Paragon Insights (formerly HealthBot) is a cloud-native, network health and diagnostic solution that provides operational intelligence across all service provider, cloud, and enterprise network domains, from network access to servers in the data center. Paragon Insights supports multiple open-source data collection formats, including Junos telemetry interface (JTI) and standards-based OpenConfig telemetry. Once collected, built-in advanced…
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SolarWinds Network Configuration Manager (NCM)
Score 8.3 out of 10
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SolarWinds Network Configuration Manager is network diagnostics and troubleshooting technology, from Austin-based SolarWinds.
such tools in the IT market but the advanced way of providing and supporting a company’s network is unmatchable in the case of Paragon. It has the capability to withhold big companies' networks as well. Its integration, closed-loop automation, and network visibility are a few of the nitty-gritty features that make it a perfect solution for our company and I just hope that it won't disappoint anybody that has chosen it and prioritized it over other such tools. Less Appropriate: it is not so favorable for beginners because of the level of difficulty and less documentation.
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!
Visibility: it is one of its key features that supports us by showing multidimensional views and facilitates [use] in the monitoring process.
Customization: its flexibility is worth appreciating and its dashboard offers customizations and we can have resource metrics according to our personalization.
Integration: integration is easy and great that allows us to integrate it with any 3rd source platform.
Data collection is another feature that allows us to collect data in our desired standard method.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
Paragon Insights was chosen as it was able to handle more products than the Cisco Nexus Dashboard. The second qualifying decision point was the level of integration Paragon Insights had over the Nexus Dashboard. Both products would service the need of the client, but Paragon was positioned to provide additional value and ease of use to the customer.
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
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.
