SolarWinds NCM meets our organization's goals for DR of our network configurations
March 08, 2019
SolarWinds NCM meets our organization's goals for DR of our network configurations
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with SolarWinds Network Configuration Manager
We are using SolarWinds NCM in our entire organization of roughly 2000 employees and 8000 students. We have about 800 switches across our entire network that we use NCM in conjunction with. NCM is part of our disaster recovery plan, by providing us a reliable way of backing up switch and router configurations. We use it a lot to look at old configuration backups to compare against current configurations to determine what configuration changes may be causing an issue that we are seeing on the network.
Pros
- Configuration backups. Backups are scheduled and take both the running and startup configurations. Backups are only saved when there is a configuration change between the latest configuration downloaded and the previous version. This works great in our environment.
- Baseline configurations. These standardize what the configuration of a device should be. If anything changes from that baseline, you have a reference to see what and how it should be configured properly, and can easily see the differences.
- Reporting. You can easily build reports using a simple GUI to find all devices that have a certain configuration options set-build and inventory reports of devices. You also have an advanced reporting capability of using a true SQL statement to run the report as well if needed.
Cons
- Some additional pointers or documentation on how to build custom reports based around SQL queries for those of us that are not database administrators. Perhaps an examples directory or same reports to show how some of this can all be tied together.
- Upgrades have been an issue in the past if you get too far out of sync with the most current version. I know a lot has been done to address this recently by moving to a single integrated installer and we have not had any issues since keeping within 2 or 3 versions behind the most current release.
- We have quicker resolution times for issues where we need to determine configuration changes. This helps our customers get a resolution to their issues quicker.
- Alerts can tell you when equipment is no longer responsive or experiencing latency, which also impacts customer services as we are able to pro-actively respond to these incidents rather than waiting for customers to report issues to us.
SolarWinds NCM was much easier to install and maintain and manage on a daily basis than what Cisco Prime LMS was able to provide. Also, the capabilities of Prime LMS do not match all the features that are built into SolarWinds NCM.
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