SolarWinds Network Configuration Manager Reviews

We are using SolarWinds Network Configuration Manager for managing network configurations of our network devices. It helps with configuration management, network visibility and automation, and compliance and reporting. Additionally, the solution can help in mapping out network topology.

With SolarWinds NCM, you have a clear understanding of what's happening within your network as regards configuration changes, the status of the network devices, backup status, and compliance. You can generate a comprehensive report of all these.

Our experience has shown that most of the problems we've had with SolarWinds NCM are related to software issues.

I have been using SolarWinds Network Configuration Manager (NCM) for approximately three years.

The solution is stable.

I rate the stability of SolarWinds Network Configuration Manager a seven out of ten.

SolarWinds NCM is scalable.

We have three clients and roughly 30 users using this solution. The users are mostly network support engineers.

The response times could improve for the support team from SolarWinds NCM.

In the past, we've encountered bugs and other issues with SolarWinds NCM software and reached out to their support team for resolution.

There is still room for improvement in their software. 

I rate the support from SolarWinds Network Configuration Manager a seven out of ten.

Neutral

The setup of SolarWinds NCM can be difficult in a large environment. However, if you have a small environment with a few nodes, the process is easier and faster.

The deployment typically takes two days.

The cost is fair.

If you want to manage your network configurations, SolarWinds NCM is easy to understand compared to Cisco Prime, HP, NNMi, and other configuration managers out there.

For those who are new to the field and don't want to delve into technical materials, I recommend SolarWinds NCM as it is easier to understand.

I rate SolarWinds Network Configuration Manager a nine out of ten.

We use this solution to store and manage the configuration of Cisco switches and routers.

It significantly reduces the time required to make changes to routers and switches. A single script can be run on all the devices on the network at the push of a button. It also helps to enforce change management as change is implemented via the NCM interface and managers do not have the exec password but rather request for change via NCM which can be approved by those designated to.

The feature that I really enjoy is the ability to script changes across all of your devices.

For example, if you wanted to change the administrator password for all of your Cisco devices, you would simply put that config change in one window on the NCM, and with a push of a button, it sends it across to all the devices on your network.

The integration with the network performance monitor wasn't complete as at the last time I used it. 

It has a separate interface page within the web interface. I would prefer to have the NCM features on the same interface as the natural performance monitor device page.

For each device, when you open the network performance monitor, it will give you all of the information about the device, but many of the natural configuration management features are not on that page. You have to go to a separate page. It would be nice to have tighter integration with the NPM (Network Performance Monitor).

I would like to see NCM be more aggressive in adding new device support to the product.

I have been using this solution for seven years.

This solution is very stable. I have never had any real issues with stability.

When you deploy it with an external SQL server database that is properly managed and properly tuned, you won't experience any issues.

We know that the SQL Server is scalable, and you can take it to large sizes.

NPM allows you to add pollers to scale it, but I am not sure that NCM has the ability to utilize the additional pollers in a NPM. I have never tried to scale it to thousands of devices. I have only scaled to a few hundred, and I know that it handles a few hundred devices with no issues in one box.

Technical support is good. I have no complaints.

I have used other products and switched to SolarWinds NCM because of the ease of use. The design system is better with fewer bugs.

The initial setup was very easy. There were no issues at all.

I was an integrator and would help to deploy the solution for some of the companies.

We have a team of three to manage and maintain the solution.

Most of the companies would require an integrator to help them deploy the solution.

NCM pays for itself within the first 3 years of use as you do need less dedicated Cisco certified engineers fully on site once it is implemented

The NCM is licensed per device. 

You have a base license for 50 devices, and then you can add more licenses as you go. 

It scales from 50 to a hundred and so on.

Also, they have an annual fee that covers upgrades. You have a 12-month license to download new updates.

Larger organizations would be able to have people invest the time to learn how to use the system and deploy on their own. 

Smaller organizations would need an integrator to help them through the deployment process.

We definitely plan to continue working with this solution. 

There are less popular devices that are not directly supported by NCM. You have open-source Linux devices that you really can't support with NCM. They have their own tool that you have to use. We have a couple of those, but generally, NCM is a tool we use for the majority of the well-known brand network purposes.

My advice to others who want to use this solution would be to get it if you have a network with several departmental devices to take care of. 

