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NetBrain

NetBrain

Overview

What is NetBrain?

NetBrain Technologies in Burlington offers their network automation and management platform, emphasizing dynamic and accurate network mapping and automated troubleshooting and basic security analysis, as well as integration with an existing CMDB.

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Recent Reviews

TrustRadius Insights

Users of this product have found it incredibly useful for creating network topology diagrams with ease and efficiency. With the ability to …
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Reviewer Pros & Cons

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Pricing

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What is NetBrain?

NetBrain Technologies in Burlington offers their network automation and management platform, emphasizing dynamic and accurate network mapping and automated troubleshooting and basic security analysis, as well as integration with an existing CMDB.

Entry-level set up fee?

  • No setup fee

Offerings

  • Free Trial
  • Free/Freemium Version
  • Premium Consulting/Integration Services

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Product Details

What is NetBrain?

NetBrain is a network monitoring solution. NetBrain's automation technology aims to deliver accurate documentation, faster troubleshooting and improved security for the user's network.

The vendor touts the following five benefits of NetBrain:

  1. Dynamic Map is a user interface designed for automating any tasks. (According to the vendor, it is the first of its kind.)
  2. Intelligent network discovery is capable of learning a heterogeneous network – multi-vendor, virtual and SDN.
  3. Integrate with existing tools to pull any network information directly on the map.
  4. Triggered automation starts mapping and diagnoses before the engineer arrives on the scene.
  5. Executable Runbooks saves a team’s precious tribal knowledge for improved collaboration.

NetBrain Technical Details

Operating SystemsUnspecified
Mobile ApplicationNo
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Comparisons

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Reviews and Ratings

(22)

Community Insights

TrustRadius Insights are summaries of user sentiment data from TrustRadius reviews and, when necessary, 3rd-party data sources. Have feedback on this content? Let us know!

Users of this product have found it incredibly useful for creating network topology diagrams with ease and efficiency. With the ability to generate these diagrams quickly, users have seen a significant reduction in the time spent on this task, from hours or even days down to minutes. The software provides a user-friendly interface and automates the process of creating maps, eliminating the need for manual drawing. Additionally, the product allows for in-depth configuration analysis and interactive annotation of the topology map, providing users with a comprehensive network management framework solution.

Furthermore, this product has proven invaluable in troubleshooting and resolving network issues. Users have praised its ability to identify and track changes in the network topology, as well as its dynamic mapping feature that allows for quick visualization and analysis of any path within seconds. By assisting with network resiliency through built-in redundancy and providing timely detection of performance problems and device faults, the software aids in minimizing mean time to repair during network outages. It also serves as a reliable network documentation tool, automatically updating the documentation and keeping it up to date.

In addition to its troubleshooting capabilities, this product assists with network monitoring by detecting bottlenecks and helps improve network performance by identifying and correcting network pathing issues. Users have reported increased transaction speed as a result of finding and resolving bad network paths. The software is also widely utilized by network teams for effective root cause analysis of outages and overall network issue resolution. Furthermore, the service desk relies on this product for 24/7 monitoring and proactive reaction to network issues and alerts.

Overall, this product has become an essential tool for managing networks effectively by simplifying complex tasks, automating processes, facilitating troubleshooting efforts, ensuring documentation accuracy, improving performance, and enhancing overall network resilience.

Great Visualizations: Users appreciate the visualizations provided by NetBrain, finding them great and easy to understand. The visualizations help users gain a clear understanding of their network topology and make it easier for them to identify any issues or areas that need improvement. Export to Visio: The ability to export detailed diagrams to Visio is highly valued by users. This feature allows them to easily document their network infrastructure and use the diagrams for audit purposes. Some users find this functionality useful in ensuring compliance with network standards. Diagnostic and Troubleshooting Capabilities: Users find NetBrain to be a helpful tool for diagnostic and troubleshooting purposes in multivendor networks and security devices. They appreciate the dynamic mapping, real-time path analysis, and protocol-level troubleshooting capabilities offered by NetBrain. These features enable users to quickly identify and resolve network issues, improving overall network performance.

These are the three most common pros mentioned by reviewers of NetBrain. Overall, users find value in the visualizations provided by NetBrain as well as its export capabilities to Visio. Additionally, they highly appreciate its diagnostic and troubleshooting capabilities for multivendor networks and security devices.

Slow System Performance: Numerous users have expressed frustration with the system's occasional sluggishness, which has a negative impact on their work efficiency and productivity. They have experienced delays and lags while using the system, affecting their ability to complete tasks in a timely manner.

High Cost and Limited Discounts: Many reviewers have raised concerns about the product's steep price point, considering it to be quite expensive. They expect NetBrain to offer more discounts or pricing options that would make it more affordable for both individual users and organizations.

Difficult Implementation and Updates: Users have encountered challenges during the implementation process, finding it difficult to set up and configure the product initially. Additionally, some updates have caused issues such as map corruption or changes in functionality that made the product harder to use. These difficulties can require additional time and effort from users to adapt to new versions of the software.

Based on user reviews, the following recommendations for NetBrain have been identified:

  1. Define use cases and success criteria before purchasing the product to ensure alignment with specific needs.
  2. Conduct a proof-of-concept targeting the production network with Real Production use cases to evaluate NetBrain's capabilities in solving real-world scenarios.
  3. Consider NetBrain for its product functionality and performance, as well as its ability to automate problem diagnosis, potentially saving time.
  4. Appreciate NetBrain's strong customer focus and top-notch support, making installation and usage easier.
  5. Evaluate the overall cost of NetBrain as part of the decision-making process.
  6. Consider using NetBrain as a stop-gap solution if a full network management system is not currently available.
  7. Take advantage of NetBrain's extensive features and capabilities for network management tasks.
  8. Familiarity with Python and scripting can enhance the utilization of NetBrain's functionalities.
  9. Try the consultant edition of NetBrain before investing in the more complex Enterprise suite.

