NETSCOUT TruView vs. PingPlotter

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

The best scenario and best results are seen when the path does not reuse the same device for the "next hop". It is less well suited in situations where the path is being tricked by the re-use of devices for the next interface. This is seen required in many networks where the proper type of connection is not on an end device and the core device is used to provide a fiber to copper sort of "pass-through" connection.

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

• Monitor traffic in network
• Measure stops when contacting network locations such as websites
• Measures the lag and latency it takes to contact network locations
• Gives you both induvidual measurements as well as good oversight
• identifies when network lag or disconnect occurs

• 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

• Its a little confusing to see which targets are currently running pings and which ones are displayed in the plots.
• Starting and stopping pings requires a right click and that would be better with a play/pause button I think.
• Ability to drag and drop the graphs to reorder them.
• more columns to show which targets are running and which are displayed. Currently this is done with symbols so you cant sort by just the running targets for example I've found.

Incentivized

I installed it and it just started working. I realized I could then tweak it to show what I needed but didn't have to spend a long time configuring it before use, editing YAML files etc. Maybe that's fine for a network professional, but I only need this software if something goes wrong, and then need it to work quickly out of the box.

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

I have not had much contact with the PingPlotter support, only one time have I went to them and it was a positive experience. The questions I had were answered quickly and professionally. I have no issue with the experience I had with the Support team. This was from before and after the purchase of the product.

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

PingPlotter has better visualizations and a stronger ability to capture historical data than other tools I've used. This makes it easier to find the root cause by looking back in the log data to find where latency or packet loss occurred.

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

• Great ROI, troubleshooting time has been reduced by 90%
• Network Discoveries used to take 2 to 3 hours and were inconsistent - now it is a matter of minutes
• lacks integration into our MSP toolkit, and we now use it as a stand alone product

Incentivized