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  1. Stackups
  2. DevOps
  3. Monitoring
  4. Network Monitoring
  5. Packetbeat vs SolarWinds NTA

Packetbeat vs SolarWinds NTA

OverviewComparisonAlternatives

Overview

Packetbeat
Packetbeat
Stacks15
Followers44
Votes4
SolarWinds NTA
SolarWinds NTA
Stacks0
Followers7
Votes0

Packetbeat vs SolarWinds NTA: What are the differences?

Key Differences between Packetbeat and SolarWinds NTA

Packetbeat and SolarWinds NTA are both network monitoring tools, but they have key differences that make them suitable for different uses.

  1. Data Collection Method: Packetbeat uses network packet sniffing to monitor communication between applications and systems to gather data, while SolarWinds NTA uses flow data analysis from routers, switches, and other network devices to provide insights into network traffic patterns and behavior.

  2. Supported Protocols: Packetbeat primarily focuses on analyzing application layer protocols such as HTTP, MySQL, and Redis, providing detailed insights into application performance and usage. On the other hand, SolarWinds NTA supports a wide range of protocols including NetFlow, sFlow, and IPFIX, offering broader network visibility and analysis capabilities.

  3. Integration with Other Tools: Packetbeat seamlessly integrates with the ELK stack (Elasticsearch, Logstash, Kibana), allowing for easy visualization and analysis of network data within the Elasticsearch ecosystem. SolarWinds NTA, on the other hand, is part of the SolarWinds Network Performance Monitor suite, providing a comprehensive network monitoring solution with additional features beyond flow analysis.

  4. Deployment Flexibility: Packetbeat is lightweight and agent-based, making it suitable for monitoring distributed or containerized environments where resources are constrained. SolarWinds NTA, being a part of a larger network monitoring suite, offers centralized monitoring capabilities for large-scale enterprise networks with diverse infrastructure.

  5. Real-time Monitoring Capabilities: Packetbeat provides real-time insights into network traffic and application performance, enabling quick detection of issues or anomalies. In contrast, SolarWinds NTA offers historical data analysis over longer periods, making it suitable for trend analysis and capacity planning.

  6. Cost and Licensing Model: Packetbeat is an open-source tool provided by Elastic, making it free to use with community support available. SolarWinds NTA, being a commercial product, requires a license purchase based on the number of monitored interfaces or nodes, which may incur additional costs for larger deployments.

In Summary, Packetbeat and SolarWinds NTA have distinct approaches to network monitoring, with Packetbeat focusing on application-layer insights and real-time monitoring, while SolarWinds NTA offers comprehensive network visibility and historical analysis capabilities with centralized monitoring features and a commercial licensing model.

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Detailed Comparison

Packetbeat
Packetbeat
SolarWinds NTA
SolarWinds NTA

Packetbeat agents sniff the traffic between your application processes, parse on the fly protocols like HTTP, MySQL, Postgresql or REDIS and correlate the messages into transactions.

It allows you to capture data from continuous streams of network traffic, and convert those raw numbers into easy-to-interpret charts and tables that quantify exactly how the corporate network is being used, by whom, and for what purpose.

Packetbeat Statistics: Contains high-level views like the network topology, the application layer protocols repartition, the response times repartition, and others;Packetbeat Search: This page enables you to do full text searches over the indexed network messages;Packetbeat Query Analysis: This page demonstrates more advanced statistics like the top N slow SQL queries, the database throughput or the most common MySQL erro
Bandwidth monitoring; Application traffic alerting; Network traffic analysis; VMware vSphere distributed switch support; Performance analysis dashboard; Advanced application recognition
Statistics
Stacks
15
Stacks
0
Followers
44
Followers
7
Votes
4
Votes
0
Pros & Cons
Pros
  • 2
    Easy setup
  • 2
    Works well with ELK stack
No community feedback yet

What are some alternatives to Packetbeat, SolarWinds NTA?

Riemann

Riemann

Riemann aggregates events from your servers and applications with a powerful stream processing language. Send an email for every exception in your app. Track the latency distribution of your web app. See the top processes on any host, by memory and CPU.

Observium

Observium

It is a low-maintenance auto-discovering network monitoring platform supporting a wide range of device types, platforms and operating systems

Beats

Beats

Beats is the platform for single-purpose data shippers. They send data from hundreds or thousands of machines and systems to Logstash or Elasticsearch.

Wireshark

Wireshark

It is the world’s foremost and widely-used network protocol analyzer. It lets you see what’s happening on your network at a microscopic level and is the de facto standard across many commercial and non-profit enterprises, government agencies, and educational institutions.

PRTG

PRTG

It can monitor and classify system conditions like bandwidth usage or uptime and collect statistics from miscellaneous hosts as switches, routers, servers and other devices and applications.

LibreNMS

LibreNMS

It is an auto-discovering PHP/MySQL/SNMP based network monitoring which includes support for a wide range of network hardware and operating systems including Cisco, Linux, FreeBSD, Juniper, Brocade, Foundry, HP and many more.

Tailscale

Tailscale

It connect all your devices using WireGuard, without the hassle. Create a secure network between your servers, computers, and cloud instances. Even when separated by firewalls or subnets, Tailscale just works. It makes it as easy as installing an app and signing in.

Nagios XI

Nagios XI

It is the most powerful and trusted network monitoring software on the market. It extends on proven, enterprise-class Open Source components to deliver the best network, server and application monitoring solution for today's demanding organizational requirements.

Snort

Snort

It is an open-source, free and lightweight network intrusion detection system (NIDS) software for Linux and Windows to detect emerging threats.

Pi-hole

Pi-hole

It is a DNS sinkhole that protects your devices from unwanted content, without installing any client-side software. You can run it in a container, or deploy it directly to a supported operating system via our automated installer.

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