Do an early set up of your approval process to make sure that change management is built-in. If you have several people with the admin password who are able to go in and make changes to all your devices at one time, it makes the entire system much less stable. You need to ensure that you put in all of the controls very early on, and have levels of authorization for change.

This should be done very early when you deploy the system.

I recommend using SolarWinds Network Configuration Manager.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.

It allows us to manage backups in big companies. It is also useful in managing configuration changes. 

SolarWinds is currently in the process of a strategic change. They recognized some of the issues they had and are changing the way that they are delivering their software on-premises and on the cloud. You will be able to benefit from these changes sometime in 2023/2024.

Its look and feel can be improved. They can also put in more effort into building the THWACK community and use the information about various customer issues and requests to build new releases.

I have been using this solution for about four years. 

It is stable. 

It is scalable.

This solution works in conjunction with SolarWinds Network Performance Monitor. Usually, you first buy SolarWinds Network Performance Monitor and then SolarWinds Network Configuration Manager. You have to go with both.

I would recommend this solution. Typically, while recommending a solution, I look at what the management needs in terms of strategy, how a solution integrates, and how powerful is the IT department. Based on that, I recommend a solution that meets the needs and integrates with ITSM.

I would rate SolarWinds Network Configuration Manager a seven out of ten.

I'm using SolarWinds Network Configuration Manager to configure and manage devices like Aruba, and it's working fine.

It's perfect for network configuration management. It's easy to use.

It would be great if they include a network service manager, network performance manager, or privileged assessment in the next release.

I have been distributing SolarWinds Network Configuration Manager for about three years. 

SolarWinds Network Configuration Manager is very stable for now.

SolarWinds Network Configuration Manager is scalable enough. 

Technical support is perfect.

The initial setup was straightforward. I use a team to deploy and maintain this solution.

I have a yearly subscription.

On a scale from one to ten, I would give SolarWinds Network Configuration Manager an eight. 

SolarWinds Network Configuration Manager can be used for backing up network device configuration. It helps you be more secure when you have a system failure, you can get the information back.

The solution could improve by being more secure.

I have been using SolarWinds Network Configuration Manager for approximately nine years.

The solution is stable.

The solution is scalable.

We have more than 100 customers using this solution.

Technical support could be faster when responding to an issue.

The installation is straightforward.

We have one engineer that does the implementation and maintenance of the solution.

There is a license for the use of this solution and it is priced well, there is a lot of value for the money.

I would recommend this solution to others.

I rate SolarWinds Network Configuration Manager a nine out of ten.

They are four areas that we use the Network Configuration Manager for

1. Automate configuration backup. 

2. Configuration compliance. We have created checklists for different types of devices and check for configuration compliance as per our config guidelines.

3. Security vulnerability detection for Cisco devices. Identify open CVE's with devices.

4. Firmware upgrades / IOS upgrades of Cisco devices. This feature has seen one major improvement in the ability to perform parallel upgrades.

NCM has provided for the following benefits - Mainly to to with audit readiness on 3 fronts - regular configuration backups, configuration hardening and Vulnerability management.

The features we find most valuable are the configuration backup automation, configuration compliance, security vulnerability detection, and upgrading devices.

The Network Configuration Manager needs to improve the access control list compliance.

We have used SolarWinds Network Configuration Manager for more than six years now. We are on the near latest release 2020.2.5 HF1 as of June 2021. We have adopted an N-1 version deployment policy.

Platform stability is extremely good. A few areas of improvements required - better handling of NCM jobs failing - for example if an NCM job has multiple devices to be backed up, a detailed report/log of the success or failed status is required.

SolarWinds Network Configuration Manager is very scalable. We have a deployment that covers over 12,000 network devices.

We have used technical support many times. They're good if you escalate properly. It is an area that needs a bit of improvement in terms of helping prioritize the ticket. Whenever we open a ticket with them, I think by default it lands up in an open bucket. So I don't have the option of saying that there is an absolutely critical requirement and I need some urgent help. I can't classify that when opening up a ticket for the first time.

The initial setup was pretty straightforward. The initial setup did not take very long. I think the base platform was set up in a day's time. But I think configuration compliance policies, which is actually more of writing the policies rather than anything to do with SolarWinds, are slightly more time-consuming. The creation of policy is time-consuming. That has more to do with the organization policy, i.e., do I need Telnet enabled, do I need Telnet disabled, etc.

