IBM NS1 Connect Reviews

We use NS1 as the primary point of contact, the first point of contact for a client to reach us, to discover a DNS. We use NS1 in two ways: We use the Managed DNS product and the Dedicated DNS product, which gives us redundancy. Our primary use-case is for getting users to the CDN [content delivery network] one that is best suited for each user.

We have an automated deployment, so we use Terraform to deploy changes.

The managed solution is completely managed by NS1; it's not on-premises.

The integrations for monitoring events is helpful. Monitoring of events can change things in the Filter Chain. That helps our team receive alerts. Our team is kept in the loop about what is happening.

When it comes to maintaining uptime during a major DDoS attack, NS1 is very good. NS1's Dedicated DNS gives us redundancy. In addition, NS1 has worked closely with us to get us into the position we are in today. They do a good job in communicating problems and of looking forward with their solutions. They don't just address the current issue when it comes to DDoS and mitigation. These are continuous issues. It's not just a one-off that you handle once. They look for solutions that will solve future DDoS impact.

It has also improved our DNS response times. Because we have been using NS1 for quite a long time, it's hard to estimate how much response times have improved. But since we started with them we have definitely done better. The most critical thing that we look at, rather than the response time, is the time for propagation, and that's been very good.

The solution has also massively reduced DNS maintenance work in our company. The way we were set up a long time ago was that we would maintain things by ourselves, and now we don't do anything along those lines. For the external DNS, we do about 10 percent of the amount of work that we did previously. That's a huge improvement. The amount of maintenance has gone down significantly and our maintenance cost is down by at least 70 percent, for the external DNS.

NS1's automation has also enabled us to assign people to other kinds of work. It saves us time so that we can concentrate on other things.

Overall, it has helped to improve our end-user experience. Knowing the DNS delivery part is taken care of is important; performance is very critical. Taking users to the right CDN or data center is very important for the end-user experience. NS1 is part of the set of tools we have to achieve that better user experience and to get them to the right place.

The Filter Chain is one of the most valuable features, for geo-load balancing and geo-fencing. The Filter Chain is the most useful because it allows us to do several things. With geo-fencing we can redirect a particular user to a particular answer. That's very valuable for us. Filter Chains with monitoring is our strategy to provide redundancy.

We also use the automation extensively, with Terraform.

From the get-go, we have used the API from NS1. We have hardly used the solution's UI. For any major changes, we use the API and that works brilliantly for us. As an infrastructure team and organization, we heavily value infrastructure as code, so this is a great approach. Any feature that comes into the Filter Chain gets exposed first to the API, before it even goes to the human resources. It works very well and enables us to adapt a complete infrastructure-as-code approach.

The real-time telemetry and ecosystem of integrations were also a key part for us when choosing among multiple vendors, because of geo-location. It's very crucial for us. Choosing which server to use, in case of an emergency, for example, we depend on NS1's monitors. It's reliable and hasn't caused us any trouble. Another advantage is that there are multiple regions for the telemetry collections so, even if one of them has an issue, we are confident that there is enough redundancy to let us sail through the problem.

The Filter Chain simulation is really good in the UI, but it would be nice to have something similar in the API so that we could simulate and test things before we deploy them.

And while it's not exactly a problem, a nice-to-have would be a faster API. If we have to make a change to many things, it would be nice if there were a bulk change operation. For example, if we want to change TTL, we would just issue one bulk operation. We can make the calls simultaneously, but there are limits, even if you do things in parallel. 

I have been using NS1 Managed DNS in this company for about five years.

The stability has been very good. We haven't really had major problems. Especially, since we have the Dedicated DNS as well, our setup of NS1, as a whole, the Managed and the Dedicated, is very stable.

We have confidence in NS1 that they will take care of our scaling needs. It's a hosted solution so we just send our traffic to them and, so far, there haven't been any issues.

The solution has helped us to meet SLAs and customers’ demands, without adding complexity. The scalability, when it comes to traffic, is very important because our traffic pattern changes. It's not a straight line on the graph. Scalability is a key feature for us.

When we got started with Dedicated DNS, the technical support worked with us and they were really good and helpful.

