Likelihood to Recommend Cisco Nexus Dashboard Insights is a powerful network monitoring software. It may assist you in more effectively monitoring your network. With the program's assistance, we can detect a wide range of network flaws and irregularities. Furthermore, it eliminates an interruption in the services we offer our consumers while also allowing us to reduce our high rates. Technicians no longer need to utilize CLI to copy and paste hundreds of coding lines. If you want a powerful programmable management program for your next-generation data centre, this is the program for you.
Read full review 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
Read full review Pros It is a flexible tool that helps streamline and facilitate the development of new services. Ideal for automating tasks such as network modification, configuration, and removal, which provides great time savings. Ensures services without interruption and without difficult scheduling. It has a simple user interface and excellent support, made up of several providers. It facilitates the administration of managed services. Read full review 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. Read full review Cons With the latest version release of Cisco Nexus Dashboard to version 3.0.1 I can say that most of the features have already improved but one of the wishlists that I want for ND is the possibility of extracting lists of Anomaly. Include older versions of Firmware in the list of choices when doing the firmware upgrade analysis, currently only the recommended is in the list of choices. If possible, include all the prechecks in the Firmware pre-upgrade analysis same in the script provided by Cisco. Read full review 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. Read full review Likelihood to Renew 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.
Read full review Usability For the end user, it is relatively easy to use. However, some training and practice is a must because the NSO is not as straightforward as the traditional router CLI. For the administrator, Cisco Network Service Orchestrator (NSO) is just like another program running on the Linux system--there is no big difference.
Read full review 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.
Read full review Performance Great and effective automation functionalities and the tools on network security management are the best and easy data reports building. Cisco Nexus Dashboard Fabric Controller feature for the network monitoring and easy management of various services and even offers the best analytics and also powerful integration tools for easy data migration.
Read full review Support Rating 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.
Read full review Online Training 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
Read full review Implementation Rating 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
Read full review Alternatives Considered It's an upgrade from DCNM and worth looking into. We're trying to solve the issue of Creating and maintaining VLAN fabrics. Speed and ease of use are much better than other options. The app is great; the functionality is solid. Though It can have an improved UI, and user navigation could be simpler. It helps track your data and pipelines; you can set it up in different ways to monitor different flows about where its data is. It has in-built integration with Splunk, which is what was helpful.
Read full review 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 .
Read full review Scalability The platform is very well done, and to date, I have had no complaints about the implementation of the platform and no security issues or vulnerabilities. Cisco in all its product releases new versions to resolve security issues or bugs that appear on the platform, this is a big plus.
Read full review Return on Investment From the experience of use, I can affirm that the tool improves the user experience since it reduced the time in the administration of the infrastructure, the prediction of events, as well as the suggestions for solving the problems. all the aforementioned has been simplified thanks to the tool, in turn, it helps us to maintain the network in high availability. The impact has been very positive due to the simplification of the administration, which in turn reduces the detection times, leading to a reduction in costs. Read full review 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. Read full review ScreenShots SolarWinds Network Configuration Manager (NCM) Screenshots