BlueCat Integrity Reviews

We use BlueCat Address Manager for the DHCP and DNS servers.

It provides a single-pane-of-glass view of our IP address space. It's pretty critical for us because the whole organization depends on it for IP address assignments. We have a big network. To assign an IP, I don't want to go to different servers or give the wrong IP. I can just go to Address Manager, which gives me a complete view of everything. Even while troubleshooting, I don't have to jump through two different things or four different things to solve a problem.

It's flexible. For example, just the day before yesterday, I ended up upgrading it from one version to two jumps. It happened pretty seamlessly. In the past, I had to jump, for example, from 9.1.0 to 9.1.1 and so on, but recently, even though we were down two versions, we were able to do it in one shot. That was big for me.

It has helped reduce human error, especially if you're looking at it from the perspective of having one pane. You don't want IP conflicts. If I was using two different platforms for my big organization, it's possible that I could assign the same IP to something else, and then there would be a conflict. It reduces errors in that sense because you have one Address Manager that provides a complete view of the organization. If I assign an IP, it's one IP that we know about.

It reduces downtime. For example, while troubleshooting an issue, if I had to look at several panes, it could take me an hour to get to the bottom of the issue, whereas, with BlueCat, I can literally jump into my Address Manager and look for that specific IP. I get to know immediately which subnet it is. I can then track it within two or three minutes.

It has helped to consolidate tools. We are currently doing consolidation. We are integrating with another company, and in addition to DHCP, we are about to get BlueCat for DNS as well. We are in the process of working with BlueCat to move DNS from AD to BlueCat.

It has definitely helped free up our IT staff for other projects.

It's a critical infrastructure piece. This is where all the IPs are named for the whole organization. It's a big deal. It has all the features related to DNS and DHCP. It's pretty amazing.

It's pretty robust. I haven't experienced any issues with it since I've been working with it. 

It's easy to use and easy to understand. It's pretty user-friendly. I like its user interface. It's pretty easy to use once you get around it. With the new version of the software, they changed the whole interface. From version 9.1 to 9.3, it's a totally different interface. The new interface is even better. 

The DNS and DHCP servers for guests are separated from the main organization. A lot of times, it doesn't allow you to choose a default IP space. When I log in to the GUI, it doesn't default to where I want it to be. So far, I haven't been able to find out how to change or specify that so that it defaults to a particular space, such as the main org. If I'm looking for the IP space for guests, I need to toggle and go to the guest site. Most of the time, I want the IP space for the org to be my main space, but it doesn't give me the ability to do that, or I haven't been able to find that over the last two years. I want the org one to be the default one, but a lot of time, it defaults to the guest.

The company has been using it for years. I've been using it for about two years since I've been with the company.

It hasn't broken. Since I've been here, the application itself has never broken. In the past two years, we haven't had any problem with it, not even one single day. That's something huge in my field.

We have more than 15 sites. We have more than 50,000 employees.

I love their customer service. They are pretty awesome. I've been working with them over the last few weeks on the version upgrade. I'd rate them a 10 out of 10. They haven't made me upset yet.

An example of their service is that I made a mistake today where instead of putting in a ticket as a standard request, I put it in as urgent. After I hit submit, I got a conference invite within a minute because it was urgent. I thought that was exceptionally fast. I don't remember that with Infoblox or any other organization.

Positive

Before I joined the company, I used a totally different platform. This was new to me, but I was able to get around it without any issues. So, there is ease of use.

I used Infoblox previously. Compared to Infoblox, I found BlueCat easier to use. When I used Infoblox, my networking experience wasn't that great. That might have been a part of the issue. It felt more difficult for me to use, but when I came to this organization, they had BlueCat, and it was totally different. It was the same concept but a different platform. I didn't have any difficulty with it. I was able to jump in and use it. So, if I have to compare these two, it was easier for me to use BlueCat.

I wasn't involved in its deployment. The deployment was done before I joined this organization.

In terms of maintenance, they require us to keep up with upgrades.

It provides a good service and experience. There is a single pane of glass, and Address Manager provides a full view of everything. Most solutions do have that, but the big thing for me is stability and not having any issues for a long time. When we had Infoblox, the remote sites would die pretty often. All of the sudden, the site wouldn't receive IP addresses because the little box at the site died. You have to go and either kill the process completely or reboot the device. That was a problem. I have not seen that with BlueCat. We have more than 15 appliances at different locations, not just a single one. Over the past two years that I've been around, none has gone down.

To someone at an organization who doesn’t think that they need a full-stack, integrated DDI management solution, I would say that in our current situation, for some reason, we ended up not combining DHCP and DNS. We only had the DHCP and then DNS was being done by AD. That caused us a tremendous amount of problems in terms of just integrating systems and so on. So, it would make more sense to have an integrated full stack of it so that it's doing everything that you need instead of having it piecemeal. That became very prominent when we were doing our merger with the new company. They were using the full stack of it, and we were not.