The initial was very simple and straightforward. Initially, sending the users to one of the data centers regions was the most complex part, but we had good help from support to understand Filter Chains and to set things up correctly. The process didn't take too long.

We didn't have any downtime when migrating to NS1 because we had external DNS as well.

Our experience with the NS1 customer success team has been good. We have worked closely with them on many occasions. Some of the problems were even new to them, because we had unique features. They were happy to engage and bring in people from their core engineering teams to help. It has been really nice working with NS1's customer success teams. That's one of the biggest advantages of NS1.

I believe we have seen ROI, and that's why we keep going back to them. We've been using them for five years and that is a long time. It's useful for us and it delivers.

We recently evaluated another solution, but the complexity involved with it was slightly high. With NS1, our Filter Chain is cleaner. Also, scaling would add a complexity factor with the other solution.

If someone says they can use a basic DNS, one issue is that it only works to a certain scale. After a certain limit you will have to pay exponentially more. You need to be aware of up to what scale a solution will work for you. Another issue to consider is the flexibility. An enterprise solution has features, such as the Filter Chain, to do complex things, and they might not be available in the free solutions. A third factor is support. That is one of the key features in evaluating these solutions, especially if you're building a product that is critical for a customer. I'm not sure that the free solutions provide that level of support. All of these factors are very good with NS1.

Engage as much as you can with their customer success team. Explain your use cases very well and they will suggest good solutions that are the perfect fit. Keep in touch with their team. NS1 is an evolving product. The more you stay in touch with the customer success and technical support teams, the more likely it is you will be successful.

Also, focus on automation. NS1 is API-driven. The fact that we are really focused on and invested in automation tools has really helped us.

We use Managed DNS, and we also partially use functionality from some of their other products such as Pulsar. We generate a DNS map and upload it to NS1 using their API to propagate to their service. Then, we use Managed DNS to find the optimal route for our users to connect to the closest point of presence for them.

We use NS1 as software as a service. We are not having anything on-prem. It is a public cloud from our point of view. We are just using their cloud solution or their service. We are not installing it in our data center. They provide us with an API for us to talk to their cloud implementation.

Telemetry is something that we really care about. We care about the reliability of our edge network, and telemetry services are something we highly utilize. We use it through the NS1 API to make sure we have our dashboards and alerts configured correctly to have visibility in real-time over what's happening with our edge network. This way, we can easily and quickly react if needed or in some cases, act in advance to re-steer and re-adjust our traffic.

We're using Managed DNS with other functionality from NS1, so it improves the latency for our end users. So, we can steer traffic to better locations for users. It is not just based on geographical location closeness. It is based on real user metrics for these users. We also need fewer tools for DNS iterations in DNS management. So, we can have it fully automated by using our code and automation tools that we can build on top of NS1 API.

We actively use its Pulsar Active Traffic Steering feature. We cared the most about performance and latency for our users, and we have been getting significant improvements, especially for some of the corner cases at some of the unusual geographic locations where our users are. We have better performance with good efficiency. It did not reduce our costs, but our users have a better experience. It has resulted in better work.

In case of incidents or events for our points of presence, we are able to steer our users to a better location with RUM DNS, which is a part of the Pulsar product. So, we can provide better latency for them in comparison to simple anycast or geolocation traffic.

We use several DNS maps for the traffic distribution between our points of presence in the edge network. For some of these cases, to decrease the load on our network in a location where we may have limited network capacity, we can actually distill some portion of traffic, but it is less important for us. In such a case, we can avoid potential reliability incidents and bring availability, which eventually can improve our uptime.

Pulsar has saved money on CDN optimization. For some of our use cases, we need to distribute a significant amount of content between our users. So, we can use this functionality by having several route maps to route this content to better locations.

It has absolutely improved our DNS response times. We have seen significant improvements for some corner cases with geolocations that have unusual network connections to magistral lines. For some of the use cases, we have seen more than 10% improvement in our latency after we started using the RUM DNS functionality of Pulsar. We have latency improvements of more than 10% in selected regions.

It has reduced the DNS maintenance work in our organization. We have fully automated tools around NS1 API. So, to do any maintenance, by using the NS1 product, we can easily drain traffic in our point of presence to quickly re-steer our users to other locations. It is fully automated on our site so that we do not spend a lot of engineering time preparing our edge network for maintenance. This preparation time counts towards maintenance time, so we can save a lot of time on this.

