Item: SolarWinds Network Configuration Manager (NCM)
Rating: 8
Author: Art Mehlman

Overall Satisfaction with SolarWinds Network Configuration Manager

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

NCM is being used to keep track of the running configurations of our network devices.The network engineers use NCM to keep the configuration for PCI auditing across our network. This helps us to track network device configuration changes. This help us find the cause of down times when a configuration change affect network performance.

Pros and Cons

Pros

Easy to track configuration changes
Allows us to manage our network device configurarations
The interface is very easy to use

Cons

When going to edit a node I often click on the node which brings up the details page then I have to hit edit node. I like the new drop down menu that allows a direct route to the edit node function.
I don't like the new manage entities page, I prefer the old manage nodes interface.

Return on Investment

NCM saves a lot of time by tracking our configurations online versus our old system of manually tracking them
NCM allows us to easily audit our system

Alternatives Considered

IBM Tivoli Monitoring

The Tivoli monitoring system is using dated human interface front end. We like the more up to date human interface capability.

Other Software Used

IBM Tivoli Monitoring

Likelihood to Recommend

We use NCM almost every day to add new nodes to our system. But if the devices have a lot of interfaces it is time consuming to unclick the interfaces to monitor. A way to automatically pre-select only the interfaces we are interested in would save us time. At this time we don't have many custom properties, but as the number of properties increases it may take a while to find the property we want to change.A searchable list of properties would be good.

Comments

Please log in to join the conversation

Solarwinds Network Configuration Manager from a user's perspective