Catchpoint vs. SolarWinds Network Configuration Manager (NCM)

A Solid product, provides meaningful accurate data results from synthetic monitoring. Catchpoint as a vendor has acted as a reliable business partner and promotes good relationship with customers and provides them with meaningful support. Support engineer and account manager make efforts to maintain helpful relationship for services offered. Been able to work with us to provide input for code changes and enhancements for payload used for synthetics.

Incentivized

If your IT team isn't proficient in automation and scripting, Solarwinds NCM can fill that gap (assuming your company's security team signs off on approving SW in your environment given the hack.) Basic device configuration, pushing mass changes reliably and backups are NCM's strong suites. If you have a complex scenario where if/then cases are needed, NCM is a bit lack luster. Auto discovery isn't as easy either as certain parameters need to be met for that feature to work 100% of the time

Incentivized

• Global Monitoring: Catchpoint offers an extensive network of monitoring locations worldwide, allowing organizations to simulate user experiences from different geographical regions. This capability helps identify performance variations based on location, ensuring a consistent and optimal experience for users across the globe.
• Alerting and Root Cause Analysis: Catchpoint offers robust alerting mechanisms that notify organizations when performance thresholds are exceeded or anomalies occur. These alerts enable prompt incident response and troubleshooting. Catchpoint's root cause analysis capabilities help identify the underlying causes of performance issues by analyzing network conditions, DNS resolutions, server responses, or content delivery problems.

Incentivized

• Integrates with Network Performance Management for Alerting and Reporting.
• NetPath and detects issues due to Configuration Change.
• Keeps a record of which user made the change.
• Which devices are not being backed up, devices where backups are failing, dashboard and alerting available.

Incentivized

• The ability to monitor the Catchpoint nodes with the ability to setup a take a recovery action based on specific criteria
• The ability to tell us when we are at X% capacity so that we better plan or budget for increasing the "capacity" of the Catchpoint nodes before we get to an overloaded state. The capacity utilization graph is not a reliable indicator for this metric. How can the capacity utilization rate get above 100%, it does not make sense

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized

we are heavily dependent catchpoint system for the following functions * Detect end-user availability/performance-related problems * Ensures
service level objectives (SLO) are met, that prevents service level
agreement (SLA) breaches * Identify and understand the cause of any
network connectivity or application level issue * Improves the
availability and response time service levels

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

It's hard to find the functionalities that I am looking for in the application. Even if I did something in the past, after a time I have to re-learn again where the functionalities are. This is a powerful tool, but not user-friendly. Texts in the buttons and menus are not always meaningful or easily comprehensible.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

Catchpoint exceptional service has consistently exceeded my expectations.
Their technical expertise, coupled with their timely responses to
queries and issues, demonstrates their dedication to customer
satisfaction. Additionally, the
support team's ability to provide actionable advice and guidance has
enabled me to resolve complex problems efficiently and effectively.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

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

Incentivized

very easy to implement as the product is user-friendly

Incentivized

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

Incentivized

Primary reason we went with Catchpoint is that they offered us actual backbone testing locations. All the other features like a filmstrip and traceroutes have been very beneficial as well and were not available in the competitors' solutions.

Incentivized

Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform is a great tool and matches much of the functionality of SolarWinds Network Configuration Manager. Nothing about Ansible will likely be overwhelming to an engineer with a little time to spare, but that spare time combined with SolarWinds already being our monitoring tool made the decision easy. Time is at a premium in small teams and SolarWinds Network Configuration Manager is very easy to use right out of the box without all the tweaking required by powerful command line driven tools like Ansible.

Incentivized

• The ROI has been very good with this product, we have seen multiple folds of time-saving by using this tool and preempting any risk associated with non-performant times of our server, hence increasing the team's capability to respond to certain downtime scenarios and the level of action that needs to be taken.
• Catchpoint’s observability solution makes it easier to have global visibility of our website's performance and to fix issues quicker
• I don't have any negatives, every good product comes with a cost, that is the fact but the Catchpoint tool has ultimately improved our ROI much beyond the changes that we pay

Incentivized

• The time savings from automatic daily backups is significant
• The compare configuration tool is super helpful at spotting errors when small changes occur that are hard to detect otherwise.
• The compliance check tool saves countless hours going through configurations for errors.

Incentivized