BlueCat Integrity vs. SolarWinds IP Address Manager (IPAM)

It can act as a reasonable DNS and DHCP solution if money allows you chose to have a dedicated (virtual) appliance.

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

• IP management
• DNS server
• TFTP

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

• GUI interface could use some touch-ups. For example, saving a configuration is not the easiest thing to do.
• Hypervisor compatibility (currently doesn't support Nutanix AHV).
• Not too many KBs publicly available.

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

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

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.

For all it's worth, it's a Linux based appliance and does offer a high availability design. It does offer IP address management and can scan your network through ICMP and SNMP. It does support role-based access controls for admins.

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

• CONS: Not up to speed with market-leading virtualization technologies such as Nutanix.
• PROS: Reliable solution.
• PROS: The design can be confusing for the folks used to Infoblox as it utilized 1 controller called Bluecat Address Manager and the actual DNS/DHCP servers named BDDS.

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