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4+ year user loves the product for specific tasks, but has accepted some fairly major flaws as reality
Updated December 09, 2020

4+ year user loves the product for specific tasks, but has accepted some fairly major flaws as reality

Anonymous | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with SolarWinds Network Configuration Manager (NCM)

NCM is being used within our department as well as the department responsible for the design of the network. NCM is being used to push mass changes to all of our network gear and to enforce configuration standards. It is also being used as a recon tool by running show (recon) commands on gear to have a quick but detailed look across the organization.
  • Configuration Standardization
  • Quick and Mass Configuration Changes
  • A better implementation of using variables in jobs would be awesome.
  • Being able to take the output of a command and feed it into a second command.
  • Negative: ACL Updates: Since we had a slight variation in our naming convention of an ACL that we use to filter where you can SSH from when we pushed the update it ended up breaking 80% of our devices that had the ACL as lower case instead of uppercase like we expected. This locked us out of these devices and we had to drive 1000's of KMs to each device and manually fix them. This was partly user error but if the tool had the ability to take the output of a command such as "sh access-list" and use the output to execute the next command, the variation in naming would have not been a problem.
  • Positive: IOS Upgrades: We had a security vulnerability and a software bug start to affect our service on roughly 3000 switches. Being able to say run the upgrade command on 3000 devices and reload them saved months of our worker's time and condensed the work to about 4 nights. We only made it 4 nights in case there were problems, we didn't want to affect all the switches, but no problems arose and in less than a week we had done 3000 IOS upgrades which is a major money and time saver.
We have not tried any further tools.
NCM is great at pushing a generic script to multiple (100+) devices quickly. If you need to change your DNS servers on every Cisco Switch, it's super slick. But, if you need to change every access port in VLAN 5 to VLAN 55, NCM struggles really hard to interpret the output and be able to use that data efficiently.

ROI

  • Price
  • Product Features
  • Product Usability
  • Product Reputation
  • Prior Experience with the Product
The single most important factor when deciding to purchase SolarWinds Network Configuration Manager (NCM) was the suite of features and the functionality it would add to your workflow. For example, the configuration backup and script execution was some major areas we were lacking in before onboarding NCM. Our configuration backup method was reliant on our staff TFTP'ing the configuration of each device to a TFTP server after they made a change where we still do this, but we have the extra layer of certainty that does not rely on human interaction to complete.

Using SolarWinds Network Configuration Manager (NCM)

20 - Network Analysts and Technical Support
1 - The ability to learn from documentation websites as well as trial and error as there does not seem to be many resources that go in depth about how to support the product and most of the support that is done is as result of output of logs. Most of the support can be handled by calling the Solarwinds Customer Support line and they are fairly good at what they do.
  • Configuration backup
  • Basic CLI scripting
  • Configuration Compliance reporting
  • Device End of Support/Life reporting
  • Device addon inventory reporting through CLI scripts
  • Creating base configuration templates to speed up device provisioning
  • Track changes to configs to better investigate why outages occured
  • We are hoping for more scripting elements to be added so we can utilize them more when it comes to device provisioning
  • We are hoping to setup the device baseline portion of NCM to better tell which of our devices are not configured like the rest
NCM has become a product we rely on to better manage our network and be able to discover problem before and after outages occur. This helps us better our network deployments to reduce outages as much as possible.

Upgrading SolarWinds Network Configuration Manager (NCM)

Yes - Yes, Solarwinds has implemented a upgrade process built right into the website portion of NCM. This allows you to click through the prompts fairly quickly and provides updates on the status of the upgrade. If you are not using HA pairs, the server will be down for the upgrade but only once he needs to power down the processes in able to upgrade them. There was no negitive impacts to the upgrade and we were given a nice new feature sets with each release
  • When you perform a firmware upgrade operation, you can confirm the selections for all nodes at once, instead of having to confirm each node individually.
  • The ability to customize the name of the saved configurations
  • More advanced scripting capabilities