We automated the entire workflow on our site. Its automation has absolutely enabled us to assign staff to other work. Automation is always good, and we can reinvest the time of our engineers.

Managed DNS helped improve our end-user experience. It reduced our latency dramatically, and our users' experience is much better now. Latency is not the only metric that it has impacted. It has also impacted reliability. We didn't have any major incidents while using NS1 all this time. Our company's SLA is 99.99%, and we can easily maintain it with NS1.

The Pulsar functionality, map uploading, and real user maps around DNS are some of the valuable things for us.

Another valuable feature is how easily we can interact with their API. We run our infrastructure as a code, so it is really easy for us to describe the whole configuration of the NS1 service by using our service configuration and interact with their API. We like this functionality a lot.

Monitoring is really important for us. We really care about reliability, and we want to make sure that we can remove some points of presence in our sector and in our edge network really fast when we experience any problems. So, monitoring that NS1 provides for DNS is really important for us.

We care about monitoring and telemetry work, and NS1 provides a pretty good system for monitoring. We can monitor our endpoints and points of presence around the world. If there are any issues, we can easily remove them from our network, but this area needs some improvement because it is not always reliable in NS1. In the past, we had a number of false-positive cases when the monitoring system told us about some problems in our infrastructure that were not true. NS1 is improving the system, and we are constantly talking about this with them. I know that they are releasing a new version of their monitoring system, which is really important for us, but this is a different area where we would expect them to improve.

I joined the company two years ago, so this is when I started working with the product, but in our company, we have been using it for a longer period of time. We started using it several years ago. 

Managed DNS is very stable for us. In our company, our uptime SLA is 99.99%, and DNS is crucial here. If the DNS system is down, then there will be a significant availability hit for the whole organization. We have been using NS1 for a long period of time, and we have not had any major outages on the NS1 side that lead to any outage on our side.

We don't have any problems with scalability. Our edge network is growing. So, every year, we add more and more points of presence to our edge network. It means that we need to add more zones for us. So far, we didn't experience any problems with this. It is easy to scale the solution.

We never had any complexity with meeting SLAs and customer demands. We heavily utilize NS1 API, and we have automation on our site around this API. It has worked well so far, and there are no problems with it. Its non-complexity is super important because we want to have everything as smooth as possible and as automated as possible. It helps us to actually achieve these goals.

We have a whole traffic team in our organization that has seven people at the moment. So, we use NS1 within one single team in our company.

It is being used across our whole infrastructure. This is our main DNS provider, and an increase in usage would align with the organic growth of our user base. We don't have plans for any additional increase at this time.

We work with their customer success team. We have a dedicated person from their side with whom we can talk about our problems, our issues, or any proposals we might have. This is a really fruitful collaboration.

We are happy with the NS1 support. They are responsive and professional. They reply to all of our requests. They provide good updates about progress or status on their side, and we can even discuss the next steps. If there are some things that need to be improved, they always propose a good plan for improvement. I'm completely satisfied with their customer service team. I would rate them a 10 out of 10.

It was set up before I joined this organization. Its maintenance is done on their side. Because it is a software as a service, all upgrades and maintenance for NS1 services are done by NS1.

We have definitely got a return on investment because this is the core functionality for our company to operate our business, but I don't have any numbers.

To someone who says that they don't spend money on a solution like this because they have a free cloud provider or a basic DNS, I would say that they need to think about reliability and, of course, performance. Those are two main things on the users' side. On the company side or the engineering side, with NS1, it is really easy to have automation in place for management and monitoring.

My only advice is to keep it automated. It is easy to do. NS1 provides the whole platform to run their solution from your infrastructure as a code by using API. You can also use tools like Terraform or any other automated management system. 

I would rate Managed DNS a 10 out of 10. We don't have a lot of issues. Of course, it is a growing product, and there are some areas of improvement for NS1, but just based on our interactions with them and how this product works for our infrastructure, we are completely satisfied. 

NS1 holds all of our domains.

