One of my customer wants the featurewise difference between Solarwinds and Netscout .
Can someone help me regarding this.
I view Solarwinds as primarily an Availability Mgmt application. It has the bonus of also being able to collect statistics (cpu/memory/storage/network) as well as any other info you can collect via SNMP. With modules you can buy for Solarwinds you could even collect Netflow/Sflow from network devices to show application level detail on your network traffic.
Netscout is more for detailed traffic analysis. You can either install taps in your network that connect to the Netscout probes or you can use the probes as Netflow receivers to collect the information that way. It is pretty powerful and is very useful when determining how much and what type of traffic is going across your network.
We're really torn between the capabilities of NetScout and Orion. Orion wins hands down for usability but NetScout probes provide great data gathering capabilities.
Does SolarWinds have any future plans to produce for sale or support third-party remote network probes that capture traffic, provide remote NetFlow storage / consolidation of date, and provide RMON2 capabilities?
We are heavy users of both Netscout and Orion.
There is some overlap in terms of Netflow collection, but really they aren't competitive products. Orion is alarm and event management focused (not just in the Network space now with the additional modules), while Netscout is about deep packet inspection. Netscout does also have the K2 analytics model, but again it's a in-line based network analytics approach.
We utilise both products for their respective strenghts, but don't expect one to do the job of the other.
Even in the Netflow space there are differences. Netscout has a distributed model which scales well, but to be frank has a difficult user interface. Orion has a great user interface, but the centralised database shared with the primary Orion database makes scale a little harder. Both will get better I'm sure (Orion has made rapid strides very quickly into a fairly new space for them).
I should quantify scale - we can easily handle 50,000 flows per/sec into our Orion database today (I'm sure many run more). For us however, that just scratches the surface (and the way network traffic is growing, the pond is getting deeper). That's an impressive number for fairly cheap off the shelf commodity hardware - and probably meets most of Orion's current target market quite nicely.
We tend to collect long term Netflow data with Netscout, and utilise Orion for short term problem investigation type activity (I'm sure the balance will change over time - I can see some long term benefits for alarm and event management having access to the Netflow data in the same data repository).
Netscout appliances are also very expensive. Fantastic for raw data capture and problem diagnostic activity after the event - but to justify the expense means you really need a high value environment.
Dave.
Dave:
Your reply is probably the best characterization of the two solutions I’ve heard and certainly helps justify our push to obtain both systems.
Thanks for your insights.
Ken
6 years later after this post, we are still using both products; can anyone out there comment as to strides both products have made? NetScout is used in another department here, and would like to know Orion/NPM progress, if any in comparison with NetScout. to date.
Now I´m curious to know the real difference. You could talk to someone from another department and spend the difference.
very different tools that use flow technology...
its like kiwisyslog vs LEM.
Who it´s who ?
