User Reviews Overview
About Ostinato
Ostinato is a versatile packet crafter, pcap player and traffic generator with an intuitive GUI, comprehensive Python API for scripting and automation and a Turbo add-on for 10G, 25G and 40G line-rate traffic generation.
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- Industry: Financial Services
- Company size: 1,001–5,000 Employees
- Used Weekly for 1+ year
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Review Source
Fast and objective
We had a problem with a poorly configured DNS server in the environment that was generating several conflicts and unavailability of critical applications. In less than 15 minutes I was able to identify the source of the problem.
Pros
The quick and objective way to find and help solve problems
Cons
The price could be more affordable and a free version for home use
Response from Ostinato
Thank you for your feedback, Gilberto!
Happy to hear you were able to diagnose your network problems to a faulty DNS server - ain't DNS (almost) always the culprit?! :-)
Regarding the price, we are a small team trying to provide a quality product and customer service with limited resources. At the current stage of the company we are not in a position to reduce the price or provide a free version. We will reconsider this as we grow!
- Industry: Computer & Network Security
- Company size: 10,000+ Employees
- Used Weekly for 2+ years
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Review Source
We've had numerous success stories with Ostinato
Hi Srivats,
I wanted to take a moment to congratulate you and your team on developing such an incredible tool. We've had numerous success stories with Ostinato, conducting several POCs and FATs that have allowed us to effectively showcase test cases to our clients. The tool is not only lightweight and user-friendly, but it also makes demonstrating and verifying outputs so much easier. I’m truly grateful for how it has contributed to the success of many of my projects. Thank you for your hard work!
Pros
Demonstrations of unicast, multicast and broadcast traffic,
Cons
nothing, it all good, if this can be available for cybersecurity test.
Response from Ostinato
Thank you Chintaharan for your effusive praise!
We are absolutely delighted has Ostinato has enabled many success stories for you and your organization!
Do reach out to us if you have suggestions for newer use cases - we will definitely consider them!
- Industry: Computer Networking
- Company size: 11–50 Employees
- Used Monthly for 1+ year
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Review Source
Generator not tester
Only suitable for laboratory use. It has the potential but lack of network tester functionality disqualifies it from everyday use.
Pros
Platform Availability (Linux, Masons etc)
Cons
Difficult to use, no network tester function.
Response from Ostinato
Thank you for your feedback! Can you elaborate on what network tester functionality you are looking for so that we can consider implementing that in a future release?
Srivats (Founder, Ostinato)
Top Ostinato Alternatives
Virtana Platform
- Industry: Oil & Energy
- Company size: Self Employed
- Used Weekly for 2+ years
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Review Source
Excellent protocol analyzer
Excellent, I love that you can capture and inyect messages, an indispensable tool
Pros
All the information available, and known protocols
Cons
Sometimes can be overwhelming amount of data to filter an go thru, maybe more intuitive filtering could help
Response from Ostinato
Thank you, Alfredo!
Do you mean to create a packet/stream one has to fill a lot of data? Can you give an example of intuitive filtering so that we better understand your suggestion?
- Industry: Computer & Network Security
- Company size: 201–500 Employees
- Used Monthly for 2+ years
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Review Source
Simple and Fast TG
Overall I am a satisfied user who uses patina to for throughput test on edge devices
Pros
Very easy to install, use and configure simple traffic genaration
Cons
I would also like to run protocol specific and topology specific traffic as we do with ixia
Response from Ostinato
Thank you Mohit!
Would love to know more about the protocol specific and topology specific traffic scenarios that you would like added to Ostinato so that we can add it to our roadmap - please reach out to us!
- Industry: Government Administration
- Company size: 1,001–5,000 Employees
- Used Monthly for 2+ years
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Review Source
What's in your network wallet...? Hopefully Ostinato
I'm a network engineer of 25+ years. This is exactly the sort of tool to have in your pocket when you need to prove behaviors of network traffic.
Pros
I liked the simplicity and layout of the application
Cons
updating myself to the latest version. I have a very old copy. The changes however, were both timely and necessary
Response from Ostinato
Thank you for your kind words, Chris!
I'm sure your review will encourage more network engineers try Ostinato and benefit from it.
