We primarily deploy it for our customers. We don't use the solution ourselves. Customers schedule it with us and we troubleshoot for the customer as well. We have files and templates from NCM as well as confirmation templates. We sometimes schedule the backups too.
Since the customer is the primary user, they'd have a better idea of the best features.
Compared to other vendors, like NetBrain, managing the solution is easy. They made it very user-friendly.
On NCM, reporting could be a bit better. It's completely become just one report. When I try to create a custom report, the solution just commits old server data.
They need to make a health checkup report in a new release.
We've been using the solution for one year, but this year we are switching to NPM NCM. It's a request from our engineers. We are not monitoring the servers with either and we want to monitor the servers with something going forward.
We do health checkups for the network devices. However, compared to NetBrain, the NCM health checkup is getting very bad.
The technical support for the solution is very good.
We also use NPM and NetBrain as well.
The implementation process is very user-friendly. Deployment takes about three hours with customization. You only need a few people to handle the deployment; it doesn't take too many. You might need one on the server-side and one for the application.
We are using version 7.9 of the solution. We migrated from 7.7 to 7.9 about three years ago.
We use both the cloud and on-premises deployment models. We had production on the on-premises model in 2016.
I'm an implementation engineer for SolarWinds so I'm not using the NCM devices any longer.
I'd advise others who may be installing the solution for the first time to just use the 7.9 version of the solution. It's the latest version. If you are using FortiGate you'll be able to configure everything and have a backup and be able to use the data.
I'd rate the solution eight out of ten.
