IBM NS1 Connect Reviews

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. 

We use NS1 to serve our public DNS and we have around 500 domains that we service through it. It is the public resolver for our website and various other entities we own, and it has been pretty good.

The solution is hosted by NS1. 

We have done some DNS load balancing through NS1 and, using the Filter Chain offering, it has been very straightforward. That's what really sets them apart from their competitors. It's very simple to do and very powerful, reliable, and accurate.

In addition, we haven't had any issues at all with uptime when there is a DDoS attack. When we have been the subject of an attack, NS1 has been up and stable for us, as well as performant. On top of that, it has been able to provide us with pretty good details of what kinds of attacks we have been subject to and what NS1 was doing at the time. Even if we are undergoing DDoS attacks, NS1 will still serve DNS for us.

We have also seen an improvement in our DNS response times compared to previous vendors we used that had had some churn on their response times.

NS1 has also reduced DNS maintenance work for us. Being an e-commerce platform, every millisecond counts for a customer, and we definitely struggled there. We do a lot of testing and monitoring of response times and, in other solutions, we were seeing that our DNS responses would be flapping from time to time, meaning sometimes they'd be really fast and sometimes they'd be really slow. In a dashboard or graph view, you'd see spikes, a screen full of mountains, things going up and down, up and down. But NS1 gives us a nice flat line, because it's always performant and fast and that's what we want to see. Every millisecond we can shave off is better for business.

We have also saved time when it comes to manual processes because NS1 is API-first. That means we can automate records, as needed, as part of other processes. And from time to time, as part of troubleshooting, they have a nice feature where you can see if there is a record or multiple records that get an abnormal amount of queries against them. You can see that granularly, down to the actual record view. That is something you can't do on a lot of platforms. The insight we get is really good compared to other solutions.

Another benefit is connected to the fact that we have some FTP servers that partners of ours use to send and receive files. Those servers are fronting several backend servers, although the partner wouldn't know. They connect to one endpoint and, from their point of view, it's just one server, but it's actually several servers. With the other solutions we've had, if maintenance was needed on a backend server, the partner would notice that the server was down. With NS1's Filter Chains and health checks and monitoring all built-in, we can take servers like that out of service and the partner would never know because NS1 just routes them to a healthy server. That kind of stuff is extremely important for us.

• Ease of use 
• Stability - We haven't had any issues at all with the service.

Also, the fact that it's an API-first platform for DNS and application traffic management is one of the reasons we looked into NS1. We use it for a lot of automation and metrics gathering and it's been great.

Its real-time telemetry and ecosystem of integrations are very easy to use. We haven't taken advantage of much of that, but the fact that we know those capabilities are there, and that they're pretty straightforward, is key. We have done a few things using their routing protocols that are provided as part of the service and that has been really nice. We can actually do automation around that as needed.

I would like to see the UI updated to allow me to do finer searches. I would also like to have the ability to get reports that can sort based on various metrics. For example, I would like to be able to say, "Show me the top 10 records by total queries" in an easy-to-digest format. If I wanted to do that today, given that we have 500 domains, I'd have to go into every single domain and browse through it to see what is getting hit the most. That kind of filtering functionality would help because our licensing model is based on the number of queries we serve per month. If something goes hog-wild, I want to be able to easily find what that is and then react to it.

We have been using NS1 Managed DNS for about four years. 

If there are scalability issues, they haven't been apparent to us as a customer. As a system engineer, I can empathize and I'm sure they have some internally, but we haven't seen them. The scalability helps meet SLAs and customers’ demands, without adding complexity.

Every customer who hits our website is using NS1, so that is up to millions per day. Internally, it's mostly system engineers who use it to add or remove records and there are about a dozen of them, possibly more.

In terms of increasing use of NS1, we're looking into their internal DNS and DHCP solutions. That would be a complicated migration for us, and we are currently in multi-year agreements with other vendors. The goal would be to start slowly migrating over to NS1 for all of our DNS and DHCP needs, but that will take a few years.

