Cloudflare vs. SolarWinds IP Address Manager (IPAM)

Cloudflare works well as security measure that gives peace of mind without needing to work too hard to get it functioning well. It provides great tools to customize the security experience as well. This is all the same for the caching tools as well. They have a lot of built in tools that make using the caching easy right out of the box, but they provide the customization options to get things just right for your site.

Incentivized

If you already have SolarWinds Products, there's no other product that I have seen on the market that incorporates all network management and IPAM tools so seamlessly. No longer having to have several consoles open to manage DHCP, DNS, and Subnets saves so much time and makes the whole process much more manageable.

Incentivized

• Registrar and DNS services are impeccable, with registrations done at cost and without ADs. DNS services setting standards for speed of resolution.
• DDOS protection. With their content distribution network to back them they have the bandwidth and tools to be both proactive and reactive to bad actors.
• WAF - Their Web Application Firewall helps mitigate common site vulnerabilities and has active zero-day protection running for breaking exploits

Incentivized

• With IPAM automated address scanning, we can be confident that we are looking at an up-to-date, accurate snapshot of our network.
• The built-in alerts are a great safety net. We know that even if we aren't paying close attention to our IP address space, IPAM is. If a range is nearly full, IPAM lets us know before it becomes a real problem.
• IPAM's event logging gives us insight into any and all changes made by our network engineers.

Incentivized

• In some cases, using Cloudflare can actually lead to slower website speeds if the network is congested or if the website's traffic is particularly heavy.
• Some website owners may find that the level of customization offered by Cloudflare is limited, especially in comparison to other solutions.
• While Cloudflare is easy to set up and manage, it may be too complex for users who are not familiar with web technologies.

Incentivized

• The user experience is not as intuitive as other products. We have to be more restrictive around level 1 help desk access compared to NCM or NPM in SolarWinds.
• Making and enforcing changes, not just monitoring, has been hit or miss in some instances.

Incentivized

CF is a core piece of our cloud infra.

Incentivized

We are heavily invested in SolarWinds. We currently own Network Performance Monitor, Netflow Traffic Analyzer, User Device Tracker, Server Application Monitor and Network Configuration Manager. We have NOC mode setup for deskside support for monitoring any down devices that may effect our network across the globe. This application gives us the information we need when we need it.

Incentivized

Everything is extremely concise and all settings apply immediately and take effect globally. There is no reason to explicitly plan/think in terms of individual regions as one would have to traditional cloud offerings (AWS, OCI, Azure). All Cloudflare products integrate seamless as part of a single pipeline that executes from request to response.

Incentivized

Bring the interface into a more user friendly space.

Allow the user the ability to move root folders into other root folders. There are times when sites need to be combined into a new group and having to delete then re-add them is a huge pain. Make the popup screen for putting in information double the size so that you get everything in one window view rather than having to scroll.

Incentivized

In 6+ years of relying on Cloudflare, I think we experienced one or two brief outages that were Cloudflare's fault.

Incentivized

We don't have any issues with availability. Our cluster setup provide us a 99,9% availability that is enough for us.

Incentivized

They are built to be fast and deliver very well on this. Performance has never been a problem.

Incentivized

We do not integrate IPAM into other systems other than the standard Orion integration. The performance is reasonable, however, we are running all the SolarWinds applications on a very large server.

Incentivized

I have only used their support a few times, and most times, they are responsive and able to resolve my issue with a minimal amount of time and effort. However, there was one instance where I simply asked about how to purchase some more resources (redirect rules), and I received some type of automated/AI response that was very unhelpful and gave me no opportunity to escalate to a person.

Incentivized

I have not contacted customer support and therefore have no experience in this area. I know we have some issues with our VAR support at this time for Orion, but I don't know if the IPAM falls into the same support structure. Perhaps others in the organization may know more regarding the support area.

Incentivized

Very well executed implementation where our team was able to handle the implementation with guidance.

Incentivized

Know the full scope of what you will be installing. Solarwinds can be a very complex installation. IPAM is just one fairly simplistic piece.

Nothing like it. Organizations can utilize these Cloudflare products to enhance their online presence by improving security, performance, reliability, and developer efficiency. Cloudflare is an American company that delivers services such as DNS, a content delivery network (CDN), and various other additional services to make websites faster and more secure. Cloudflare is used by over 26 million sites, resulting in the processing of more than 1 billion IP addresses each day.

Incentivized

BT Diamond IP required the company remote to make changes we constantly had to message
support which in my opinion was not worth it. All research said SolarWinds IP Address Manager was the best by a wide margin. We had no issues with SolarWinds IP Address Manager, and we got a great price so after evaluating SolarWinds IP Address Manager we did not look at any more alternatives

Incentivized

They are built for scale and have the capacity to handle all the traffic we could ever expect to get.

Incentivized

We have not experienced any scalability issues with this product. However, SolarWinds needs to allow users to scale horizontally without any license restrictions. For example, we would like to separate Netflow and Orion onto different platforms but are unable to due to license restrictions.

Incentivized

• We have seen reduced usage and downtimes after using Cloudflare for Caching. This has already yielded ROI as minimal downtime ensures consistent user traffic and increases revenue.
• It can handle significant traffic spikes and shields the website from DDOS attacks. We have prevented a number of DDOS attacks after using Cloudflare and hence we are already seeing an ROI by using it.
• Some of the integrations with Cloudflare are really painful and we have faced a lot of issues because of not having native integrations to certain 3rd party apps.

Incentivized

• IPAM has made our IP allocation process automated and smooth.
• Different team used to use Spread Sheet which have been gone now.
• We are able to predict well in advance if any new Subnet is required or existing subnet is going to exhaust.

Incentivized