TrustRadius Insights
Easy Installation and Configuration: Many users have found the installation, configuration, and use of Solarwinds Network Configuration …
Overview
What is SolarWinds Network Configuration Manager (NCM)?
SolarWinds Network Configuration Manager is network diagnostics and troubleshooting technology, from Austin-based SolarWinds.
Recent Reviews
Awards
Products that are considered exceptional by their customers based on a variety of criteria win TrustRadius awards. Learn more about the types of TrustRadius awards to make the best purchase decision. More about TrustRadius Awards
Product Details
- About
- Integrations
- Competitors
- Tech Details
- Downloadables
- FAQs
What is SolarWinds Network Configuration Manager (NCM)?
SolarWinds Network Configuration Manager (NCM) can help save time and improve network
reliability and security by managing configurations, changes, and compliance for routers,
switches, and other network devices.
Network Configuration Manager enables IT Pros with:
Network Configuration Manager enables IT Pros with:
- Out-of-the-box support for major network device vendors, including Cisco®, Juniper®, HP®, Huawei®, F5®, Avaya®, Ruckus®, and more.
- Automated bulk deployment of standardized device configs.
- Automatic backups of device configurations, and rollback to the last-known good configurations, if necessary.
- Identifying IOS® devices with potential vulnerabilities, utilizing the NIST CVE repository service, and even provides the tools to manage the investigation, remediation, or waiver of each vulnerability.
- Auditing device configs for NIST FISMA, DISA STIG, and DSS PCI compliance.
- Built on the Orion® Platform, NCM provides the ability to purchase and fully integrate with additional network monitoring modules (network performance monitoring, NetFlow traffic analysis, WAN management, VoIP, device tracking, and IP address management), as well as systems, storage, and virtualization management, all in a single web console.
SolarWinds Network Configuration Manager (NCM) Features
- Supported: Configuration Change Automation
- Supported: Configuration Backup and Restore
- Supported: Change Monitoring
- Supported: Change Management - Roles & Approval
- Supported: Baselines and Configuration Drift Monitoring
- Supported: IOS Vulnerability Scanning
- Supported: Compliance Assessment and Enforcement
- Supported: Network Insight for Cisco Nexus
- Supported: Network Insight for Cisco ASA
SolarWinds Network Configuration Manager (NCM) Screenshots
SolarWinds Network Configuration Manager (NCM) Video
SolarWinds Network Configuration Manager Overview
SolarWinds Network Configuration Manager (NCM) Integrations
- SolarWinds Server & Application Monitor
- SolarWinds Database Performance Analyzer
- SolarWinds Network Performance Monitor (NPM)
- SolarWinds NetFlow Traffic Analyzer (NTA)
- SolarWinds Web Performance Monitor (WPM)
- SolarWinds IP Address Manager (IPAM)
- SolarWinds VoIP & Network Quality Manager (VNQM)
- SolarWinds Virtualization Manager (VMAN)
- SolarWinds Storage Resource Monitor (SRM)
- SolarWinds User Device Tracker
SolarWinds Network Configuration Manager (NCM) Competitors
- ManageEngine OpManager
- Cisco Prime LAN Management (discontinued)
- DX Spectrum (formerly CA Spectrum)
- RANCID
SolarWinds Network Configuration Manager (NCM) Technical Details
| Deployment Types | On-premise |
|---|---|
| Operating Systems | Windows, Windows Server |
| Mobile Application | No |
SolarWinds Network Configuration Manager (NCM) Downloadables
Frequently Asked Questions
SolarWinds Network Configuration Manager is network diagnostics and troubleshooting technology, from Austin-based SolarWinds.
ManageEngine OpManager and Cisco Prime LAN Management (discontinued) are common alternatives for SolarWinds Network Configuration Manager (NCM).
Reviewers rate Solarwinds Premier Support Rating highest, with a score of 9.5.
The most common users of SolarWinds Network Configuration Manager (NCM) are from Enterprises (1,001+ employees).
Comparisons
Compare with
Reviews and Ratings
(263)
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!
- Pros
- Cons
- Recommendations
Easy Installation and Configuration: Many users have found the installation, configuration, and use of Solarwinds Network Configuration Manager to be easy. They have mentioned that the product has a simple and intuitive setup process, allowing them to quickly get started with it.
User-Friendly Reporting: Users appreciate the simplicity and ease of reporting provided by Solarwinds Network Configuration Manager. They find generating reports to be a straightforward process, thanks to the product's user-friendly interface. This allows users to easily access and analyze the necessary data.
Seamless Integration with Other SolarWinds Products: Users highlight the compatibility of Solarwinds Network Configuration Manager with other products from the same company. It seamlessly integrates with other SolarWinds tools and can run on the same server instance. This unified experience provides users with a cohesive workflow and enhances their overall efficiency.