I would highly recommend SolarWinds Network Configuration Management to other customers. I rate this product at a nine out of ten.

We really did not evaluate many other options. We were actually using the Kiwi CatTools version which is also a part of SolarWinds. But I think SolarWinds Network Configuration Manager is a big brother of Kiwi CatTools and I think since we were already familiar with Kiwi CatTools the migration to NCM was pretty easy.

I use it for monitoring the entire network for the company. We oversee nodes, we oversee devices heading up to crossing the threshold for CPU usage. We oversee power, we oversee if they're down or if they're failing. We oversee any node down or any router from any vendor. We have MPLS, so we have a lot of those MPLS routers on the node. We can see when those routers are down. 

SolarWinds can give us not only that, but we can also create running tasks. It can schedule backup for the devices. We can do active jobs, we generate reports and oversee and look for any peaks of ranges or network slowness or network interruptions. These events trigger immediate alerts and the alert brings up the attention to the NOC that brings up the troubleshooting with whoever is local, depending upon who manages the network in that place. It's a helpful tool and I really like it.

The network logs could be improved. When the error logs come across with those false positive alarms in the error logs. We see days or weeks on those error messages. I think this needs to be addressed or they need to mitigate the house cleaning or the housekeeping of those errors or those logs. I mean that's one of the things that I will say that can be a little challenging sometimes. I'd like to see when you look for the node, via IP or via the name of the product, a quicker response in the search for the node. Sometimes when I search it, I have to look three times for the node in a different way. The search for that particular device or search for that particular product, I have to sometimes dig in on my own DNS and find the IP. Then I go to SolarWinds copy and paste it the IP. It's a pain. Let's say the search or the browse for any particular note needs to be improved for the GUI.

I have worked with SolarWinds Network Configuration Manager for about a year.

I think so far stability is going great.

They need to improve their response time. Sometimes they take longer than expected. They need to respond quickly after a ticket is opened. I will email them and I won't see the response for another two or three hours. I have to give them a call and it's a pain. It's a nightmare. I keep bringing that up to them all the time. I would improve that.

Just make sure you only put the nodes that you need to monitor and make sure whoever needs to have nodes in SolarWinds, keep the people besides your team or your group, who want their own nodes there. Make sure you set up the right rules and the standards and the thresholds where you need to get communication for error messages or CPU alerts or power heat or any type of alerts. The alerts, they need to be very clearly addressed in order for you to monitor your devices. We have faced some problems in the past that the alerts are not really set up properly. We have to randomly change the thresholds and the numbers and the ranges. I would recommend that you make sure you monitor only what you need to monitor. Make sure if you need to trigger those alerts, make sure that you have somebody or a team to respond. And, they can have a group responsible for whatever they need to troubleshoot. 

I would rate it at a seven out of ten.

We primarily deploy it for our customers. We don't use the solution ourselves. Customers schedule it with us and we troubleshoot for the customer as well. We have files and templates from NCM as well as confirmation templates. We sometimes schedule the backups too.

Since the customer is the primary user, they'd have a better idea of the best features.

Compared to other vendors, like NetBrain, managing the solution is easy. They made it very user-friendly.

On NCM, reporting could be a bit better. It's completely become just one report. When I try to create a custom report, the solution just commits old server data.

They need to make a health checkup report in a new release.

We've been using the solution for one year, but this year we are switching to NPM NCM. It's a request from our engineers. We are not monitoring the servers with either and we want to monitor the servers with something going forward.

We do health checkups for the network devices. However, compared to NetBrain, the NCM health checkup is getting very bad.

The technical support for the solution is very good.

We also use NPM and NetBrain as well.

The implementation process is very user-friendly. Deployment takes about three hours with customization. You only need a few people to handle the deployment; it doesn't take too many. You might need one on the server-side and one for the application.

We are using version 7.9 of the solution. We migrated from 7.7 to 7.9 about three years ago.

We use both the cloud and on-premises deployment models. We had production on the on-premises model in 2016.

I'm an implementation engineer for SolarWinds so I'm not using the NCM devices any longer.

I'd advise others who may be installing the solution for the first time to just use the 7.9 version of the solution. It's the latest version. If you are using FortiGate you'll be able to configure everything and have a backup and be able to use the data.

I'd rate the solution eight out of ten.