We performed a comparison between BlueCat Integrity and IBM NS1 Connect based on real PeerSpot user reviews.
Find out in this report how the two Managed DNS solutions compare in terms of features, pricing, service and support, easy of deployment, and ROI."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."
"The solution includes automatic management of segments."
"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."
"Managing our BDI infrastructure globally is simple, and BlueCat's personalized relationship with us is valuable to our organization."
"This inherent stability, derived from its Linux-based architecture, provides a well-established and reliable platform."
"One of the key features enabling us to operate at our current scale is robust automation."
"Adaptive DNS's best feature is DDoS protection, which stops malware and network security attacks."
"The solution is scalable in multiple ways."
"We leverage two things from Managed DNS that we couldn't do with any other solution. One is their filter chain technology, which allows us to shift some of the intelligence we need for the traffic steering to the DNS. The second one is data sources, which enables us to manipulate multiple records simultaneously using NS1's internal message DOS. In our case, we are trying to direct the traffic in over 150,000 different NS1 records to an arbitrary set of repeating responses."
"The Filter Chain is one of the most valuable features, for geo-load balancing and geo-fencing. The Filter Chain is the most useful because it allows us to do several things. With geo-fencing we can redirect a particular user to a particular answer. That's very valuable for us. Filter Chains with monitoring is our strategy to provide redundancy."
"The fact that it's an API-first platform for DNS and application traffic management is one of the reasons we looked into NS1. We use it for a lot of automation and metrics gathering and it's been great."
"Everything we download into our observability platform so that we can also track any changes in traffic behavior or things like that is also something that we use quite a lot. I'd say traffic management, the speed of updates, and observability are the top three things that we use."
"We find that the low latency access to DNS queries has a direct effect on the customer experience. Visiting a site, whether it's an AdTech-based solution or marketing tech, the fact that whatever we're rendering on a page can be rendered better than the industry standard, in terms of time, ensures a better user experience."
"Monitoring is really important for us. We really care about reliability, and we want to make sure that we can remove some points of presence in our sector and in our edge network really fast when we experience any problems. So, monitoring that NS1 provides for DNS is really important for us."
"The provisioning is great. They have an API service that is simple to use and very quick. The changes that we make are replicated worldwide in a matter of usually milliseconds, sometimes seconds. They are done very rapidly. That's something that's obviously priceless when we're dealing with things like DNS."
"It massively speeds things up. Today, we allow developers to deploy services and have externally facing DNS scrapers that are created automatically without the addition of human intervention."
"During our testing phase, we encountered some issues with Active Directory and DNS reverse lookups."
"The technical support is slow and has room for improvement."
"Usability needs to be better."
"The solution does not export reports in a comprehensive format."
"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."
"I would like the GUI to be similar to AWS and Azure, where we can simply click on an item to expand it and see all the information on one page, without having to click to the next page."
"One crucial area for development is IPv6 support."
"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."
"We would really like them to become a DNS registrar."
"The reporting metrics are great from an API standpoint, but it would be a little bit nicer if there was some type of dashboard around that. There should also be some type of reporting that's more executive-level focused."
"We use our client in our infrastructure to communicate with NS1. This client is a bit complex in the way that it is set up. NS1 has their own client solution that you can deploy into your platform to do this, but even that is a bit complex. So, I would like a very simple, thin, light API agent that we can deploy into our platform to communicate with NS1. That would be welcome."
"We use the geo load balancing functionality and there are a couple of things that are helpful there. But the language itself is something we had to get used to a little bit. Some of my folks made a few mistakes in rolling out the Filter Chain...The Filter Chain setup is a bit hard to grasp at first. It would also be nice to have a way to simulate changes in addition to staging."
"I would like to see the UI updated to allow me to do finer searches. I would also like to have the ability to get reports that can sort based on various metrics. For example, I would like to be able to say, "Show me the top 10 records by total queries" in an easy-to-digest format."
"The Filter Chain simulation is really good in the UI, but it would be nice to have something similar in the API so that we could simulate and test things before we deploy them."
"We care about monitoring and telemetry work, and NS1 provides a pretty good system for monitoring. We can monitor our endpoints and points of presence around the world. If there are any issues, we can easily remove them from our network, but this area needs some improvement because it is not always reliable in NS1. In the past, we had a number of false-positive cases when the monitoring system told us about some problems in our infrastructure that were not true. NS1 is improving the system, and we are constantly talking about this with them. I know that they are releasing a new version of their monitoring system, which is really important for us, but this is a different area where we would expect them to improve."
"I would love to see improvement in the testing capabilities they provide. They have a simulate-filter feature so that you can simulate how your traffic would flow, based on their Filter Chains. I believe that was shut off for quite some time. Having that as a way to test our load-balanced CDN structure would be fantastic."
BlueCat Integrity is ranked 5th in Managed DNS with 14 reviews while IBM NS1 Connect is ranked 7th in Managed DNS with 11 reviews. BlueCat Integrity is rated 8.8, while IBM NS1 Connect is rated 9.6. The top reviewer of BlueCat Integrity writes "Helps reduce downtime, is easy to use, and frees up staff time". On the other hand, the top reviewer of IBM NS1 Connect writes "Balances cost and functionality, speeds up provisioning, and reduces the DNS maintenance work drastically". BlueCat Integrity is most compared with Infoblox IPAM, Infoblox DDI, SolarWinds IPAM and Cloudflare DNS, whereas IBM NS1 Connect is most compared with Cloudflare DNS, Akamai Edge DNS, Amazon Route 53 and Neustar UltraDNS. See our BlueCat Integrity vs. IBM NS1 Connect report.
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