- Industry: Transportation/Trucking/Railroad
- Company size: 1,001–5,000 Employees
- Used Monthly for 1+ year
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Review Source
Senior Network Engineer
I have experience doing performance test on Network devices. Ostinato allow me to generate traffic with specific metric.
Thanks to this i able to identify, which device is more suitable for our environment.
Pros
We able to generate network traffic and inject it to real network devices.
Cons
While doing some test, you might need to restart application to make it work.
Response from Ostinato
Thank you for your review, Hafiz!
We are sorry you didn't have a great support experience and are not very likely to recommend Ostinato to others.
We'd like to make amends and improve your Ostinato experience - please do reach out to us
- Industry: Computer Networking
- Company size: 2–10 Employees
- Used Monthly for 1+ year
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Review Source
Ostinato is a great tool!
Overall, Ostinato delivers great value and is a key tool for our devices QA testing.
Pros
It is very easy to create traffic scenarios in order to test a networking device. The paradigm of drones and GUI connecting to drone is simple and works very well.
Cons
The GUI is sometime non intuitive.
Response from Ostinato
Thank you Philippe! Please do share the aspects of the GUI that you find non-intuitive - we will try and improve the same!
- Industry: Electrical/Electronic Manufacturing
- Company size: 5,001–10,000 Employees
- Used Monthly for 1+ year
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Review Source
Must have tool for traffic analisys
Excellent valuable software to use. Real Swiss knife tool.
Pros
Easy of use and create patterns of frames to generate several different types of traffic
Cons
I haven't found something missing for me yet
Response from Ostinato
Thank you for your kind words Vitor! "Swiss Knife" is apt!
- Industry: Information Technology & Services
- Company size: 5,001–10,000 Employees
- Used Monthly for 1+ year
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Review Source
Great tool for automating
It is a great tool to automate my traffic tests
Pros
By using it, it really helped automating my test
Cons
The interface is not great. Having said that, I only use it once and then run it with python
Response from Ostinato
Thank you Jose!
We are happy to hear your automation success with Ostinato. We have taken your feedback about the UI and will work on improving it in future versions.
- Industry: Computer Networking
- Company size: 51–200 Employees
- Used Monthly for 2+ years
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Review Source
Great tool to have to complement your enterprise network support systems
It is my go to product for packet crafting for security/FW testing, network load and fail over stimuli testing. Application simulation for performance. I have used this product almost ten years. It has matured greatly and if its result data can be tied into analytics/splunk/AI type systems vai api pipeline an AI system can take the traffic load/impact results from Ostinato and provide additional analysis feedback.
Pros
Ease of use, mature gui and the ability to craft packets as well as use pre loaded or saved traffic sessions.
Cons
selecting/discovering interfaces but that has matured as well. Much improved
Response from Ostinato
Thank you for your kind words Jeff!
Your suggestion of integration with analytics/splunk/AI systems is a good one!
- Industry: Information Technology & Services
- Company size: 10,000+ Employees
- Used Weekly for 2+ years
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Review Source
Fine product. Replicates customer issues very well.
Very good.Would love to know if there's any way (present or future) to leverage a CLI-based ostinato.I.e. a CLI command in linux that would do the same as the "generate" click in the GUI.Example (new command called "ostinato-send", etc.)ostinato-send <stream> <interface>etc.
Pros
Powerful and easy to understand.Easy to install, too.
Cons
A little confusing understanding how all the streams/interfaces/names all work together. (a bit diffuse conceptually at times) but I can always figure it out.
Response from Ostinato
Thanks Scott for for your review! We will try to explain the various concepts and the relationships better. Regarding the CLI, you can do this easily using the Ostinato API - please reach out to Ostinato support and we'll help you out!
- Industry: Computer & Network Security
- Company size: 51–200 Employees
- Used Weekly for 2+ years
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Review Source
Excellent alternative to expensive network performance testing tools
Pros
The GUI is very easy to use and makes sense. And now with the TURBO mode we can test devices up to 40G without any problem. Also the tech support is TOP NOTCH.
Cons
Overall everything is well documented and easy to use and understand. I would like to see the GUI have saved preferences for setting port stat columns a certain size etc. Currently you have to resize them each time you bring it up. But that is minor compared to the amazing functionality of the product.
Response from Ostinato
Thanks for your kind words, Peter! We'll try and extend the GUI to remember the last column size settings for the ports window.
