We performed a comparison between BlueCat Integrity 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."The most valuable features are scalability and cloud infrastructure."
"The solution is scalable in multiple ways."
"The most valuable piece, which has been a lifesaver, would be the BlueCat DNS resolver. BlueCat Cloud DNS resolver is a tool that takes a look into your cloud's DNS and then reports back everything it finds into BlueCat's DNS Edge solution. The Edge solution has a bunch of nice rules that you can configure to route the DNS traffic. That automation alone is a lifesaver for me for the day-to-day churn of the DNS components that change on an hourly, daily basis."
"The most valuable feature is the IPAMs, which provide visibility into all the IP addresses on the network."
"One of the key features enabling us to operate at our current scale is robust automation."
"It's a critical infrastructure piece. This is where all the IPs are named for the whole organization. It's a big deal. It has all the features related to DNS and DHCP. It's pretty amazing."
"The solution includes automatic management of segments."
"Since implementing BlueCat, we have experienced fewer problems, anomalies, and strange issues."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"The solution does not export reports in a comprehensive format."
"Adaptive DNS only supports AWS for network automation and cloud computing and would be improved if it also supported other options like Azure or Google Cloud."
"During our testing phase, we encountered some issues with Active Directory and DNS reverse lookups."
"One complaint about the interface is BlueCat's handling of subzones."
"Usability needs to be better."
"However, it does not offer robust support for high availability failover with different subnets, especially if the servers are located in different data centers and belong to distinct IP networks."
"While the product is IPAM, DNS, and DHCP, it does provide NTP functionality, but one of the things that they have yet to correct or catch up with is NTP authentication. There are new standards being pushed out and they are lagging a little bit in supporting them."
"The UI is outdated and needs a modern refresh."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"We would really like them to become a DNS registrar."
"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."
"There could maybe be additional ways to manage traffic. There are no major improvements we're looking for. It's a very complete solution."
BlueCat Integrity is ranked 5th in Managed DNS with 14 reviews while IBM NS1 Connect is ranked 7th in Managed DNS with 11 reviews. BlueCat Integrity is rated 8.8, while IBM NS1 Connect is rated 9.6. The top reviewer of BlueCat Integrity writes "Helps reduce downtime, is easy to use, and frees up staff time". 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". BlueCat Integrity is most compared with Infoblox IPAM, Infoblox DDI, SolarWinds IPAM and Cloudflare DNS, whereas IBM NS1 Connect is most compared with Cloudflare DNS, Akamai Edge DNS, Amazon Route 53 and Neustar UltraDNS. See our BlueCat Integrity vs. IBM NS1 Connect report.
See our list of best Managed DNS vendors.
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