SolarWinds NCM
February 22, 2019
SolarWinds NCM
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with SolarWinds Network Configuration Manager
We use NCM to keep an archive of our running and startup configurations for our Cisco network devices. We also have begun to use it to ensure that our switches meet our standard configurations by creating configuration policies that compare our standards to the running configurations of our devices. When we have large-scale changes to make on several switches, we take advantage of the scripting available to run the commands on multiple switches simultaneously. There are several tasks that, without NCM or something like it, would take us hours or days to complete due to the number of network devices that we would have to manually touch.
- It is a central portal to administer global or site-specific changes.
- The capability to compare running configurations to standard policies that you can build yourself is very powerful. It does take some initial investment and follow-up on the part of the administrators, as we have found using the auto-remediation features a little bit dangerous.
- The out-of-the-box templates for industry standard policies are very powerful as well. We have not taken advantage of them, but I can see them being very valuable in highly regulated areas.
- The user community on THWACK is fantastic.
- As with all things SolarWinds, many things just seem like they could have a little more of an easy button. SolarWinds has made some great strides with this recently in UI improvements, but I think there is still room to grow. Most functionality you could want is there, it is just a matter of finding how to do it.
- I know that there have been several instances where NCM has saved my team a ton of time.
- NCM has also assisted us in keeping a standard switch and router configuration across our organization.