Cisco DNA Analytics and Assurance vs SolarWinds Network Configuration Manager (NCM)

Likelihood to Recommend

So not everyone is in need of a smart AI checking their network metrics looking for issues before they happen or finding and alerting on problems that the network staff may not have noticed, but if you have the budget for it, it could be a huge time saver for your whole department.

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Verified User

Manager in Information Technology

Government Administration Company, 501-1000 employees

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You can use it while you sleep. My favorite part. If you are not aware of your systems health, don't worry it will tell you. Well first you need other modules from the SolarWinds toolkit. Your other teams will like this because of the flexibility it provides integrating. You now have a centralize system with the ability to give you a good nights rest. If you have silos you will need to review how you can segment your systems, especially security from network.

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Fernando Villamil

LAN Engineer

Maimonides Medical CenterHospital & Health Care, 5001-10,000 employees

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Pros

Easy-to-use interface
Gives broad, top-level details of the network
Allows you to easily drill down to exactly the problem

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Douglas Demartino

Database Administrator

City of KissimmeeGovernment Administration, 501-1000 employees

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Configuration Comparison Tool is great since you can quickly compare configs in a single pane of glass. To make things easier to identify, NCM will highlight the differences.
Vulnerability reporting on all current versions of Cisco IOS/NXOS software. NCM will identify the version of firmware you are using and also list the most well known CVE vulnerabilities that are associated with each version.
I appreciate NCM is vendor agnostic. It will consume configs from any network device. It can also be customized to look for certain strings that are missing or to look for certain strings that are present. Very flexible and since it isn't vendor specific, I don't feel like I'm being forced to buy a certain manufacturer to obtain all of the 'features' like I do with other products.

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Verified User

Engineer in Information Technology

Retail Company, 10,001+ employees

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Cons

May require an implementer to get this set up and running.
For a software based service that you can run on your own VM's, price is still very high.
The first setup can be a bear and you will need much help from TAC.

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Verified User

Manager in Information Technology

Government Administration Company, 501-1000 employees

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The NCM does not work particularly well out of the box on some not so popular network hardware like Ubiquiti, Fluid Mesh and others
The auto-select device does not always work and sometimes you have to modify a template to get the full backup to work. SolarWinds tech support can help with this if you are not familiar
The email notifications of the backups and the deltas are very simple html. It would be nice to see some improvement on the output there. Looks about 10 years old...

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Michael Haberkern

Network Engineer Supervisor

City of Santa MariaGovernment Administration, 501-1000 employees

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Likelihood to Renew

No score

No answers yet

No answers on this topic

SolarWinds Network Configuration Manager (NCM) 8.1

Based on 4 answers

I simply love this product for what it does. it backups our configs and stores them so i don't have to worry about if we have current configs. It allows me to recover from a cisco failure in a matter of minutes rather than hours. I only have to copy and paste instead of recreate. so the maximum downtime we have is the time it takes to get the physical hardware replaced

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Aaron Coody

Systems Administrator

Scott Equipment Company, LLCConstruction, 501-1000 employees

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Usability

No score

No answers yet

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SolarWinds Network Configuration Manager (NCM) 7.3

Based on 8 answers

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.

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Verified User

Engineer in Information Technology

Design Company, 51-200 employees

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Support Rating

No score

No answers yet

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SolarWinds Network Configuration Manager (NCM) 7.1

Based on 13 answers

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.

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Wyant Niswonger

Network Engineer

AAICInsurance, 51-200 employees

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Implementation Rating

No score

No answers yet

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SolarWinds Network Configuration Manager (NCM) 9.1

Based on 6 answers

Change management played a key role in our organisation. We didn't have any major downtime but it was crucial for us to get his product.

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Nandini pallipamu

Network Engineer

Commonwealth of MAInformation Technology and Services, 10,001+ employees

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Alternatives Considered

No answers on this topic

We have a very diverse IT environment (Cisco/Palo Alto, VMWare, Cisco UC, SD-WAN, Windows Servers) and we wanted to have one suite of software that we could manage as many of our different areas in one single pane of glass. SolarWinds allows the network team, VOIP team, Storage and Systems teams to all use the same platform to get their monitoring, alerting and reporting.

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Verified User

Supervisor in Information Technology

Banking Company, 501-1000 employees

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Return on Investment

Admins have saved time diagnosing issues
IT is able to get ahead of problems before they occur
Money saved on separate monitoring products that may not work as well

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Douglas Demartino

Database Administrator

City of KissimmeeGovernment Administration, 501-1000 employees

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Prior to breaking the baseline function, NCM was considered our most valuable network tool. Without adding any additional FTEs, we could ensure we maintained current backups, ensured consistent application of security settings and can monitor for unauthorized changes.
For a very little additional cost, we vastly improved our network security and availability.

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Graham Clarkson

Team Lead, Network Services

ATCO ElectricUtilities, 1001-5000 employees

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Pricing Details

General

Free Trial

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Free/Freemium Version

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Premium Consulting/Integration Services

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Entry-level set up fee?

No

General

Free Trial

Yes

Free/Freemium Version

—

Premium Consulting/Integration Services

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Entry-level set up fee?

Optional

Cisco DNA Analytics and Assurance vs SolarWinds Network Configuration Manager (NCM)