SolarWinds Network Configuration Manager

What do you like best?

I enjoy the ease of use and setup for Network Configuration Manager. It integrates well into the SolarWinds Orion Platform. If feels like it belongs there. To set it up, just monitor the device and add credentials for Network Configuration Manager. NCM will take care of backing up configurations of your device. It will show you differences in configurations from day to day. It will also so you potential security issues with your configuration which is a huge time saver when it comes to researching CVEs and best practices.

What do you dislike?

The job and automation pieces are very powerful. It would be good to find ways to integrate other types of scripting.

Recommendations to others considering the product:

This software is as useful as the end user wants it to be. This can be as simple as set it and forget it. Another option is to take full advantage of the feature-sets and really embrace the functionality and flexibility of the job automation.

What problems are you solving with the product? What benefits have you realized?

We can perform many health checks of our devices by automating jobs to run every day. One particular case at this moment, we have a job the shows us the authentication successes for our NAC deployment. We don't have to go through logs on the NAC solution when all we have to do is refer to the NCM job results for a quick answer.