IBM NS1 Connect Reviews

Name: IBM NS1 Connect
Brand: IBM
Rating: 5 (11 reviews)

Vendor: IBM

4.8 out of 5

11 reviews
100% willing to recommend

What is IBM NS1 Connect?UNIXBusinessApplication
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IBM® NS1 Connect is a managed service for authoritative DNS and traffic steering that improves application performance and network resilience.

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IBM NS1 Connect is the #7 ranked solution in top Managed DNS solutions. PeerSpot users give IBM NS1 Connect an average rating of 9.6 out of 10. IBM NS1 Connect is most commonly compared to Cisco Umbrella: IBM NS1 Connect vs Cisco Umbrella. IBM NS1 Connect is popular among the large enterprise segment, accounting for 60% of users researching this solution on PeerSpot. The top industry researching this solution are professionals from a computer software company, accounting for 21% of all views.

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Managed DNS

April 2024

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Featured reviews

Michael Wills

Senior Network Systems Engineer at McKesson

Jun 8, 2022

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. It is great as an API-first platform for DNS and application traffic management. It is very simple to use. It allows us to rapidly provision and deprovision things. We are all around happy with the solution. From a metrics standpoint, the solution that we came from had no metrics. So, it has been great. Their service team is excellent in taking the time to provide reports for both growth and strategic planning. It has been great.

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Valentino Volonghi

Chief Technology Officer at NextRoll

Feb 15, 2022

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. It doesn't return all of the multiple results by default. It returns only one. So we have to add a bunch of operations, like geo-target by first selecting a group in terms of regional proximity and then shuffle the list of potential endpoints and then select the first one. 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. Also, right now, as far as I understand, there is no way to do atomic changes to a DNS configuration. You need to make changes record by record and apply. But if someone wants to do more complex stuff like, for example, if I want to migrate from a CNAME to an A record being served, or vice versa, that's typically something that involves first taking out all of the CNAMEs and then adding all of the A records. That would require some downtime. It would be a lot easier if I could just have the new full record with the CNAME or A record, and then be able to replace the nodes directly in a single operation and I don't think they have that.

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Helge Dymling

Group Directory Manager at Capgemini

Feb 22, 2022

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. If a server is down, it will automatically use a server that is up instead. It's like a load balancer that manages the redirecting of traffic depending on where you are. The filtered records mean we can set up the rules so that DNS requests are answered exactly the way we want them to be. For example, if my request comes from Sweden, we can have a rule in the filtered DNS setup to go to sslvpnsc.ourcompany.com if it's up. Otherwise, it uses another one. The solution has other features where you can import and export data, but we don't use them. We use the more fundamental things, but NS1 is a big help for us thanks to the filtered records. Another reason we use it is that we use a management tool, where you can update DNS records called Micetro from Men&Mice. It has an integration with NS1 and, for us, this was the perfect combination. NS1 Managed DNS also has a REST API which makes it easy to integrate things yourself. We collect some statistics by using the REST API. And even if we don't know if we will need it, from time to time we take a backup of all the data records by using that API. It is helpful for automation. The API also made it possible for Micetro to integrate with NS1. Men&Mice used it to integrate their management tool to update, manage, delete, and report, and do everything else you would normally do with DNS from within their platform. The NS1 API is good and flexible. As for maintaining uptime during a DDoS attack, we haven't noticed anything, so it has been fine from our perspective.

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IBM NS1 Connect market share

As of March 2024, the market share of IBM NS1 Connect in the Managed DNS category stands at 1.0%, marking a decrease of 58.7% compared to the previous year, according to calculations based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Managed DNS

Key learnings from peers

Valuable Features

"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."
"Their Pulsar filters allow us to collect RUM metrics from our users so that we can determine the best paths for our users to take. That has been very useful in providing the best user experience, and for responding to and recovering from downtime of our multiple CDNs."
"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."

Room for Improvement

"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."
"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."
"When we first deployed, we flipped the switch, and it didn't work as well as we expected. It wasn't a complete outage, but we had issues in some places with some customers. The NS1 team went out of their way to resolve it on Thanksgiving. We have a post about it on our blog. We called it "Black Thursday.""

Pricing

"From a cost standpoint, it's certainly not the most expensive out there, and it's also not the cheapest, but it does well to balance the cost and the functionality/reliability."
"Everything can always be cheaper, but as it is today the pricing is fair."
"We pay about $30,000 a month. We used to pay about $20,000 with Dyn every month, for lower volume than we're doing right now, but it had none of the features that we have available with NS1, so it was worth it for us. It seems competitive for us, given that we're doing 4.5 billion requests."

These insights are based on the in-depth reviews provided by peers to help you make a better buying decision.

Download our Managed DNS Buyer's Guide for additional reliable information.

Review data by company size

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Top industries

By visitors reading reviews

Computer Software Company

21%

Financial Services Firm

14%

Comms Service Provider

11%

University

Media Company

Government

Educational Organization

Retailer

Manufacturing Company

Healthcare Company

Wholesaler/Distributor

Performing Arts

Real Estate/Law Firm

Construction Company

Pharma/Biotech Company

Hospitality Company

Transportation Company

Insurance Company

Energy/Utilities Company

Recreational Facilities/Services Company

Outsourcing Company

Legal Firm

Non Profit

Leisure / Travel Company

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Learn more about IBM NS1 Connect

Revenue-generating applications require authoritative DNS resolution to keep critical applications and websites online. Unless your DNS infrastructure is always-on and resilient, network reliability and user experience will suffer.

IBM NS1 Connect provides fast, secure connections to users anywhere in the world with premium DNS and advanced, customizable traffic steering. NS1 Connect’s always-on, API-first architecture enables your IT teams to more efficiently monitor networks, deploy changes and conduct routine maintenance.

For enterprises looking to further optimize DNS performance, IBM NS1 Connect offers rich DNS data analytics to streamline the identification of the root cause of anomalies within traffic.

IBM NS1 Connect Features

Global anycast DNS network: Enjoy fast connections to consumers around the globe through an anycast network with 26 points of presence (PoPs).

100% uptime SLA on DNS resolution: Maximize uptime and revenue generation with resilient, always-on, authoritative DNS.

API-first architecture: Integrate and automate workflows with NS1 Connect's well-documented API.

Real-time user monitoring-based traffic steering: Use real-time intelligence on network performance and availability to
direct DNS connections to the best available application resource.

Built-in resilience: Add a single-tenant, redundant DNS layer and manage it from the same portal as your primary DNS.

Managed DNS for China: Improve performance for the Chinese mainland by segmenting traffic with NS1 Connect’s Managed DNS for China.

DNS insights: Get a better understanding of DNS traffic patterns by mining your DNS data to identify security issues, misconfigurations and performance issues.

DDoS protection: Cap your query-based spending with protection against unexpected surges in traffic from distributed denial-of-service attacks.

Uptime monitor: Quickly identify issues and automatically adjust DNS traffic steering configurations with native health check alerts.

DevOps tool integrations: Preconfigured integrations with leading DevOps tools including Ansible and Terraform to help automate routine maintenance, manage data sources and feeds.

IBM NS1 Connect was previously known as NS1 Managed DNS, NS1.

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IBM NS1 Connect customers

Avast Software, Bloomberg L.P., BBC, Carfax, CNBC LLC, Deloitte Consulting LLP, Disney Streaming, Dropbox, EBAY Inc, Gannett Media Corp, Salesforce, Wayfair, Workday