Item: SolarWinds Network Configuration Manager (NCM)
Rating: 8
Author: Joe Slitzker

Overall Satisfaction with SolarWinds Network Configuration Manager

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We use NCM by SolarWinds to back up our configurations, inventory hardware, and create change reports to watch for unauthorized changes and/or in troubleshooting to help find things that recently changed if an outage occurs.

Pros and Cons

Pros

Regular Configuration Backups.
Configuration Change Reports.
Hardware and Health Inventory.

Cons

Updated GUI.
Better integration with third parties such as Cisco -- they're working on it, but it's not quite ready.

Return on Investment

NCM has eliminated homemade scripts for the backup of device configurations.
Policy reports allow for finding areas to improve our configuration settings for hardening images.

Alternatives Considered

I've used other products like Nagios and other open source tools. NCM is a much better enterprise-ready solution, and the support they provide (US-Based, by the way), is top-notch.

Likelihood to Recommend

I highly recommend NCM if you don't have a way to centrally manage your networking environment, or if you need a way to keep track of changes made to your device configs.

Comments

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Easy to use and great support team in the US!