Aviatrix aims to bring multi-cloud networking, security, and operational visibility capabilities that enterprises customers require. Aviatrix software leverages public cloud provider APIs to interact with and directly program native cloud networking constructs, abstracting the unique complexities of each cloud to form one network data plane, and adds advanced networking and security features.
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SolarWinds Network Configuration Manager (NCM)
Score 8.4 out of 10
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SolarWinds Network Configuration Manager is network diagnostics and troubleshooting technology, from Austin-based SolarWinds.
This product offers simple ways to manage network routing between public cloud, on-prem, and external network. It has built-in options to secure network traffic, as well as option to direct traffic to 3rd party security products for a more advanced traffic inspection. The core function works and is easy to operate. On the other hand, I am unable to give it more than 7-star because some useful features are lacking. This includes lack of customization in email alerting, IPS policy management, and temproarily admin-down of an established site to site VPN connection.
Network Configuration Manager is well suited for backing up configurations of all your devices. It also has a great comparison tool for seeing only the differences in config. Another great feature is it's ability to push a script to any number of devices. This is very handy for pushing changes to one, 10 or multiple devices. There are also some great reports that you can run against the devices in inventory
With a few very easy steps to establish routing between AWS VPC
Easy procedures to establish site to site VPN connection with external parties.
Provide network access control on routing traffic using its own build-in firewall inspection or directing traffic to 3rd party NGFW for full stack inspection.
For our use case, it does everything great and some of the features we underutilize but I would like to be able to set a configuration baseline when initially adding a node instead of after the configuration is pulled but it's not a particularly big deal to let it pull the configuration then set it as the baseline.
Medium complexity to set up in the beginning if using any non-standard devices or configurations, else fairly easy (e.g. Cisco Nexus or IOS-based devices). Reports are fairly straightforward to set up. Updates to the platform are fairly straightforward and don't take a major effort. Easy to add or remove devices.
The core function of the product works very well. It really makes network traffic management easy in public clound, as well as crossing different public and private cloud platform.
The user interface is lacking. It is difficult to navigate at times and things can be done multiple ways. Quite often I am confused by how their notification structure works. It is not very intuitive. They do offer a free Academy. They also offer a community of other technical folks. I have enjoyed both.
To be fair, I have not had to involve Support in a number of years, but when I did, I was greeted with enthusiastic engineers who wanted to understand and solve the issue. It was a fairly complex scenario and I have discovered in my most recent implementation that engineering included that option as a standard now.
Solarwinds has actually produced new training since I last used it that is available on their site at any time. Their previous training was more than enough to get us started but now there is significantly more content. Since I'm comfortable with the Orion platform and the products we use I haven't checked the new training out yet but we have new staff go through portions of that training and they always come away with an understanding of the platform and ready to use it
it was a fairly easy implementation and everything was pretty straightforward. only challenge we had was getting all the snmp communities updated on the networking equipment
We initially tried using the native routing funcitons in AWS (transit gateway) and in Azure (virtual network). While those native options worked, it became difficult to opeate when we tried to impose security inspection on the routing traffic. This leads us to the Aviatrix solution.
At the time SolarWinds was the biggest player in the space and their whole portfolio was very comprehensive. As time progressed and newer technologies came about (i.e. SDWAN) their products couldn't keep up with the consumer demands and changing market. Security became such a big focus that once Solarwinds got hacked we had to remove all their products from our environment
Reduce labor hours for network admin to manage public clound network routing policy.
Build-in security features may be good enough for small/medium size companies, and thus saving money from full funciton NGFW solution.
The Cost-IQ feature enable one to capture traffic volume of each VPC. This provides one way for the enterprise to perform cost charge back to various business funcitons at the VPC level.
Saves 100s of hours a year in man hours over manual configuration.
Saved easily 50k in lost revenue when a switch rebooted with months old unsaved configuration. NCM let us quickly restore a snapshot of the running config from the previous day.
Saves us several man hours per week of config auditing by reducing all changes to a summary email.
