Overview
What is NetBrain?
NetBrain Technologies in Burlington offers their network automation and management platform, emphasizing dynamic and accurate network mapping and automated troubleshooting and basic security analysis, as well as integration with an existing CMDB.
One stop automation shop
Don't use your brain, use NetBrain's.
Unique Product for Enhanced Network Issues Troubleshooting Capability
Automating your network documenatation
- First, our old network documentation tool was not anymore supported.
- Secon…
Reviewer Pros & Cons
Pricing
What is NetBrain?
NetBrain Technologies in Burlington offers their network automation and management platform, emphasizing dynamic and accurate network mapping and automated troubleshooting and basic security analysis, as well as integration with an existing CMDB.
Entry-level set up fee?
- No setup fee
Offerings
- Free Trial
- Free/Freemium Version
- Premium Consulting/Integration Services
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Product Details
- About
- Competitors
- Tech Details
What is NetBrain?
NetBrain is a network monitoring solution. NetBrain's automation technology aims to deliver accurate documentation, faster troubleshooting and improved security for the user's network.
The vendor touts the following five benefits of NetBrain:
- Dynamic Map is a user interface designed for automating any tasks. (According to the vendor, it is the first of its kind.)
- Intelligent network discovery is capable of learning a heterogeneous network – multi-vendor, virtual and SDN.
- Integrate with existing tools to pull any network information directly on the map.
- Triggered automation starts mapping and diagnoses before the engineer arrives on the scene.
- Executable Runbooks saves a team’s precious tribal knowledge for improved collaboration.
NetBrain Competitors
NetBrain Technical Details
Operating Systems | Unspecified |
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Mobile Application | No |
Comparisons
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Reviews and Ratings
(22)Community Insights
- Business Problems Solved
- Pros
- Cons
- Recommendations
Users of this product have found it incredibly useful for creating network topology diagrams with ease and efficiency. With the ability to generate these diagrams quickly, users have seen a significant reduction in the time spent on this task, from hours or even days down to minutes. The software provides a user-friendly interface and automates the process of creating maps, eliminating the need for manual drawing. Additionally, the product allows for in-depth configuration analysis and interactive annotation of the topology map, providing users with a comprehensive network management framework solution.
Furthermore, this product has proven invaluable in troubleshooting and resolving network issues. Users have praised its ability to identify and track changes in the network topology, as well as its dynamic mapping feature that allows for quick visualization and analysis of any path within seconds. By assisting with network resiliency through built-in redundancy and providing timely detection of performance problems and device faults, the software aids in minimizing mean time to repair during network outages. It also serves as a reliable network documentation tool, automatically updating the documentation and keeping it up to date.
In addition to its troubleshooting capabilities, this product assists with network monitoring by detecting bottlenecks and helps improve network performance by identifying and correcting network pathing issues. Users have reported increased transaction speed as a result of finding and resolving bad network paths. The software is also widely utilized by network teams for effective root cause analysis of outages and overall network issue resolution. Furthermore, the service desk relies on this product for 24/7 monitoring and proactive reaction to network issues and alerts.
Overall, this product has become an essential tool for managing networks effectively by simplifying complex tasks, automating processes, facilitating troubleshooting efforts, ensuring documentation accuracy, improving performance, and enhancing overall network resilience.
Great Visualizations: Users appreciate the visualizations provided by NetBrain, finding them great and easy to understand. The visualizations help users gain a clear understanding of their network topology and make it easier for them to identify any issues or areas that need improvement. Export to Visio: The ability to export detailed diagrams to Visio is highly valued by users. This feature allows them to easily document their network infrastructure and use the diagrams for audit purposes. Some users find this functionality useful in ensuring compliance with network standards. Diagnostic and Troubleshooting Capabilities: Users find NetBrain to be a helpful tool for diagnostic and troubleshooting purposes in multivendor networks and security devices. They appreciate the dynamic mapping, real-time path analysis, and protocol-level troubleshooting capabilities offered by NetBrain. These features enable users to quickly identify and resolve network issues, improving overall network performance.
These are the three most common pros mentioned by reviewers of NetBrain. Overall, users find value in the visualizations provided by NetBrain as well as its export capabilities to Visio. Additionally, they highly appreciate its diagnostic and troubleshooting capabilities for multivendor networks and security devices.
Slow System Performance: Numerous users have expressed frustration with the system's occasional sluggishness, which has a negative impact on their work efficiency and productivity. They have experienced delays and lags while using the system, affecting their ability to complete tasks in a timely manner.
