NetBrain vs. SolarWinds Network Configuration Manager (NCM)

Great for our large global environment. Works well with our legacy and newer equipment. Ease of install was exciting compared to other products we POC'd. Less of a learning curve when training Teams on how to monitor and troubleshoot while in production. Service desk were able to capture the logs and load into our ticketing system with ease.

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

• Network Issues Troubleshooting
• Visualizing the root cause using color coding
• out of the box runbooks available

• 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.

• Not all devices are integrated with the same quality.
• Not all steps are self-explaining.
• The updates were difficult (but thanks to the help of support no real problem).

• 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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

The others were cumbersome, slow and there is a huge learning curve for the installation, configuration and just daily monitoring. NetBrain was the easiest of all to setup then let it run and build our network and map it out. Once it was complete, we immediately identified several circuit issues that we were unaware of within our network. With the maps and information gained, we were able to present to [management] and prove a case that we needed larger circuits in several areas.

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.

• Enhanced Network troubleshooting for our Network tea
• Out of the box pre-build runbook reports with all required details
• Additional cost for troubleshooting feature

• 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.