Overall, I'd rate it a 10 out of 10.

We use it for IPAM, DNS, DHCP, and cloud solutions.

We've enhanced security with the toolset. It has given us a better, real-time jump on issues that might crop up versus an issue that has already arrived and now we have to deal with it. We can catch it a little bit before it goes off, which is great. Other tools, like antivirus or malware, catch it once the machines are trying to download the packages. With DNS, you catch that as it's trying to attempt to go and ask for the download, so it's a couple of steps before, which makes it to be a lot faster in saving a lot of extra work that would be needed.

It provides a single-pane-of-glass view of our IP address space, which is very important for us. It's an item that can be used across the board for multiple teams—from network to platform teams. It's an easy-to-use portion of the toolset that's out there.

We're using its integration with ServiceNow. It's a great integration. We're expanding on those out-of-the-box tools with which integrations are provided. So, we're able to expand our capabilities. We're looking at other automations as well to expand.

It has helped reduce human error. Prior to BlueCat, which was a long time ago, we used to have spreadsheets and notepads of our records of where DNS is, what's being kept, what's not being kept, which networks are available, and which ones aren't available. I've run into some colleagues in other organizations that still do this today, and I'm surprised because we've had a lot of overlaps. We've had machines being built that are stepping on top of other machines. We've had production outages, whereas now with the IPAM capability and the real-time view into it, all those mistakes are pretty much gone. We don't have any overlap. We don't see any other machines taking over IP space from other machines. That's pretty much gone. It provides a great single source of truth for what's in our infrastructure.

It has helped to reduce downtime. When there are issues, a lot of fingers point back to its DNS. With the toolsets and with what's provided in diagnostics, we're able to prove and provide reliable information to lessen an outage in some areas so that they can start concentrating on items other than DNS. We're able to jump in and reroute and move items around to make things move faster.

It has helped to consolidate tools or applications. We rely on multiple Microsoft solutions, Linux, Unix, and Red Hat. We're able to take all that and have that under one umbrella for DNS. We're now able to streamline that type of configuration.

It has freed up our IT staff for other projects. The resiliency that it provides had me focus on being able to do other work for DNS or other tasks that are assigned to me outside of DNS. If we were looking at it in terms of manpower, it has saved about one manpower's worth of work for a year.

The most valuable piece, which has been a lifesaver, would be the BlueCat DNS resolver. BlueCat Cloud DNS resolver is a tool that takes a look into your cloud's DNS and then reports back everything it finds into BlueCat's DNS Edge solution. The Edge solution has a bunch of nice rules that you can configure to route the DNS traffic. That automation alone is a lifesaver for me for the day-to-day churn of the DNS components that change on an hourly, daily basis.

From the time that I've been using it and the input that I've been having into their engineering, they're very flexible in seeing what the issues are. They're very flexible in working on new changes within the product. I've had great input on issues that we've run into in our world when using their products.

The ease of use is where I got to give a little knock on them. Once you start using the tool, it becomes very easy. It's actually quite easy to use. The problem that I run into is documentation. The documentation could be a little bit richer. Documentation has always been a little pet peeve for me with them.

Sometimes the documentation does not really show real-world applications. Need to get tickets into support to get more details on how an item is supposed to operate or some CLI sequence may be missing in the docs.  

I am hoping to see an improved robust process to mass import/export IPAM data in their next major release.

We've been a customer of BlueCat since about 2013.

It's very stable. We've only run into one issue this past week and a half ago. We had roughly two outages all this time, and it was the second outage. That was due to a bug not in BlueCat software but in the underlying Linux bind. We actually hit it, and we were able to work around it and fix the issue and get moving again. In ten years, there were only two outages, so the system is very stable.

It scales very well. We're able to move and change things on the fly. We're able to bring up, bring down, not lose a beat, and still be in production without issues.

They're hands down fabulous. They're there in a pinch. We use their enterprise solution for support, and they are top-notch. I can't say anything wrong with them. They're there when you need them.

You have to work out a schedule with them. They just don't sit there and wait for Dave Muscat's call. Just put it that way. I have to schedule it with them, but they're there. In some cases, when we have issues where some people contact me with problems, or our customers need to have something resolved, and I'm not hitting it, I put in a ticket. It's a quick and easy process.

They're usually pretty good at responding. They sometimes respond within 15 to 20 minutes. They're sometimes a lot better than what they put out there in their SLA. We're on the phone talking quickly. In our outage situation that we had last week, within minutes, there was already an email with a link in there to jump on a call so we can start working on the issue. I'd rate them an eight out of ten.

