New Relic vs SolarWinds Network Configuration Manager (NCM)

• The New Relic agent does a great job of monitoring and profiling an application.
• The New Relic alerts make it easy for us to define when individuals should be alerted to an issue.
• New Relic Synthetics helps us monitor our websites and provide insights into our uptimes.

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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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• Sometimes we can't drill down deep enough on errors or traces.
• Inter communication paths are not obvious (stack) though service maps are helpful at times.
• I often feel like it's not really built for cloud monitoring and microservices.
• There are additional plugins that our IT dept can't seem to get working with our product, like Kubernetes, PostgreSQL.

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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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• I can't speak to this specifically as I'm just an end user, so I'll speak in terms of the impact on our team. We've used New Relic to monitor a new page we're still in the process of fully rolling out.
• It allows us to keep an eye on our overall page performance (several different metrics), JavaScript error rate, and other custom logging to make sure the new page is not having any significant downturns in these areas.
• By comparing these stats to the previous version of the page, we can feel confident in continuing to roll out the new page, and get early warning signs if something goes wrong.
• Our high priority alerts are tied in to OpsGenie so we get custom notifications off hours.

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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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