Juniper Paragon Insights vs. SolarWinds Network Configuration Manager (NCM)

There are many products in this particular space. I believe Juniper has divided up the product suite which comprises automation, programmability and general DevOps, but this also makes it frustrating, as the functionality may not be inherent to the particular product. I recommend making sure all use-cases are covered by the product or products prior to being implementation, because a partial solution may grow stagnant or losing funding if it does not meet all KPI.

Incentivized

Network Configuration Manager is well suited for backing up configurations of all your devices. It also has a great comparison tool for seeing only the differences in config. Another great feature is it's ability to push a script to any number of devices. This is very handy for pushing changes to one, 10 or multiple devices. There are also some great reports that you can run against the devices in inventory

Incentivized

• Visibility: it is one of its key features that supports us by showing multidimensional views and facilitates [use] in the monitoring process.
• Customization: its flexibility is worth appreciating and its dashboard offers customizations and we can have resource metrics according to our personalization.
• Integration: integration is easy and great that allows us to integrate it with any 3rd source platform.
• Data collection is another feature that allows us to collect data in our desired standard method.

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

• Appliance-version would be a nice addition
• Additional product/protocol support for a wider data ingress
• Better documentation / online support

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

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

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

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

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

We decided to go for Paragon after checking all the pros and
cons as we didn’t have a good experience of Memfault and maybe it was just
because we haven’t made enough research on it and we had to suffer cause of its
malfunctioning and difficulty. Moreover, I think that I can never regard
Memfault as a complete package which Paragon insight definitely is.

Incentivized

At the time SolarWinds was the biggest player in the space and their whole portfolio was very comprehensive. As time progressed and newer technologies came about (i.e. SDWAN) their products couldn't keep up with the consumer demands and changing market. Security became such a big focus that once Solarwinds got hacked we had to remove all their products from our environment

Incentivized

• The KPI shown in the dashboards has assisted in business devices.
• The playbooks with user- or event-triggered actions has reduced manhours.
• The automated workflow has reduced outages due to human error.

Incentivized

• Saves 100s of hours a year in man hours over manual configuration.
• Saved easily 50k in lost revenue when a switch rebooted with months old unsaved configuration. NCM let us quickly restore a snapshot of the running config from the previous day.
• Saves us several man hours per week of config auditing by reducing all changes to a summary email.

Incentivized