We have a dedicated success manager. We don't need a lot from him, but every two or three months he checks in to see if we have any large needs. We also meet with him once every few months just to touch base.

Their technical support is really quick to respond to concerns. They communicate well and provide feedback that's not only technical but easy to understand if you're not technical. They do a great job.

Positive

We've used other tools like this over the years, obviously, being a publicly exposed e-commerce platform, and we've had some struggles with them. NS1 has been really smooth for us. Most recently we used Dyn DNS. They were purchased by Oracle and, predictably, their offering went downhill after that. Dyn was cumbersome, at best, to get the stats and reports that we needed, and to steer traffic as needed. With NS1, it has been extremely straightforward.

The clincher that made us switch to NS1, for me, was actually talking to their CEO at a conference in New York, in 2017. He gave a presentation on their ability to withstand large attacks. He is a systems engineer/architect/programmer at heart. He knew the tech side of the industry and that gave me the confidence I needed that he actually knew how to solve some of the problems that we were facing.

We then went through some stress tests with NS1 and it was much more performant than other vendors that we had done trials with.

The initial setup was straightforward. There wasn't a whole lot to it. I had to learn the semantics that are specific to the system, but once I did that it was really straightforward.

The deployment took a few phone calls and meetings with our onboarding team and engineers, to go over the scope. The work itself was really pretty straightforward and took just a couple days.

Our implementation strategy was to sync the main zones we care about, like our main ".com" domain, which is a big zone where a lot of our traffic comes. We added the NS1 name servers to that zone, in addition to the Dyn name servers. That meant a customer going to our website would get served through Dyn or NS1 or sometimes they'd bounce around. Once we saw that NS1 was receiving traffic, we let it bake for a couple of days and then we started removing the Dyn name servers, to the point where there was only NS1 left. There was no downtime when we migrated to NS1 from Dyn.

The solution's automation has saved our staff work. As I mentioned, we host about 500 domains and serve DNS publicly through NS1. We were doing a lot of that in-house on our own infrastructure and appliances, through Infoblox. The thought of migrating all of that to another platform was kind of harrowing. But with the NS1 API, it actually took us maybe four hours to do all the work. That kind of stuff is really helpful when you're an assistant engineer and you have multitasking upon multitasking happening. I was thinking that project would take two months, but it took one day to do.

We did not use a third-party.

Our ROI comes from the fact that it has been stable and we've had to spend less time on it than we did with third-party integrations and other solutions that we've purchased. It's more of a set-it-and-forget-it type of platform, which is extremely valuable.

NS1's pricing is much more aggressive than its competitors in the market and you get more value out of what you pay for it.

We went through trials with Dyn, of course, because we were their customer. We had also done some trials with Infoblox, which is another of our vendors, but that was where we were hosting the DNS ourselves and using their appliances. And we did some trials with Akamai, which is our CDN provider—the biggest one on the internet—and they have their own DNS offering.

But NS1 outperformed all of them in terms of the ability to administer it and the actual response times of queries and the propagation of DNS records out to the greater internet. It was much faster, generally speaking, in broadcasting those changes. A DNS has a TTL, a time to live. If you change a record or add a record, it can take up to a certain amount of time to propagate throughout the world, which makes sense because the world is one big connected internet. Akamai was taking a few hours to propagate and NS1 was taking just seconds or minutes to propagate. That was key for us. If we have to make changes because there's a routing issue or an internet issue somewhere in the world, we want to make sure that we can serve traffic. If we need to make some changes on our DNS, NS1 publishes them right away.

If someone says they don't need to spend money on a solution like this because they have a free cloud provider or basic DNS, I would say you get what you pay for and that you're also paying for the time and energy you have to put in, yourself, to do the work.

Perhaps one of the biggest wins for NS1 is that people don't readily know their name at times. That means they're doing a good job and people don't even think about who our DNS provider is because it just works.

I would say use NS1, without hesitation.

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.