1. Home
  2. Network Diagnostics Tools
  3. SolarWinds Network Configuration Manager (NCM) Reviews
  4. User Review of SolarWinds Network Configuration Manager (NCM)
NCM - Great Config and Compliance Management Tool
August 30, 2016

NCM - Great Config and Compliance Management Tool

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

Overall Satisfaction with SolarWinds Network Configuration Manager

NCM is being used by the IT department to backup most network devices and parse through some of them to detect potential compliance issues - but not yet to auto remediate.
  • Backups 95% of the devices I need it to.
  • The compliance reporting is great.
  • Being able to diff two configs is amazingly valuable.
  • Main issue with NCM it it relies on its NPM underpinnings. The UI is kludgy - although this is reportedly fixed in a newer release
  • The pre-built compliance rules are very Cisco centric.
  • Helped ensure PCI compliance.
  • It's helped us restore configs for boxes we've replaced.
  • Helped us restore bad configs.
The primary benefit when compared to the three listed are:
  • Rancid: Commercial support, plus pre-built remediation templates. Config auto-deploy as well
  • Prime and Panorama: These two products have strengths, but only when in a network compromised only of the vendor's gear
Anywhere Rancid is used or being considered, I would recommend SolarWinds Network Configuration (NCM) as a better product. It can do everything Rancid can, plus the support for auto-remediation and the point and click integration with other Orion tools makes its it very easy to spot when a config change was done and why it maybe screwed something up. It's a great tool if you are vendor neutral in your network infra; however if you tend to veer towards one vendor or another, its likely that the given vendor may have a better toolset - e.g. Cisco Prime.