F5 Distributed Cloud Network Connect vs. Spot by NetApp

F5 Distributed Cloud Network Connect Would be incredibly useful when having to juggle multiple cloud providers. Also XC would be fantastic for standardization and consistency of the whole networking stack. It may be less useful for incredibly specialized cases where very specific traffic manipulation is needed. Any use-cases with heavy APM usage would have to be carefully considered as those features didn’t make it into XC yet.

Incentivized

CloudCheckr is fantastic for those that are purely in the Cloud as it provides everything you need under one roof for a comprehensive configuration and usage monitoring tool. It has SysLog capabilities though so you can farm out the alerts into a SIEM or other log management system, so hybrid environments could also benefit from its use.

Incentivized

• Centralized Hybrid ingress for our cloud workloads
• Centralized ingress for our existing on-prem BIG-IP devices
• Application visibility to address end-to-end visibility into the end-user experience

Incentivized

• Detailed Best Practices. It's important to align your cloud to industry best practices for security and cost—it just performs better if it's used the way it's meant to be used. AWS is very flexible, and that's great when you have special requirements, but you've got to at least know when you're using something in a non-standard way so you can think through the implications.
• Cost Reduction. Some recommendations are almost impossible to make at least for our setup, but many, many others are easy. We only have to log into CloudCheckr every few months and make a few changes for it to more than pay for itself.
• Right-Sizing. This is related to the other points, but for some reason is separate from their cost module. The metrics it's able to pull only tell half the story, so it's good to verify it's sizing recommendations before making changes. But it does show you what instances to focus on first, and even if you choose a slightly different size to move it to, it does clearly indicate it's current size isn't appropriate. And this works both ways, if the size is too big, you can save some cash by making it smaller, but if it's too small, you want to be sure to scale up before you run into performance problems.

Incentivized

• The support model needs a quite a bit of work. I personally have experienced an outage on the platform. due to mis-configureation Although the outage was due to engineer error it took over 2 hours before we were able to speak to an engineer
• Proxy v2 protocol to allow our organization to capture and view the source IP address

Incentivized

• CloudCheckr features have a tendency to break without warning. Functionality in place for months could suddenly stop working.
• CloudCheckr support often delays work on support tickets for fixing broken application functionality.
• The CloudCheckr platform and documentation website often crash or experience performance degradation.
• CloudCheckr cost reporting is often impacted by faulty code or broken report functionality. This can contribute to a low level of confidence in CloudCheckr's ability to deliver accurate cost reporting.

Incentivized

Overall, CloudCheckr covers all our AWS monitoring needs and great integration through SysLog into our SIEM to capture alerts for investigation. The reports are great and allow for an easy daily review. Small improvements could be made to the interface and better filtering in places would be good. Great product and the price is fair.

Incentivized

Overall, F5 Distributed Cloud Network Connect is responsive and has many features. There is minor clunkiness in how certain scroll bars are layered. This may cause some adverse experience when trying to manage this product through a zoomed browser. Page loading and refresh timers were all very much responsive. There is a good amount of feedback from the interface as well.

Incentivized

Fantastic Support team who are responsive and address question and concerns promptly with a thorough explanation and fast resolution.

Incentivized

Aviatrix operates like a slightly different version of XC. Mostly it relies on routing, where cloud connect takes a whole stack into consideration. Not sure if XC can fully replace Aviatrix, but after a couple of implementations, it may become apparent. There are similar routing features in both. XC has more overall features.

Incentivized

There are a few products out there that'll do an aspect or two of what CloudCheckr does, but I honestly couldn't find anything nearly as comprehensive as CloudCheckr.

Incentivized

• Is a niche segment and it provides a rich set of features that supports our use case

Incentivized

• CloudCheckr has allowed us to increase resell margins as an MSP.
• CloudCheckr has made us aware of cost savings opportunities that exceed the price of the platform itself.
• CloudCheckr has given us additional visibility that has allowed us to manage and understand cloud computing costs.

Incentivized