- Industry: Utilities
- Company size: 51–200 Employees
- Used Monthly for Free Trial
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Review Source
A good product that fit your neeeds
My experience was great. By beginning I needed to review several documentation to achieve my scenario but once I hit what I needed worked like a charm. Very reliable and results as expected.
Pros
You can achieve tests with simplicity and ease to use
Cons
The interface could bring more of not just specifics but something like click here to start and move on to advanced settings
Response from Ostinato
Thank you Sidnei! We will consider how to simplify the UI to make common use cases easier and faster to set up - as you say one-click!
- Industry: Internet
- Company size: 2–10 Employees
- Used Weekly for 1+ year
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Review Source
When iPerf just doesn't do it anymore...
It was great working with [sensitive content hidden], he is always quick to answer emails and improve his product.
Pros
Had to test MPLS and VxLAN traffic at higher speeds and Ostinato met our requirements with a low cost compared to other expensive appliance based traffic generators.
Cons
No cons as of yet, still testing and using the product.
Response from Ostinato
Thank you for your kind words, Mike!
- Industry: Information Technology & Services
- Company size: 51–200 Employees
- Used Monthly for 2+ years
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Review Source
Very functional software for testing various features of networking equipment
Pros
A rich set of ability for fine-tune our test scenario. We can construct custom IP packet passing through all OSI layers.
Cons
GUI is good but I think can be worked in a direction to be more user-friendly interface. Some functionality are not so intuitive.
Response from Ostinato
Thank you Yavor!
We will try to make the GUI more intuitive and user-friendly
- Industry: Semiconductors
- Company size: 5,001–10,000 Employees
- Used Daily for 2+ years
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Review Source
Must have tool
This is the must have software for any user who needs to simulate/test network equipment and can not use real traffic generator like IXIA or SmartBits. For example, when working from home office.
Pros
I really like the look and feel of real traffic generator.
Cons
I miss support for some kinds of protocols, like PTP for example.
Response from Ostinato
Thank you for your kind words, Aharon!
Please let support know about what new protocols you would like to see and we will add it to out roadmap!
- Industry: Utilities
- Company size: 5,001–10,000 Employees
- Used Monthly for 2+ years
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Review Source
We use Ostinato in generating traffic in our firewall testing.
As mentioned before, the overall experience with Ostinato is satisfied. We meet our goals in the network security testing using Ostinato to simulate various types of crafted traffic we were planning to test.
Pros
Ostinato provides us a handy tool to generate traffic that we are using to pass on into the testing firewall stack. It has a lot of options to craft the traffic and control the behavior instead of bringing in a lot of end devices which is not practical in our lab environment. The feature we used most is to rerun the recorded traffic from the production which save us a lot of time.
Cons
We had a lot of difficulties in running the Linux VM. If this small VM can get improved, it will be most helpful. We tried to build a mobile test pod by using R-Pi in order to perform our test out of the lab environment, out in the field test. But it was not working quite well as we expect.
Response from Ostinato
Happy to hear that Ostinato is helping with your firewall testing, Sira!
We will reach out to you about your difficulties with the VM and look into how we can improve it.
- Industry: Computer Hardware
- Company size: 51–200 Employees
- Used Daily for 2+ years
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Review Source
An outstanding platform for performance testing that rivals high-end hardware solutions
I have worked for a few companies now and it is very hard to justify a performance tester outside of QA and Dev so to have an affordable option that works allows me to take Alliance Partner acceptance testing to the next level rather than trying to rely on tcpreplay or Dev to let me use theirs.
Pros
1. Ease of use2. Multiple deployment options3. Flexibility to customize screens4. Import of existing PCAP files5. Granular control of steams
Cons
The one drawback is that a lot of my testing with our security alliance partners require the use of specific pcaps, I leverage, https://www.malware-traffic-analysis.net/, for the much of this. It sometimes requires a lot of manipulation to get the attack to register on the security tool. May just be a training issue so a whitepaper etc on this would be great.
Response from Ostinato
Thank you James for your kind words.
Regarding the malware pcap replay not registering on the security tool, please reach out to the forum or support. We will try and help you out.
