MxToolbox in Austin supports global Internet operations by providing what they describe as free, fast and accurate network diagnostic and lookup tools. The vendor boasts millions of technology professionals using their tools to help diagnose and resolve a wide range of infrastructure issues.
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SolarWinds Network Device Monitor
Score 8.7 out of 10
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SolarWinds Network Device Monitor is a network diagnostic tool, from Austin-based SolarWinds.
The site/product is well suited for a quick and free tool to diagnose any first-level external DNS and/or email-related issues. The monitoring tool and reports is a good first line of alerting when an email issue arises, so it can be dealt with in a timely manner, as a free service
For a network admin or security team, NCM can be very useful in keeping config parameters standardized, this can mean anything from ensuring the timezone setting is standard to ensuring SNMP or logging is set up as you want it. The alerting is good if you want a record of findings for audit purposes so that you can show that you are monitoring configurations, you are alerting when a config goes out of compliance, and a ticket is created to drive remediation. Alternatively one can choose to automate remediation by running a configuration change script but that scares me so we never used it, this is a me-problem and not a tool problem. Where it falls down is in the data storage architecture as we had constant problems with our server running out of disk, this seems to be because it does a lot of basic monitoring of the devices along with storing many, many copies of the configurations. This may have been a user-side issue, though NCM runs under the Orion app which is where the storage issues come from I think.
MXToolBox is easier to use probably because I am more familiar with it. I have used DNSStuff several times to compare results, which usually are very similar. The main drawback for DNSStuff is that each tool is a download rather than browser-based, and I would just prefer that whatever I am using is as up-to-date as possible. I would tend to uninstall the DNSStuff tools right after using them.
For the purposes we use SolarwWnds, we get the functionality we need at a favorable price point. Additionally, we have easy adoption by our staff and any consultants we work with due to existing familiarity and/or experience with the product which brings some added efficiency to our onboarding process or project engagements.
