Colasoft Capsa vs. Variphy

Capsa is highly recommended to be used in small dense areas of a network where it makes sense to be able to run analytics off of a mirror port to gain insight into traffic trends. It is a costly product to install in branch locations, and requires a decent spec hardware to run appropriately

Incentivized

It has been most helpful to our customer service (we call it patient advocates) department in evaluating complaints. It assisted us in finding issues where perhaps our service didn't live up to the customer's expectations. Letting our patients know they are cared for is our number one goal! I believe it also helped with employee satisfaction because managers and directors were able to see when staff was overwhelmed by calls. I use it to know when 911 calls are made, as well as when we need to add trunks to our phone system.

• Robust Application. Able to handle traffic that most businesses will throw at it.
• Easy to use. Easy to setup captures and filter down to specific traffic types.
• Relatively cheap for what it's able to accomplish.

Incentivized

• Our most used function is the Cradle to Grave function in Reporting. We get the full and exact path that any call takes.
• Monthly scheduled reporting is automatically sent to the correct Directors and Managers.
• Dashboards give a quick look at the status of your calls.
• The ability to use "Friendly Names" for fields for ease of user use.

• Needs options to scale to 10Gb/s networks. The cutoff for performance looks to be around 3Gb/sl
• Needs API access to trigger capturesl
• Needs Agents for remote capturesl

Incentivized

• The ability to connect to systems that have a hybrid cloud solution so receive statistics from both sides

Because we did experience some non-vendor-related issues during and after implementation, Dre and the team were terrific at working with us to solve the problems and get us up and running.

Colasoft performs more like the traditional wireshark as opposed to other solutions that tend to focus on graphs instead of giving you the raw data. I personally prefer the raw data, and then the ability to build graphs upon this (which Capsa can do). This allows for quicker analysis and makes it easier to relate to.

Incentivized

Variphy is a great enhancement

• While the product doesn't detect malware, it has helped track down malware infected machines by using data from other applications to run filters to look for known traffic destinations for that malware. For me this is a huge ROI since malware can be the great unknown.
• Relatively cheap compared to the feature set.

Incentivized

• No negative impact
• Positive impact because it let's measure circuit usage on an hourly basis to determine busy times