When we started using it, we didn't use it with API automation. Today, we do everything with automation and run everything with our automation, so that any change we run, all the data is backed up with GIT. Changes are done with an API so that there is no manual work. It reduces errors significantly and allows us to quickly roll back all the activities on the platform. It works flawlessly for us. Deployments are very fast. There's absolutely no complaint there.

We manage our internet facing traffic with it.

We use it for traffic optimization. I have optimized the traffic using this feature by 20%.

DNS obviously plays a major role in DDoS attacks. It's something that is under attack, but it's also a major player in its ability to defend. NS1 has been doing an amazing job with that.

It has improved our DNS response times as well. 

We've been using Managed DNS for the past 10 years. We moved from a different vendor a few years ago. Generally speaking, I would say that Managed DNS reduces the overhead. 

NS1's automation has enabled us to assign tasks to other work because we have very little DNS right now because it's all managed. It frees up SRE time to deal with actual internal system and application management, instead of managing the infrastructure that can be managed by a third party.

It helped to improve our end-user experience because users get better service by accelerating the response time.

We have also seen benefits when it comes to speed, time, and cost.

The ability to manage traffic, what's called Smart Domains or Smart Record, enables us to provide our customers the relevant, closest data center by providing the correct IP address according to geography or other logic. The ability to see real-time performance is also very useful. 

Everything we download into our observability platform so that we can also track any changes in traffic behavior or things like that is also something that we use quite a lot. I'd say traffic management, the speed of updates, and observability are the top three things that we use.

Observability means monitoring the API, the ability to see the traffic at the different levels, the ability to connect the right record to the right place, and then see everything within the platform or within our observability platform. It is really useful. The automation and the fact that they provide the connectivity into Terraform, for example, is very useful because it allows for ease of integration. I don't have to write the right API integrations myself. We can actually use industry standards that are available out there.

There could maybe be additional ways to manage traffic. There are no major improvements we're looking for. It's a very complete solution. 

I have been using NS1 Managed DNS for over four years. 

The platform itself is stable and highly available. We had very few incidents and never full downtime.

We have not found any scalability issues. We are running a pretty large operation ourselves, of around 100,000 requests per second, and we have never had any scalability issues with the platform. It's always scaled to the size that we need.

It provides scalability to help meet SOA and customers' demands without adding complexity. DNS is a basic part of any solution. And once you have 100,000 requests coming in and you need to make sure that the connectivity is there, the response time is there, the error levels are as low as possible, and every request actually gets an answer. If a third party can do this and I can take care of my actual application and not think about the path into my application, that is very useful.

The only time we used support was when we migrated the additional features around security. They were highly professional and available. They are very good at what they do.

Post-deployment their support was very good. I would rate them a ten out of ten. They are very knowledgeable, not only about their product but about general DNS protocols, from performance to global interconnectivity. They were able to look at the whole picture and the small details within the picture as well.

We switched from Akamai. It was slower and had fewer features.

The initial setup was very straightforward. Using the migration itself was easy. The ongoing monitoring and change for the service, the support that we got from NS1, was all very clear. They are all very professional. There was no downtime. It's very, very straightforward. It took a few weeks. It was very short. 

We kept a backup of the old service up and running, and moved 50% of the traffic into the new DNS and then into the new managed service. Then once we saw everything was running smoothly, we deployed the rest.

We were working with NS1's customer success team during our deployment. I was satisfied with their support. 

We have seen better performance. It's very hard to measure if there is an ROI here, but we have absolutely seen better performance, and that is the important part for us.

We also looked at Neustar. NS1 solution has many more features and it works faster than any of the other solutions. It was also that the pricing was clearer and much easier to work with in terms of the tiers of the pricing. It was really the full package.

For those who have a free cloud provider or basic DNS, I would say that the road into the application and the road into your infrastructure is part of the actual solution that you provide. DNS is part of that pavement. That is the road that end-users reach your application. The higher quality you can have there, especially if it's at a reasonable price means that you will be able to better serve your customers. And that is an important part of IT. Eventually, we are here to serve the business and if we can serve them better then it has an impact.

Once you have it side-by-side to your existing solution and the stability, speed, reduced error level, the easy connectivity into other platforms, observability, and automation are all worth the investment in engineering time and cost.

I would rate NS1 Managed DNS a ten out of ten.