Amazon Route 53 vs. SolarWinds IP Address Manager (IPAM)

- Routing users to the closest or best-performing resources: Route 53 allows you to use geolocation and latency-based routing to route users to the resources that will give them the best performance. - Load balancing: Route 53 can be used to distribute incoming traffic across multiple resources, such as Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) instances or Amazon Elastic Container Service (ECS) tasks, to improve the availability and scalability of your application. - Managing domain names: Route 53 can be used to register domain names and manage DNS records, making it a one-stop solution for managing your domain name and routing traffic to your resources. Scenarios where Route 53 is less appropriate include:Applications with very high query rates: Route 53 is designed to handle millions of queries per second, but if your application generates an extremely high query rate, you may need to use a specialized DNS service.Applications that require very low latency: Route 53 is designed to provide low-latency DNS service, but if your application requires ultra-low latency, you may need to use a specialized DNS service or a self-hosted DNS solution.Applications that require advanced security features: Route 53 provides basic security features such as DNSSEC, but if your application requires advanced security features such as DDoS protection, you may need to use a specialized DNS service.

Incentivized

If you already have SolarWinds Products, there's no other product that I have seen on the market that incorporates all network management and IPAM tools so seamlessly. No longer having to have several consoles open to manage DHCP, DNS, and Subnets saves so much time and makes the whole process much more manageable.

Incentivized

• We can purchase our domain through Route 53 and can be hosted for cheaper prices in AWS.
• There are many number of routing policies you can go ahead with and this will come into picture when the customer satisfaction is required at most, so choose routing policy accordingly.
• As usual health checks are part of DNS systems, this is also provided at cheaper rates when total process is done in Route 53 service.
• It can be used as standalone application from AWS

Incentivized

• With IPAM automated address scanning, we can be confident that we are looking at an up-to-date, accurate snapshot of our network.
• The built-in alerts are a great safety net. We know that even if we aren't paying close attention to our IP address space, IPAM is. If a range is nearly full, IPAM lets us know before it becomes a real problem.
• IPAM's event logging gives us insight into any and all changes made by our network engineers.

Incentivized

• Price, it is not expensive ... but you can find some cheaper and even free DNS solutions.
• If you use non-AWS infrastructure, Route 53 doesn't have significant advantages on other services.
• AWS Route 53 does not support forwarding or conditional forwarding options for domains used on an on-premise network.

Incentivized

• The user experience is not as intuitive as other products. We have to be more restrictive around level 1 help desk access compared to NCM or NPM in SolarWinds.
• Making and enforcing changes, not just monitoring, has been hit or miss in some instances.

Incentivized

We are heavily invested in SolarWinds. We currently own Network Performance Monitor, Netflow Traffic Analyzer, User Device Tracker, Server Application Monitor and Network Configuration Manager. We have NOC mode setup for deskside support for monitoring any down devices that may effect our network across the globe. This application gives us the information we need when we need it.

Incentivized

You need to know what DNS is; this is a tool built for developers who already know the technology and are just looking for a DNS management tool. The tool is very usable given that. If you're not familiar with DNS, Route53 isn't really for you and you won't find it to be very usable-- you'll need to go read the documentation, and that will start with learning what DNS is

Incentivized

SolarWinds IP Address Manager (IPAM) is extremely easy to use. Once the application is installed and set up, you do not have to do very much else to get it going, except for scanning of the different networks that you plan to monitor. You can access SolarWinds IP Address Manager (IPAM) from any device that supports a web browser rather easily.

Incentivized

We don't have any issues with availability. Our cluster setup provide us a 99,9% availability that is enough for us.

Incentivized

We do not integrate IPAM into other systems other than the standard Orion integration. The performance is reasonable, however, we are running all the SolarWinds applications on a very large server.

Incentivized

Until today, I have never needed support to Route53 because the documentation is great. But, I have needed it for other services. And they're near perfect always. Except that they don't have Portuguese support yet and they're sometimes slow to answer (48 hours in non-critical ones, in two tickets). But usually, they're amazing!

Incentivized

I have not contacted customer support and therefore have no experience in this area. I know we have some issues with our VAR support at this time for Orion, but I don't know if the IPAM falls into the same support structure. Perhaps others in the organization may know more regarding the support area.

Incentivized

Know the full scope of what you will be installing. Solarwinds can be a very complex installation. IPAM is just one fairly simplistic piece.

Cloudflare is also similar in the features to Route 53. However, since we are completely hosted on the AWS cloud, we can't use Cloudflare for configuring our internal networks, and integrating with the other services. The API based integration of AWS via Terraform is another factor that allows us to automate most of our deployments and manage them programmatically

Incentivized

BT Diamond IP required the company remote to make changes we constantly had to message
support which in my opinion was not worth it. All research said SolarWinds IP Address Manager was the best by a wide margin. We had no issues with SolarWinds IP Address Manager, and we got a great price so after evaluating SolarWinds IP Address Manager we did not look at any more alternatives

Incentivized

We have not experienced any scalability issues with this product. However, SolarWinds needs to allow users to scale horizontally without any license restrictions. For example, we would like to separate Netflow and Orion onto different platforms but are unable to due to license restrictions.

Incentivized

• All of our brand domain names (about 80 brands) are managed in there
• Many non marketing or brand domains are also in there
• There isn't any defined ROI because it's such a trivial and necessary service with impacts all business operations

Incentivized

• IPAM has made our IP allocation process automated and smooth.
• Different team used to use Spread Sheet which have been gone now.
• We are able to predict well in advance if any new Subnet is required or existing subnet is going to exhaust.

Incentivized