Likelihood to Recommend Citrix Netscaler can be a powerful network appliance for environments that are fully committed and open to utilizing a network appliance that isn't made by a traditional network vendor. Administrator user experience has improved over the years and will continue to improve with the flexibility of virtual and physical appliances available for medium and large enterprises.
Read full review Oracle managed DNS becomes very heavy when there is an ample amount of DNS being managed. However, the DNS creation and updating takes very less time to propagate and is very easy to use. So, for an organization, where there is a modest amount of DNS to manage, it works very well and gives a splendid experience. So, considering the complexity of managing the DNS for an IT company Oracle Dyn managed DNS is the best option to opt.
Read full review Pros Flexibility. NetScaler assumes its admins know a bit about networking and in-depth details surrounding the applications they are configuring access for/to. This being so, the range of configuration options is very broad allowing various versions' combinations of protocol patterns, expressions, rules etc., all to the benefit of the admin. Granularity. Having such a broad range of configuration options available, while still allowing simple options to be configured simply. The GUI is well-stylized and navigation has a good flow. Ease of control. For load-balancing of simple services right out of the box, NetScaler makes it pretty easy, compared to the range of options available in the surrounding GUI and under the hood. Read full review The portal management is very easy to use in comparison to other companies for DNS management. The have expert mode that allows for multiple edits on records and allows you to make notes for each edit on a zone. The have TTLs that are as low as 30 seconds. Read full review Cons The documentation could use an overhaul with specific examples related to the command line as well as GUI. Explanations in the documentation would also be helpful. Being able to have more than just one routing table would allow the ability to leverage security. Read full review Simpler billing interface More responsive sales team to provide relevant QBRs to ensure proper and best practice use of the product/platform Integration of the Dyn ECT Managed DNS with Dyn Domain Registration would be a nice feature as currently I have to manage two consoles and billing accounts. Read full review Likelihood to Renew It does exactly what we need, its fast, secure and reliable.
Read full review Usability Improve on the specifics I mentioned previously and could be a 10/10 product. It is also a confusingly branded product that I have supported in two large enterprises where IT departments are unsure if the product belongs to the Citrix remote access support team or the Network infrastructure support team (it should be the later) and typically under utilized.
Read full review This is the only real gripe we have with Dyn; their web-UI can be remarkably painful to use. In the "simple" editor, DNS records are arranged in a kind of "node" view, where each record is a node and any records of the same name or longer (i.e. all records called "record.example.com" or "other.record.example.com") fall under it. This creates an odd sort of hierarchical view that's not really representative of the zone file. The "expert" editor doesn't have an actual delete button, just a checkbox. If you want to update conflicting record types (for example, replacing an A record with a CNAME) you have to check the box for the record being deleted, save changes, create the new record, save changes, and finally publish changes. Dyn uses a publish model for changes, where all changes you make are staged and can be reverted or published all at once. This is fine, except that the publish/revert dialog is in a different page. This is nice when you have many changes, but very annoying when you're changing just one or two records across multiple zones. These are relatively minor issues in an otherwise good platform; annoyances more than deal breakers.
Read full review Support Rating Overall, our organization's experience with Citrix support is that support can be hit or miss. Oftentimes it takes multiple attempts and much longer than desirable to obtain a viable solution for issues experienced with their products. It would be great to see Citrix invest time, effort, and almighty dollars into improving their support and bug fix process across the board.
Read full review The support team at Dyn has always been very helpful and have tried to answer our questions to the best of their knowledge. We have never had any issues from support tickets and they are often resolved in a few hours
Read full review Alternatives Considered We chose Citrix ADC over Kemp and F5 due to additional integrations with various products such as Citrix/Horizon/Monitoring tools. We additionally chose ADC due to better ease of use and ability to have the appliances be virtual or physical, with the configuration being a simple migration of code which provided flexibility to be able to do a hybrid environment with ease.
Read full review We use both Oracle Dyn Managed DNS and
Amazon Route 53 . We like having our main DNS provider outside our cloud provider in case there's an issue with Amazon and we need to point things somewhere else temporarily. But for all the smaller stuff and internal stuff, we use Route 53 successfully.
Read full review Return on Investment It has saved a tremendous amount of money and manpower by allowing for broad support without the need for a VPN. The security functions within Netscaler enabled our business to pass additional IT-based audits. Having a full Citrix stack from front to back makes our business look more professional both to our users and outsiders. Read full review For the law firm its being used for, it keeps their remote users working. For law firms, time is money, usually every 15 minutes lost can be a big deal to them. Sometimes it has switched when its not supposed to, and causes downtime. No real way to inform users when the switch is happening, it would be great to have an email alert we can not only send to ourselves but a notification to primary and technical partners in the firm so they don't have to yell at us like something is broken, instead they are aware it had to change. Read full review ScreenShots