We performed a comparison between Azure DNS and IBM NS1 Connect based on real PeerSpot user reviews.
Find out in this report how the two Managed DNS solutions compare in terms of features, pricing, service and support, easy of deployment, and ROI."Integration with other Azure services is good."
"If you're running your enterprise application on Azure, it's convenient to use Azure DNS. It has native integration with other Azure solutions, and Microsoft is a globally recognized DNS provider. You also get CDN services. If you're a media company that requires on-demand data streaming, your DNS plays a vital role by working with CDN services to publish your application. It's cheaper and easier to expand your solution."
"The most valuable feature of the solution is the simplicity of putting DBs."
"Azure DNS provides value beyond its user-friendly interface and easy learning curve."
"Can be configured to achieve a hundred percent reliability"
"The most valuable feature of Azure DNS is it works automatically after configuration. Additionally, the solution is secure."
"It is a scalable solution."
"The most valuable feature of the solution is that it is a stable product."
"We leverage two things from Managed DNS that we couldn't do with any other solution. One is their filter chain technology, which allows us to shift some of the intelligence we need for the traffic steering to the DNS. The second one is data sources, which enables us to manipulate multiple records simultaneously using NS1's internal message DOS. In our case, we are trying to direct the traffic in over 150,000 different NS1 records to an arbitrary set of repeating responses."
"The provisioning is great. They have an API service that is simple to use and very quick. The changes that we make are replicated worldwide in a matter of usually milliseconds, sometimes seconds. They are done very rapidly. That's something that's obviously priceless when we're dealing with things like DNS."
"We find that the low latency access to DNS queries has a direct effect on the customer experience. Visiting a site, whether it's an AdTech-based solution or marketing tech, the fact that whatever we're rendering on a page can be rendered better than the industry standard, in terms of time, ensures a better user experience."
"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."
"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."
"It massively speeds things up. Today, we allow developers to deploy services and have externally facing DNS scrapers that are created automatically without the addition of human intervention."
"One of the features that is non-standard and that is very useful is the filtered DNS. We have set up our external VPN, which is what all our employees connect through, to use this feature. It's geolocation-aware. In that way, for India we set it up so that these are the servers that should be supporting things, and in the UK these servers, in the U.S. these servers, and in Sweden these ones."
"For starters, it integrates with Terraform and a lot of our infrastructure is effectively built out using Terraform. That makes all this stuff extremely easy... when we deploy, all the entries are created and configuration is done."
"The pricing can be more competitive."
"The web interface to manage the solution must be made easier."
"The scalability could improve."
"What needs improvement in Azure DNS is visibility in terms of troubleshooting. It's similar to the area for improvement in Azure Network Watcher, where I can see how the source is going out if I'm troubleshooting a source destination. I can also see the destination. As for seeing how the packet travels, that's what should be improved. It's still lacking in visibility. Suppose I'm looking into backend machines, and if I'm hitting another NPM machine or any machine on the other side, there should be visibility. The tool should tell you that a specific machine is passing through a VPN gateway or route table, routing to a third-party firewall, and then dropping. Azure DNS should show an accurate answer to help the customers, which is its area for improvement."
"There are some latency issues that could be improved."
"The product must be integrated with additional security features."
"I would like to see more integration with other platforms, improved stability, enhanced security, and better pricing because there is always room for improvement."
"The solution should provide better pricing."
"We use the geo load balancing functionality and there are a couple of things that are helpful there. But the language itself is something we had to get used to a little bit. Some of my folks made a few mistakes in rolling out the Filter Chain...The Filter Chain setup is a bit hard to grasp at first. It would also be nice to have a way to simulate changes in addition to staging."
"We use our client in our infrastructure to communicate with NS1. This client is a bit complex in the way that it is set up. NS1 has their own client solution that you can deploy into your platform to do this, but even that is a bit complex. So, I would like a very simple, thin, light API agent that we can deploy into our platform to communicate with NS1. That would be welcome."
"The reporting metrics are great from an API standpoint, but it would be a little bit nicer if there was some type of dashboard around that. There should also be some type of reporting that's more executive-level focused."
"There could maybe be additional ways to manage traffic. There are no major improvements we're looking for. It's a very complete solution."
"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 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."
"I would love to see improvement in the testing capabilities they provide. They have a simulate-filter feature so that you can simulate how your traffic would flow, based on their Filter Chains. I believe that was shut off for quite some time. Having that as a way to test our load-balanced CDN structure would be fantastic."
"We would really like them to become a DNS registrar."
Azure DNS is ranked 2nd in Managed DNS with 31 reviews while IBM NS1 Connect is ranked 7th in Managed DNS with 11 reviews. Azure DNS is rated 8.4, while IBM NS1 Connect is rated 9.6. The top reviewer of Azure DNS writes "Offers good performance and helps its users with disaster recovery". On the other hand, the top reviewer of IBM NS1 Connect writes "Balances cost and functionality, speeds up provisioning, and reduces the DNS maintenance work drastically". Azure DNS is most compared with Amazon Route 53, Cloudflare DNS, Cisco Umbrella and Infoblox DDI, whereas IBM NS1 Connect is most compared with Cloudflare DNS, Akamai Edge DNS, Amazon Route 53, Neustar UltraDNS and Infoblox DDI. See our Azure DNS vs. IBM NS1 Connect report.
See our list of best Managed DNS vendors.
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