NCM does what we need without having to buy a suite
November 13, 2019

NCM does what we need without having to buy a suite

Daniel Dabrieo | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with SolarWinds Network Configuration Manager (NCM)

It is being used within our department. We manage a subset of the network infrastructure for the organization. It helps us adhere to configuration and compliance standards on the hundreds of devices we manage.
  • Stores historical configuration information.
  • The compliance checking allows us to ensure our configurations are standard across the board.
  • It allows us to easily automate and schedule configuration changes across our environment.
  • The configuration comparison tool is just clunky. I ended up using the compliance tools instead because the comparison tool became easily confused when the configurations weren't identical. No two switches are alike in terms of ports or configured networks.
  • The concept of GROUPS is disconnected from the settings other tools use to manage groups of switches. Groups and departments should not be separate.
  • Some screens can multi-select nodes conveniently and some look as if they were created by an entirely different group because they do not use the same metaphor. If you have multi-select for nodes when applying something, it should be the same screen universally.
  • The ability to automate small changes across many nodes at once has been very valuable. In terms of man-hours, that has already paid for the product.
  • When I need a report about EOL devices, I can just generate one rather than having to go through our previous inventory tools one device at a time over the course of days.
  • As soon as devices are on-boarded, I can immediately check the completeness of the installation.
It seemed that NCM had more built-in options and the ability to be used in a more flexible manner. I think the number of canned reports was greater with SolarWinds. The scripting capacity was in-place with ManageEngine. In some ways, it was a much more canned product. But at the same time, it was more open-ended in that it was lacking in pre-prepared, useful reports or scripts.
The unique thing about NCM is that you do not have to acquire the rest of the suite to use these functions. We already had tools for ticketing and managing DNS, etc. But NCM allows us to kick out very useful reports that satisfy auditors. Having our own people create that in an existing system would take years. Buying an integrated CIM would cost lots of money and would require a retrofit. So if you just want to slice off the configuration monitoring, management, and the ability to automate without having to learn Python, then this is a good tool.