I have been working quite a bit with NGSE (pre-R80) lately. There are tremendous performance gains over the traditional SmartEvent version. The following shows the amount of records from a customer’s implementation that I put together a few months ago:
Almost 58 million events in two months and reports generate in a matter of minutes not hours. NGSE also includes SmartLog, so the customer can sort through millions of events in just seconds: the new indexing engine is pretty amazing.
Reports are better than ever and highly configurable. It really does feel like a complete rewrite, and something that can finally keep up with an enterprise environment.
There are some downsides as well. The main one being that NGSE (at this point) has to be installed on a separate container. It also appears to be based on the pre-R77.30 code so there are some GAiA features (mainly TACACS+) that are not available.
If you have an existing SmartEvent server (dedicated) I would definitely recommend moving to NGSE. I will be posting some more info as well as gotchas in the weeks to come.