NETSCOUT TruView vs. Nmap

As a application it stands for what it offers. One single box, one single price, and the rest is part of the experience of the IT Teams to get the most from a quite complete solution. Visual TruView has an amazing dashboard that can be customized to meet the needs of the business, and can get involved in the ITSM development insights to leverage SLA monitoring. It has a well sustainable discovery engine to get the specs of applications, servers and sites. If you're looking for a solution that can give you reporting advantages this is it, but you need to get yourself into this solution from day one to design a proper strategy for its deployment. For less complex companies I strongly recommend to find a solution that can take you to parallel result with less investment.

Incentivized

Nmap is the ideal solution if you are working alot in network environments. If you come to grips with the syntax and the most-used features (the online community helps alot), you will be able to much more quickly and thoroughly troubleshoot networks or check for security vulnerabilities, for instance. It is free to use and is available for Windows and Linux, so I would say it is very much warrented for any network administrator or sysadmin to take it out for a spin.

Incentivized

• The app monitoring gives you the details to set different filters and do a quick identification of the root cause of the problem.
• Remarkable ability to store details of performance to analyze baselining, run advance troubleshooting, error detection and catalog by trends.
• The ability to sync with a device/interface whether is physical or virtual gives me the standpoint to set analysis upon network traffic across LAN or WAN and also get the insight of Cloud segments, setting the triggers to find out where the behavior changes to non-production traffic.

Incentivized

• Nmap is very good at discovering systems on your network.
• Nmap is very good at guessing a systems operating system with a high degree of accuracy.
• Nmap is good at validating externally facing systems to make sure that unauthorized access is not allowed.

Incentivized

• Product features are sometimes overwhelming if the IT team is not used to this technology. For a small and mid-size company, the number of settings and work that is needed to implement the solution could be a long and exhausting process.
• A "lite" version of Visual TruView could help a lot to small sized environments looking to develop the solution.
• I would like to add some mitigation tools for simple/common problems that could be easily managed by a monitoring tool like Netscout TruView.

Incentivized

• exporting, There's a serious lack of ability to export the information in a readable format to present to VPs and such. I always find myself doing a lot of data massaging to get it in a pretty format
• some scans can trigger sensitive IDS/IPS
• SYN scans can be particularly aggressive and cause problems on remote systems.

Incentivized

Nmap uses are very practical and I don't think there is a better tools for what Nmap does. It is open-sources that therefore there is no cost to use it. It offers a number of benefits, including but not limited to network mapping, port scanning and more. It is very reliable as a network scanning tool.

Incentivized

As mentioned before, our deployment success depended on their expertise. Recommendations and overall response from their support engineers was out of this world. We, as supporters ourselves, are very critical in regards to the response times and knowledge of support services representatives. Often they just want to resolve your ticket not caring about the result, or focus only on the performance review we could give them. That's a standard behavior in most overseas support centers. The TruView engineers and management cared about us, our needs, and how they delivered the help we needed.

Incentivized

There is a very large support community and a robust selection of add-ons and scripts. Once you get the use down this is one of the most powerful tools and you can find anything you are looking for as far as examples on the web. While not having official support its not lacking by any means.

Incentivized

All of them have outstanding performance. They deliver excellent insights and I think we would be able to work with any of them. However, Netscout goes beyond expectations in regards to support. TruView is able to give you very detailed and specific information that would help in the early detection of performance problems and hardware failures. However, without the appropriated guidance through the setup steps, It could take a lot of time to get the desired results. Their help is invaluable. The support team was there to hold our hands through all this set up to assure that we reached the monitoring level we expected from the tool. That is sometimes more important than features.

Incentivized

A similar but more basic alternative is available on Android, called Fing. It's very useful for diagnosing issues on networks when you only have your mobile device to hand.

A graphical user interface alternative to Nmap, is Zenmap. It's the official GUI for Nmap and does use Nmap under the hood. It makes things a bit more 'point and click'.

Incentivized

• Overall response time to a failure detection has greatly improved since we started using this tool.
• We were able to centralize our NOC in one building. Before that, we had older and obsolete monitoring tools that required highly skilled network technicians to test and monitor our network health.
• Preventive actions can be programmed in advance thanks to the product's early issue detection.
• It took more time that we expected to have the system up and running as we desired. It takes a lot of teamwork and it is very time-consuming.

Incentivized

• NMap being free of charge has a positive impact on our budget. It is an enterprise-class tool that anyone can download and use.
• NMap, both command line and GUI, is a very advanced tool that is easy to use, so there's very little learning curve involved, which has a positive impact on productivity and security.
• A valuable feature that is a huge time saver is that you can compare scans. This saves hours of searching manually for differences in scan results. Faster results means faster mitigation of problems, which can be a real money saver.

Incentivized