NetBrain, founded in 2004, provides a no-code automation platform for hybrid network observability, allowing organizations to enhance their operational efficiency through automated workflows. The platform applies automation across three key workflows: troubleshooting, change management, and assessment.
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SolarWinds Network Device Monitor
Score 8.9 out of 10
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SolarWinds Network Device Monitor is a network diagnostic tool, from Austin-based SolarWinds.
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.
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.
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.
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.
