashboard, unlike SolarWinds. It isn’t integrated with SolarWinds, and I can't comment on support or setup. I’d rate it 7.5 out of 10. |
| Gerente De Ventas at internet winds ag | 5.0 | I use NETSCOUT nGeniusPULSE to analyze international traffic and gain visibility over bandwidth. While efficient for operations, the tool's interface could improve. It would benefit from alert features in Spanish and proactive traffic behavior alerts before attacks. |
| Principle Engineer Network Management Systems at a comms service provider with 10,001+ employees | 4.0 | I use NETSCOUT nGeniusPULSE for traffic monitoring. While stable, it demands significant manual effort and physical maintenance due to its hardware-centric design, limiting its effectiveness in large, virtualized environments. I rate it 8/10. |
| IT Manager at a comms service provider with 10,001+ employees | 4.0 | I use nGenius for unified app monitoring, which boosts visibility and cuts troubleshooting time by an hour with a single pane of glass. I would like more granular alerts and reporting. |
| Lead Network Engineer at a tech company with 10,001+ employees | 4.0 | nGenius quickly helps me troubleshoot issues, boosting visibility, reducing repair times, and improving network uptime. I appreciate its single pane of glass, but usability needs significant improvement due to excessive clicks. Stability and scalability are great. |
Negative
I use the solution in my company to analyze international traffic.
Operations used the solution to gain visibility over bandwidth. Earlier, for workloads, we used to play quality videos in the delivery network.
The tools are part of managed environments, but when the capabilities of the routers need to be increased, we use NETSCOUT to manage things at an international level.
The tool's user interface is okay.
It would be great if the tool could provide alerts during attacks in Spanish. In the next release, if the traffic analysis could send our company an alert before an attack starts, it would be even better. Before an attack starts, seeing the traffic behavior and activities would be great. The tool should also share alerts since it is an area where the product has certain shortcomings.
I have experience with NETSCOUT nGeniusPULSE. I am a customer of the tool.
It is a stable solution. There was a time when NETSCOUT could be deployed and be used with another tool, Gigamon, to monitor a certain portion of the traffic. NETSCOUT can manage it all.
It is a scalable solution, and we use switches in our company to divide the traffic and do the monitoring.
The solution's technical support team consists of good engineers and technicians.
I rate NETSCOUT's customer service a ten out of ten.
Positive
I have used tools from F5 Networks. NETSCOUT nGeniusPULSE is only used for monitoring purposes.
The product's initial setup phase was okay, and a technical engineer completed it by staying with our company for a few days.
I see an ROI from the tool's use since it provides efficiency in operations and visibility, especially when we lack visibility of our network traffic.
The tool's price is okay. On a scale of one to ten, I rate it as a five, where one means it is not expensive, and ten means it is the most expensive.
The tool has real-time monitoring capabilities, which help us optimize our operations. It is also helpful for dealing with clients and sending reports.
I will recommend the tool to others based on its services and products.
I rate the tool a ten out of ten.
We use NETSCOUT nGeniusPULSE in the same way that we use any other packet distributed permanent packet sniffing traffic and service insurance type product: you deploy it, you wait for things to happen, you create baselines, and you get threshold violations. When we get alarms from the system, you go investigate.
They are good.
The most valuable features of this solution are monitoring and maintaining traffic queuing, as well as seeing who is using the bandwidth.
They require a lot of manual effort as traffic flows, networks, and formal times change. Their physical devices require physical connections to other devices to gather information. It's a logistical disaster.
They require a lot of physical maintenance.
They could improve by embracing modern virtualized networks.
I have been working with NETSCOUT nGeniusPULSE and other NETSCOUT solutions for decades.
NETSCOUT nGeniusPULSE is very stable.
NETSCOUT nGeniusPULSE is scalable. However, the larger your network, the more probes, and tap points are required. It is easier if you are a smaller business than if you are a larger business.
We are currently in the process of shutting down the data centers where it is deployed. That was the Sprint network. We had about 30 concurrent network management users at its peak, with everyone monitoring the converged core traffic.
Technical support is good. They are not necessarily up to date on all protocols, but they have a good general understanding of the majority of them.
We had actually installed all three of them: PFS, the Network Packet Broker, and the nGenius Pulse.
The initial setup is straightforward.
We would have one team in charge of upgrading the software and server instances. Then there would be the data center teams, who would do the tapping.
I am not aware of the pricing.
I would suggest using something else if you get more than two data centers.
We don't resell, we are customers.
I would rate NETSCOUT nGeniusPULSE an eight out of ten.
We are using it for all our sites' access to applications and services within our organization.
We use the solution for unified communication application performance. We use Dialpad, to make test calls and it helps with uptime and end-user experience. We also use it for proactive monitoring of SaaS applications like Salesforce and Dialpad, which is our VoIP solution.
nGenius provides us with increased visibility during IT deployments. We are able to see that the application is available and working for all the sites at a glance.