Reviews

(1-4 of 4)
Companies can't remove reviews or game the system. Here's why
January 04, 2024

One stop automation shop

Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
NetBrain is a automation tool which we use to automate our task. We are also using NetBrain for our network devices monitoring, using Qapps we monitor our network performance and for any protocol failure. We have integrated NetBrain with Slack and if anything goes down in the network , NetBrain notifies us via email and Slack notifications.
  • Network Automation
  • You can create Quick apps based on your requirement and run it
  • Set Golden path rule for your network path
  • After every release one or the other things stop working
  • API call to create INC's in SNOW,Remedy
It can be best used for network monitoring, automation and for change management stuff
  • it definitely saves a lot of time so I would say it has good ROI
Best part of NetBrain is that it is customisable ,you can create apps based on your requirement and run them in your environment. Lot of flexibility
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We use NetBrain to monitor our global network environment. It is used by the Network Team to help troubleshoot or proactively prevent issues such as bottlenecks, discards, errors or dropped packets and help with the problem-solving daily. The Service Desk monitors via NetBrain 24/7 to react to issues and alerts that arise.
  • Identify throughput issues, discards, dropped packets, etc.
  • 24/7 real-time monitoring
  • Detailed, easy to read logs
  • Proactive issue resolving
  • Ease of setup
  • Like to be able to send logs to SIEM
  • Dual links to SDWAN show as 1 circuit, would like to see both
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.
  • Monitoring
  • Install (ease of)
  • Finding problems before they become a huge issue
  • Time it takes for Service Desk to identify issues has been cut into 1/2
  • Able to present maps to management for circuit throughput issues and why we need a larger circuit
  • The logs are clear and easy to understand
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.
SolarWinds Network Performance Monitor (npm), SolarWinds IP Address Manager (IPAM), SolarWinds Network Topology Mapper
Nikhil Kumar Sharma | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
NetBrain is part of our organization over all network management framework solution that is always offered to our customers for enhanced Network issues troubleshooting and auditing. When ever there is an outage in the network or network team wants to quickly validate the root cause we offer NetBrain to use as a single and effective tool.
  • Network Issues Troubleshooting
  • Visualizing the root cause using color coding
  • out of the box runbooks available
  • Deep Network Fault and Performance Monitoring
  • Historical data caching and reporting
  • Out of the box integrations with standard tools
Although there are many products in the market that provides very simple and easy fault and performance monitoring metrics in notification format, reports and emails etc However NetBrain is a specialized tool when it comes to network issues troubleshooting for various kind of scenarios such as multicasting issues in a site can be detected live and bottle neck can be highlighted by a simple click of troubleshooting button.
  • Visualization of the problematic network component in a simple GUI
  • Devices topology view
  • Runbook report availability
  • Auditing Network configuration in live environment
  • Enhanced Network troubleshooting for our Network tea
  • Out of the box pre-build runbook reports with all required details
  • Additional cost for troubleshooting feature
NetBrain is a specialized tool and other tools in the market nowhere stands up to its capabilities. Some capabilities are beyond what competitor are meant to designed for example - Network configuration auditing using a simple click, Out of the box runbook reports availability which can be sent to higher management without any hassle.
SolarWinds Network Performance Monitor (npm), SolarWinds Network Configuration Manager (NCM), SolarWinds Network Topology Mapper
Christoph Neulinger | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We had three major reasons to search for a new documentation tool:
  • First, our old network documentation tool was not anymore supported.
  • Second, our network documentation was far behind the reality as with increased workload and decreased manpower we just had no time to document.
  • Third, we wanted a network documentation tool, not a swiss army knife solution that normally is weak in network documentation.
The decision to buy NetBrain was made to have a new network documentation tool that updates the network documentation automatically.
  • It automatically updates your network documentation.
  • You can search for devices even if they are no longer operational (by a lot of attributes).
  • It can simplify your troubleshooting by showing you the L2/L3 path a packet would take.
  • It can automate and document the steps of troubleshooting tasks to get more information from one level of support to the next.
  • The support team of NetBrain is very fast and very helpful.
  • Heaps of information in the maps.
  • 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).
In Cisco environments (especially IOS and IOS-XE) NetBrain looks nearly perfect. The network is loaded with heaps of information you would never document if you would have to do it manually. The information is there but you can decide what is visible at first glance and for what information you want to zoom in a bit more on the map for.

There are still some problems with the automatic documentation and path discovery with virtual L2 firewalls.
Although the implementation of the documentation of Cisco ACI is just in the beginning but, if finished, it's probably a great tool to have an end-to-end view of paths from the legacy network into SDN.
  • Network automation is up to date.
  • Quicker failure discovery and resolving due to the path discovery.
  • Less time spent on documentation.
  • Much more details in the documentation.
We used NetViz and Microsoft Visio before.

NetViz was a great tool at its time but it's not the best solution anymore and Microsoft Visio is good in a lot of things but more of a Swiss Army knife than a network documentation tool.

We had a look at NetTerrain which looked like a good documentation tool and would have given us the advantage of importing our old NetViz documentation.

The main disadvantage with all of these tools compared to NetBrain is that the documentation needs to be done manually.
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