In terms of comparing their support with the support for our previous solution, the previous solution that we had was a free Microsoft solution, so there was no support tied to that. That was just us and googling.

Positive

We had a mixture of many products. It was Windows, Sun Solaris, and spreadsheets. 

We used to be part of a division of another company, and we were being sold off into our own company. I happened to raise my hand at a meeting with only a couple of weeks left to go before the actual cutoff date. I asked what we are doing for DNS. I was told that we just put a bunch of machines together to which I said no. You don't just put a bunch of machines together. You have to have a hierarchy of a solution. There was a third-party management company that was managing our separation, and they formed a little group that looked at three different products, and BlueCat won that process.

In terms of the deployment model, we have both environments. We're on-prem with all virtual servers, and we're also in the cloud. It's an Azure cloud, but it's private to us.

Ease of deployment is there once you work out the nuances of the documentation. Once you read between the lines, It goes quite well. Deploying virtual machines is a very easy process. They've really matured in deployments of their DNS Edge solution and patching.

In terms of the deployment duration, technically, we're still deploying after all these years. When we first launched the project, the initial deployment and cutover were in the vicinity of 12 to 18 months because of the sheer amount of data that we needed to migrate. We were working with all the teams. We're in the healthcare field, so there were a lot of HIPAA regulations and time frames based on the contracts we had.

Only I was involved in its deployment. Its original deployment and any subsequent deployment were done by me. I finally got my first person to help me this week.

When it comes to maintenance, I do have a group of three guys in India. They take care of patching, and they take care of the upgrades. They take care of the low-level tickets that come in and get generated in our ServiceNow platform. They handle requests to add or remove a record.

Our outage levels have gone down to almost nothing. We're roughly 99.8% outage free at this point in time since using the product. We've only had two medium-sized outages, and neither one of those outages caused an outage. It has been reliable enough.

I can sleep at night. I haven't said that about any other product I've dealt with, whether it's Microsoft, Linux, Cisco, or anything of that nature. I can sleep at night knowing the type of redundancies and configurations that have been put in place and the collaborative engineering work that we and BlueCat have put together to make things solid for us.

They're competitive. The way they run their model is good. Could it stand some tweaking? Sure. There are some items there. One of the things I looked at in the recent past was their container solutions. You have to pay for licensing to use their containerized platform, but the licensing doesn't include the container licensing itself. I'd love to be able to have one big package per se.

They were flexible with us. We were in a model at the time where we owned the licenses, and as time progressed forward with the product, we're now in a subscription-based model, which makes it easier for us to move the product around the way we need to use it. It has made that easier for us.

I've never been the person who brings numbers into the equation when I'm dealing with the product. So, I don't know about the total cost of ownership, but according to me, it's well worth every dime we pay for it. It has streamlined our business across the board.

We evaluated Men&Mice and Infoblox. BlueCat won that process just for ease of use and ease of installation. We were also not looking at solutions that would sit on top of a Microsoft product at the time.

Make sure you have your data available. You should have your IPAM data and your DNS data. You need to be able to bring it in, so you need to have a mechanism to pull that. You can test the solution, probably in a small VMware environment. It doesn't have to be cloud. It doesn't have to be anything elaborate. If you have a small lab, you can probably throw this together.

To someone at an organization who doesn’t think that they need a full-stack, integrated DDI management solution, I'd say that I don't care how big or how small an organization you are. You need some type of solution to manage your network. You need to have at least some type of IPAM. You need something that's going to keep track of your network space and your DNS space. You need to be able to look at it at a glance and be able to manage those systems and make changes on the fly. Whether you're a small school or a small business, you need to have something.

Overall, I'd rate it a nine out of ten. The reason why I rate it a nine is the documentation. I've always had problems with their documentation.

We use BlueCat Integrity for IP networking.

BlueCat Integrity is easy to learn and use. It provides a single pane of glass view for our IP address space. The Single pane of glass is important because it allows us to manage our large environment in one place.

It has helped reduce human error by 70 percent and has helped reduce downtime by 80 percent.

We have been able to free up staff time to focus on other projects and tasks.

BlueCat Integrity's automation capabilities saved us around 80 percent of our time.

It has improved our network stability and has saved us around 40 percent of our costs.

BlueCat Integrity's scalability and user-friendliness are the most valuable features.

BlueCat Integrity can improve by increasing the amount of updates it releases.

I have been using BlueCat Integrity for two years.

I would rate the stability of BlueCat Integrity ten out of ten.

I would rate the scalability of BlueCat Integrity ten out of ten.

BlueCat's technical support is knowledgeable and quick to respond.

Positive

The initial deployment is straightforward.

BlueCat Integrity is affordable.

I would rate BlueCat Integrity nine out of ten.

