Backup your Network Devices!
August 30, 2016

Backup your Network Devices!

Dan Lepinski | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with SolarWinds Network Configuration Manager

We currently use Solarwinds Network Configuration Manager to backup the network configurations on all of our Cisco devices. Once backed up, this allows us to review a device's configuration within SolarWinds, download it, compare it to a previous version of the config, or back it up to another location for disaster recovery. It can be a great fail safe if for some reason you accidentally copy a bad running config to start up.
  • Scheduled backups of your network devices.
  • Side-by-side comparisons of your configs.
  • Highlights changes in configs.
  • The interface is messy and can be confusing because of it.
  • It can be hard to find what you're looking for. They could create better titles or something.
  • Comparing configs the first time can be confusing. Again, this could be because of the messy interface and confusing titles.
  • You are no longer able to use a tool on your server to manage your configs. This was removed in recent versions. I preferred it over working with the web interface.
  • We can rest easy knowing we have a backup of our configs. While we've never had a disaster, the time saved in fixing the config in a DR event would be worth every penny.
  • NCM has stopped working on us once before (our mistake), but we had no idea it happened until months later. This would have nullified our purchase had we needed to do a restore.
  • None
We haven't vetted out any other solutions for backing up our network devices. NCM does this job well, but isn't the most user friendly software out there. Our Ubiquiti networking hardware is managed through an admin console for all Ubiquiti devices. It manages our configs, and is much easier to use than NCM. However, if you're running Cisco, this doesn't really matter.
I've only used SolarWinds Network Configuration Manager (NCM) to back up Cisco configurations. It works really well at doing this once you get everything set up and working. The user community is pretty strong. There's generally a wealth of information out there to help accomplish tasks within any SolarWinds product. If you need to back up network configs, this works great. You can access a nice text output of the config as well if you need to. It just takes some time and patience in getting everything working and understanding it. We're starting to use some Ubiquiti hardware now. I don't see us using NCM with that hardware.