NetBrain Technologies vs. SolarWinds Network Configuration Manager (NCM)

Although there are many products in the market that provides very simple and easy fault and performance monitoring metrics in notification format, reports and emails etc However NetBrain is a specialized tool when it comes to network issues troubleshooting for various kind of scenarios such as multicasting issues in a site can be detected live and bottle neck can be highlighted by a simple click of troubleshooting button.

Incentivized

There was a need to find an old configuration of a network switch that was accidentally wiped clean. Fortunately, SolarWinds Network Configuration Manager (NCM) kept and archived a backup copy of the switch device in question! We were easily able to upload the configuration file to the switch and restore the device back on the network in a matter of minutes!

Incentivized

• Network discovery
• Config comparation
• Runbooks

Incentivized

• Integrates with Network Performance Management for Alerting and Reporting.
• NetPath and detects issues due to Configuration Change.
• Keeps a record of which user made the change.
• Which devices are not being backed up, devices where backups are failing, dashboard and alerting available.

Incentivized

• After every release one or the other things stop working
• API call to create INC's in SNOW,Remedy

Incentivized

• For our use case, it does everything great and some of the features we underutilize but I would like to be able to set a configuration baseline when initially adding a node instead of after the configuration is pulled but it's not a particularly big deal to let it pull the configuration then set it as the baseline.

Incentivized

Medium complexity to set up in the beginning if using any non-standard devices or configurations, else fairly easy (e.g. Cisco Nexus or IOS-based devices). Reports are fairly straightforward to set up. Updates to the platform are fairly straightforward and don't take a major effort. Easy to add or remove devices.

Incentivized

This is a easly tool that i've worked.

Incentivized

The user interface is lacking. It is difficult to navigate at times and things can be done multiple ways. Quite often I am confused by how their notification structure works. It is not very intuitive. They do offer a free Academy. They also offer a community of other technical folks. I have enjoyed both.

Incentivized

To be fair, I have not had to involve Support in a number of years, but when I did, I was greeted with enthusiastic engineers who wanted to understand and solve the issue. It was a fairly complex scenario and I have discovered in my most recent implementation that engineering included that option as a standard now.

Incentivized

Solarwinds has actually produced new training since I last used it that is available on their site at any time. Their previous training was more than enough to get us started but now there is significantly more content. Since I'm comfortable with the Orion platform and the products we use I haven't checked the new training out yet but we have new staff go through portions of that training and they always come away with an understanding of the platform and ready to use it

Incentivized

Change management played a key role in our organisation. We didn't have any major downtime but it was crucial for us to get his product.

Incentivized

The others were cumbersome, slow and there is a huge learning curve for the installation, configuration and just daily monitoring. NetBrain was the easiest of all to setup then let it run and build our network and map it out. Once it was complete, we immediately identified several circuit issues that we were unaware of within our network. With the maps and information gained, we were able to present to [management] and prove a case that we needed larger circuits in several areas.

Incentivized

At the time SolarWinds was the biggest player in the space and their whole portfolio was very comprehensive. As time progressed and newer technologies came about (i.e. SDWAN) their products couldn't keep up with the consumer demands and changing market. Security became such a big focus that once Solarwinds got hacked we had to remove all their products from our environment

Incentivized

• Network automation is up to date.
• Quicker failure discovery and resolving due to the path discovery.
• Less time spent on documentation.
• Much more details in the documentation.

Incentivized

• Saves 100s of hours a year in man hours over manual configuration.
• Saved easily 50k in lost revenue when a switch rebooted with months old unsaved configuration. NCM let us quickly restore a snapshot of the running config from the previous day.
• Saves us several man hours per week of config auditing by reducing all changes to a summary email.

Incentivized