We have five users within our organization.

Our client is an enterprise organization.

I recommend BlueCat Integrity to others.

We use BlueCat Integrity to deliver DNS service to our customers.

We use the solution throughout our entire network environment.

BlueCat Integrity has an intuitive interface, making it easy to use.

It offers a unified view of our IP address space through a single-pane-of-glass interface. The unified view is essential because we can implement all the solutions while having visibility in this dashboard.

BlueCat Integrity is highly flexible. It can be used in a wide range of situations and offers numerous options for integration.

BlueCat Integrity has helped us accelerate the product implementation process and reduce the time spent on DNS.

We have saved around five hours a week per technician for troubleshooting because it is all done automatically now. This frees up their time to focus on other security products.

Since implementing BlueCat Integrity we have not had any downtime in the network.

The most valuable feature is the IPAMs, which provide visibility into all the IP addresses on the network.

The technical support is slow and has room for improvement.

I have been using BlueCat Integrity for two years.

BlueCat Integrity is highly stable.

BlueCat Integrity's technical support is unsatisfactory because they are slow to respond, and we consistently find ourselves having to reiterate our issues to them. That is why we opt for partner support instead.

Negative

We previously used Azure DNS and switched to BlueCat Integrity because it offered better visibility into the IPs.

Compared to Microsoft, BlueCat Integrity is an enterprise DNS solution that provides us with peace of mind and enables us to concentrate on other tasks without experiencing any failures.

The implementation took slightly longer compared to the implementations we have completed for other products.

We used an implementation partner service.

We have witnessed a return on investment within two years of implementing BlueCat Integrity.

Compared to other solutions, BlueCat Integrity offers a competitive price.

I give BlueCat Integrity a ten out of ten.

We replaced our legacy solution used to manage our network with BlueCat Integrity, a vendor-backed solution.

BlueCat Integrity is easy to use for end users and not difficult for administrators. I have used much more difficult solutions that are not directly related to DDI. For end users, the solution is intuitive on a daily basis.

It provides a single pane of glass view for our IP address space, which is important for our organization.

BlueCat Integrity is flexible and user-friendly for our end users.

BlueCat Integrity has helped improve our organization by simplifying the end user's experience and improving our integration with third parties. 

Managing our DDI infrastructure globally is simple, and BlueCat's personalized relationship with us is valuable to our organization.

The interface is good, better than what we were used to.

The integration has room for improvement.

Everything related to automation can be improved.

The deployment process needs to be simplified.

I have been using BlueCat Integrity for ten years.

Yes. In-house built solution, lacking lots of features, complex to support and almost impossible to evolve or enhance with new functionalities (e.g.: IPv6 support)

The deployment took around three years because we were migrating from our pre-existing in-house tool.

The solution was deployed through an in-house team with support from BlueCat's professional services, who played a critical role in the success of our migration.

I would rate BlueCat Integrity eight out of ten.

Our company includes sixteen OS staff who use the solution for segment server management and ILO code. 

Of the twenty-four segments available, we currently use four. 

The solution includes automatic management of segments. 

The solution does not export reports in a comprehensive format that allows us to see usage, administrators, VLAN, and backups. 

A reporting format similar to Infoblox would be beneficial because theirs include VLAN and function information, LAN or WAN determinations, number of segments, usage, and backups. 

I have been using the solution for one year. 

The solution is stable. 

The solution is scalable.

I would prefer the last sixteen management segments be handled through Infoblox because it is better at scaling. 

Technical support is knowledgeable but responses are often delayed. 

Neutral

The initial setup is straightforward. 

Ongoing administration includes reinitiating a license that includes technical support. 

Infoblox provides better scaling and includes reports with functional information that is comprehensive. 

I rate the solution a seven out of ten. 

I mainly use Adaptive DNS for IP address management.

Adaptive DNS's best feature is DDoS protection, which stops malware and network security attacks.

Adaptive DNS only supports AWS for network automation and cloud computing and would be improved if it also supported other options like Azure or Google Cloud. In the next release, Adaptive DNS should add an option for users to migrate their IPv4 versions to v6 via cloud apps.

I've been using BlueCat Adaptive DNS for five years.

Adaptive DNS is very stable.

Adaptive DNS is scalable.

BlueCat's technical support is very good.

Positive

We also use Infoblox, but Adaptive DNS is more stable and secure.

The initial setup was very easy and could be handled even by an undergraduate engineer. The deployment time is fast, but it depends on the number of networks being used - a single network takes hardly ten minutes, but a hundred would take an hour to ninety minutes.

Adaptive DNS's price depends on your network ranges, the services you want, and the level of support you require.

I would advise other users to go for Adaptive DNS without hesitation, and I'd rate it nine out of ten.