It also gives us a heads-up before we start receiving customer calls that there is an issue. Likewise, we can see that it might be a case that an individual user is having a challenge, not the rest of the organization. It can save us the time needed to troubleshoot networks or the application when the problem is not there. We can then focus more on the end-user's laptop or desktop. In that way, it helps us get to root cause quickly.
The solution has cut our overall troubleshooting time, reducing it by about an hour per situation.
The most valuable feature is the quick glance to see how our application services and network are working. I like the single pane of glass view. I like being able to go to one place instead of having to hunt around for everything.
In terms of additional features, I would like to see better event notification. Right now, we put in an email address to receive an alert and it receives every event and every alert that comes out. We need something a little more granular.
Overall, there is room for improvement by having more granularity in the reporting, visualization, and alerts.
The stability is good. We did have some initial issues with the endpoints losing their IPs for some reason, but the latest update that just came out seems to have fixed that.
It seems to be very scalable. We've pretty much hit almost every site in our organization, which is over 100 sites.
Technical support is very quick. They're very responsive and knowledgeable about everything we've asked so far.
We've been bringing our LAN, WAN, and application support back in-house. The contracted vendor that we used before, their systems, are very antiquated and out of date. We needed to provide our own, and that's how we came to nGenius.
I came in towards the end of the setup, but it seemed to be pretty straightforward.
We did not use an outside resource for the setup.
I can't say that we've seen anything quite yet, but I can see it coming.
I would recommend nGenius to colleagues who are looking for this kind of solution. It's fairly quick and easy to implement, rolling out the endpoints and configuring it. It does give you pretty good information for a very simple setup.
Regarding a decrease in mean time to know or mean time to repair, and similarly when it comes to the solution increasing our application or network uptime, we haven't been monitoring that as we're still integrating it into our support staff.
The solution is an eight out of ten. The PULSE was an acquisition from Fluke and I feel that NETSCOUT is still building it into their methodology and level, like nGeniusONE.
We use nGenius for troubleshooting application and network issues.
The solution gives us increased visibility while conducting an IT deployment. Especially if it's something new, it lets us rapidly gain insight into what a particular client's traffic is going to look like.
The biggest thing, given there's an assumption that the network is the cause of the problem, is that it allows us to be more efficient when it comes to isolating what the issue is - whether it's an application issue or a network issue.
The most valuable feature is being able to get to root cause relatively quickly. Being part of the network team, of course it's always the network that is the problem. Using the tool allows us to eliminate the network as the cause of problems relatively quickly.
I also like the single pane of glass view because it presents everything in one window, obviously. You can see it all. With a quick glance, you get a pretty good snapshot of what's going on in a particular situation.
We have seen a measurable decrease in mean time to know and mean time to repair. Because the tool allows us to get to things a lot quicker, see things a lot quicker, we have actually reduced those times. It has also cut our overall troubleshooting time. Finally, it has definitely helped with our network uptime. I'm on the network team, so I get to see that. I would estimate there has been an improvement in uptime of at least 50 percent.
Regarding additional features, we have yet to take advantage of a lot of the things that are already there. We haven't thought too much about what else we'd like to see.
Usability is the area with the biggest room for improvement. We've found that with NETSCOUT, while it's a fantastic product, the usability is a major factor because there are just way too many clicks. It's obvious, from our experience, that the people who are developing the product aren't using it.
The stability is great. We run it on Linux and we have not had any issues with stability of the product. It's been really awesome. We've had products run on Windows and there are always issues with Windows. I don't mean to bash Windows. We've been running it for years and I can count on one hand the times that we've had a reason to reboot our servers.
The scalability is good. We don't have a lot of appliances. What we have is not very big, but we've been able to easily add without any issues, so scalability is not a factor.
Technical support is okay. It depends on whom you talk to. The first level can be a struggle at times, but once you get to the right person, a knowledgeable person for your issue, they're really good. It's just that getting to that person is sometimes a struggle.
We knew we needed to switch because we had been running a solution that was really old, a very old iteration of NETSCOUT. We knew a couple of years ago that we needed to move to newer versions of NETSCOUT and that's how we started down the nGenius path.
The initial setup was straightforward, with easy-to-follow documentation.
We did it all internally.
I'm not sure what other vendors we looked at because we've always had NETSCOUT in-house and they've always been tops as far as industry reviews are concerned. We went with them because they were a known entity to us and we stayed with them.
Going back to usability, keep that in mind when you're looking at products. That's the biggest thing: The fewer clicks the better, when you're looking at any product.
In terms of proactive monitoring, that has been something we've been trying to get to. It's still a lot of firefighting at this point, the reactive thing. Proactive is the ideal, but we haven't been able to use the tool proactively the way we would like to.
I give it an eight out of ten. I think it could be better. Usability is a factor. But, overall, it gives you a single pane into networking application performance.