Confusing User Interface: Some users have expressed frustration with the user interface of the software, finding it confusing and difficult to navigate. This sentiment is shared by multiple reviewers who feel that the interface hinders their ability to quickly find information and perform tasks efficiently.
Slowness of Orion Platform: Several users have complained about the slowness of the Orion platform, particularly when additional modules and nodes are added. This issue has been raised by a significant number of reviewers, highlighting the need for improved performance optimization to enhance user experience.
Limited Vendor Support: Users have expressed a need for better support for multiple vendors in the software. They feel that currently, there is a lack of vendor-specific equipment profiles and features for non-Cisco devices. Multiple reviewers have suggested expanding the range of supported devices to make the software more versatile and suitable for diverse network environments.
Users of Solarwinds configuration manager have made several recommendations based on their experiences with the product. The three most common recommendations are as follows:
-
Make it easier to access saved config comparisons - Users have suggested improving the accessibility of saved configuration comparisons. This would enable them to quickly refer to previous configurations and compare them with current ones, aiding in troubleshooting and auditing processes.
-
Explore Thwack for inspiration from other users' experiences - Users recommend exploring Thwack, Solarwinds' online community platform, to learn from other users' experiences and gain insights into best practices for using the software. This can help users make the most of the features and functionality available in Solarwinds configuration manager.
-
Add more support for different vendors - Users have noted that while Solarwinds configuration manager is a useful tool, they would appreciate additional support for a wider range of vendor devices. Expanding compatibility and incorporating more device types would enhance the software's usefulness for a broader user base.
These recommendations highlight areas where users find room for improvement or suggest ways to enhance their experience with Solarwinds configuration manager.
Attribute Ratings
Reviews
(1-1 of 1)Companies can't remove reviews or game the system. Here's why
December 09, 2020
4+ year user loves the product for specific tasks, but has accepted some fairly major flaws as reality
NCM is being used within our department as well as the department responsible for the design of the network. NCM is being used to push mass changes to all of our network gear and to enforce configuration standards. It is also being used as a recon tool by running show (recon) commands on gear to have a quick but detailed look across the organization.
- Configuration Standardization
- Quick and Mass Configuration Changes
- A better implementation of using variables in jobs would be awesome.
- Being able to take the output of a command and feed it into a second command.
- Negative: ACL Updates: Since we had a slight variation in our naming convention of an ACL that we use to filter where you can SSH from when we pushed the update it ended up breaking 80% of our devices that had the ACL as lower case instead of uppercase like we expected. This locked us out of these devices and we had to drive 1000's of KMs to each device and manually fix them. This was partly user error but if the tool had the ability to take the output of a command such as "sh access-list" and use the output to execute the next command, the variation in naming would have not been a problem.
- Positive: IOS Upgrades: We had a security vulnerability and a software bug start to affect our service on roughly 3000 switches. Being able to say run the upgrade command on 3000 devices and reload them saved months of our worker's time and condensed the work to about 4 nights. We only made it 4 nights in case there were problems, we didn't want to affect all the switches, but no problems arose and in less than a week we had done 3000 IOS upgrades which is a major money and time saver.
We have not tried any further tools.
No
- Price
- Product Features
- Product Usability
- Product Reputation
- Prior Experience with the Product
The single most important factor when deciding to purchase SolarWinds Network Configuration Manager (NCM) was the suite of features and the functionality it would add to your workflow. For example, the configuration backup and script execution was some major areas we were lacking in before onboarding NCM. Our configuration backup method was reliant on our staff TFTP'ing the configuration of each device to a TFTP server after they made a change where we still do this, but we have the extra layer of certainty that does not rely on human interaction to complete.
20
Network Analysts and Technical Support
1
The ability to learn from documentation websites as well as trial and error as there does not seem to be many resources that go in depth about how to support the product and most of the support that is done is as result of output of logs. Most of the support can be handled by calling the Solarwinds Customer Support line and they are fairly good at what they do.
- Configuration backup
- Basic CLI scripting
- Configuration Compliance reporting
- Device End of Support/Life reporting
- Device addon inventory reporting through CLI scripts
- Creating base configuration templates to speed up device provisioning
- Track changes to configs to better investigate why outages occured
- We are hoping for more scripting elements to be added so we can utilize them more when it comes to device provisioning
- We are hoping to setup the device baseline portion of NCM to better tell which of our devices are not configured like the rest
Yes
Yes, Solarwinds has implemented a upgrade process built right into the website portion of NCM. This allows you to click through the prompts fairly quickly and provides updates on the status of the upgrade. If you are not using HA pairs, the server will be down for the upgrade but only once he needs to power down the processes in able to upgrade them. There was no negitive impacts to the upgrade and we were given a nice new feature sets with each release
- When you perform a firmware upgrade operation, you can confirm the selections for all nodes at once, instead of having to confirm each node individually.
- The ability to customize the name of the saved configurations
- More advanced scripting capabilities
No
No