- Industry: E-Learning
- Company size: 11–50 Employees
- Used Monthly for 2+ years
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Review Source
Teaching Packet Crafting to Teens
Ostinato is a great teaching tool for both networking and security. It allows me to create customized challenges (packets and traffic) and let the students figure out the solutions. This also means there are often more than one way to solve a problem thanks to the way Ostinato break apart packets and traffic. All students know Wireshark but now they know how to manipulate packets and traffic on their own. This lets me dive into forensics as well. Ostinato is not a forensic tool but it does allow an investigator the ability to see traffic, trace traffic, evaluate each packet, dissect those packets, and develop a plan for evidence collection. This is a much needed tool for any network analysis.
Pros
Teaching teens means they ask a lot of questions. Ostinato is well documented and provides an answer to just about every question that come up. The best part is that I can show the students how we get to that answer. This also allows me to bring up additional questions for the class and let them discover the answers on their own. All the teens know TCP and UDP. I like to have them dig into other protocols to discover how each are different (frames, size, data) and Ostinato allows me to assign new concepts and let the students play with them on their own.
Cons
There is a bit of a learning curve but nothing that can't be overcome as you learn how packets and Ostinato work together.
Response from Ostinato
Very happy to see that Ostinato is helping educate the next generation of network and security engineers!
- Industry: Telecommunications
- Company size: 11–50 Employees
- Used Weekly for 2+ years
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Review Source
Help with Homologation and Certification
Pros
We use a lot L2 features (like flood) and IPv6
Cons
No Cons, Ostinato fulfill with all that promised
Response from Ostinato
Thanks for your review, Matheus! If there are any missing features that you would like to see in Ostinato, do let us know!
- Industry: Telecommunications
- Company size: 10,000+ Employees
- Used Monthly for 1+ year
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Review Source
Excellent solution to test throughput perfromance
Great quick support. I would not hesitate to recommend it to anyone that wants to perform throughput testing
Pros
What's great with Ostinato is that it does not need special hardware to run on. It can run on pretty much anything. Most other solution need high-end or special hardware.
Cons
The UI could be a bit more stable and more modern in its feel/look. Maybe a web based UI instead of a dedicated app would be best.
Response from Ostinato
Thanks Andre! Yes, the UI is a bit dated but functional, so at the moment we prefer to work on new features than completely redo the UI.
You can try setting a different theme for the UI - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IQc6xa2Rc9Q
- Industry: Education Management
- Company size: 11–50 Employees
- Used Weekly for 2+ years
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Review Source
Ostinato in Schools
Outstanding - it is accessible and user friendly - simple - and helps young students learn - keepUp the great work
Pros
Getting students to craft packets so they understand how networking works - we use it in class with our yr11 students (15y) to create messages, encrypt messages inside the payload icmp packets - use wireshark and nmap to find other students - and make conversations back and forth so they understand mac and IP addressing and data flow
Cons
Nothing - it is the best product for anyone wanting to start in networking
Response from Ostinato
Thank you Graham for your kind words! We are happy to see Ostinato helping to train the next generation of network engineers!
- Industry: Computer & Network Security
- Company size: 10,000+ Employees
- Used Daily for 6-12 months
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Review Source
Great value for the dollar
I use the product to test functionality and it has worked perfectly for the goal
Pros
The cost/port for simple functionality testing. The cost per port for performance testing is also exceptional
Cons
I would like to order and rename the physical ports into logical groups. Other than that there very little to not like about it :)
Response from Ostinato
The upcoming v1.3 will allow user editable port descriptions (see https://twitter.com/pstavirs/status/1568183077662490624). Please share your use case for reordering ports and we will consider implementing!
- Industry: Information Technology & Services
- Company size: 1,001–5,000 Employees
- Used Monthly for 2+ years
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Review Source
+10y in and still so relevant !
Pros
This traffic gen has been a life saver in multiple occasions. Working for a VAR and having multiple projects all with different traffic profiles, Ostinato is versatile enough to be able to generate or even replicate production like traffic to identify problems in a network setup.
Cons
End to end traffic analysis complement could be useful - to understand if what is sent is aligned to what is received. In other words, to identify if packet loss is verified and when such bottleneck can be host based.
Response from Ostinato
Glad that Ostinato is a "life saver"!
We will reach out to you to understand more about what kind of end to end traffic analysis features you would like to see and add it to our roadmap.