High Cost and Limited Discounts: Many reviewers have raised concerns about the product's steep price point, considering it to be quite expensive. They expect NetBrain to offer more discounts or pricing options that would make it more affordable for both individual users and organizations.
Difficult Implementation and Updates: Users have encountered challenges during the implementation process, finding it difficult to set up and configure the product initially. Additionally, some updates have caused issues such as map corruption or changes in functionality that made the product harder to use. These difficulties can require additional time and effort from users to adapt to new versions of the software.
Based on user reviews, the following recommendations for NetBrain have been identified:
- Define use cases and success criteria before purchasing the product to ensure alignment with specific needs.
- Conduct a proof-of-concept targeting the production network with Real Production use cases to evaluate NetBrain's capabilities in solving real-world scenarios.
- Consider NetBrain for its product functionality and performance, as well as its ability to automate problem diagnosis, potentially saving time.
- Appreciate NetBrain's strong customer focus and top-notch support, making installation and usage easier.
- Evaluate the overall cost of NetBrain as part of the decision-making process.
- Consider using NetBrain as a stop-gap solution if a full network management system is not currently available.
- Take advantage of NetBrain's extensive features and capabilities for network management tasks.
- Familiarity with Python and scripting can enhance the utilization of NetBrain's functionalities.
- Try the consultant edition of NetBrain before investing in the more complex Enterprise suite.
Reviews
(1-4 of 4)One stop automation shop
- Network Automation
- You can create Quick apps based on your requirement and run it
- Set Golden path rule for your network path
- After every release one or the other things stop working
- API call to create INC's in SNOW,Remedy
- it definitely saves a lot of time so I would say it has good ROI
Don't use your brain, use NetBrain's.
- Identify throughput issues, discards, dropped packets, etc.
- 24/7 real-time monitoring
- Detailed, easy to read logs
- Proactive issue resolving
- Ease of setup
- Like to be able to send logs to SIEM
- Dual links to SDWAN show as 1 circuit, would like to see both
- Monitoring
- Install (ease of)
- Finding problems before they become a huge issue
- Time it takes for Service Desk to identify issues has been cut into 1/2
- Able to present maps to management for circuit throughput issues and why we need a larger circuit
- The logs are clear and easy to understand
- Network Issues Troubleshooting
- Visualizing the root cause using color coding
- out of the box runbooks available
- Deep Network Fault and Performance Monitoring
- Historical data caching and reporting
- Out of the box integrations with standard tools
- Visualization of the problematic network component in a simple GUI
- Devices topology view
- Runbook report availability
- Auditing Network configuration in live environment
- Enhanced Network troubleshooting for our Network tea
- Out of the box pre-build runbook reports with all required details
- Additional cost for troubleshooting feature
- SolarWinds Network Configuration Manager (NCM), Micro Focus Network Node Manager i (formerly HP Network Node Manager) and SolarWinds Network Topology Mapper
Automating your network documenatation
- First, our old network documentation tool was not anymore supported.
- Second, our network documentation was far behind the reality as with increased workload and decreased manpower we just had no time to document.
- Third, we wanted a network documentation tool, not a swiss army knife solution that normally is weak in network documentation.
- It automatically updates your network documentation.
- You can search for devices even if they are no longer operational (by a lot of attributes).
- It can simplify your troubleshooting by showing you the L2/L3 path a packet would take.
- It can automate and document the steps of troubleshooting tasks to get more information from one level of support to the next.
- The support team of NetBrain is very fast and very helpful.
- Heaps of information in the maps.
- Not all devices are integrated with the same quality.
- Not all steps are self-explaining.
- The updates were difficult (but thanks to the help of support no real problem).
There are still some problems with the automatic documentation and path discovery with virtual L2 firewalls.
Although the implementation of the documentation of Cisco ACI is just in the beginning but, if finished, it's probably a great tool to have an end-to-end view of paths from the legacy network into SDN.
- Network automation is up to date.
- Quicker failure discovery and resolving due to the path discovery.
- Less time spent on documentation.
- Much more details in the documentation.
NetViz was a great tool at its time but it's not the best solution anymore and Microsoft Visio is good in a lot of things but more of a Swiss Army knife than a network documentation tool.
We had a look at NetTerrain which looked like a good documentation tool and would have given us the advantage of importing our old NetViz documentation.
The main disadvantage with all of these tools compared to NetBrain is that the documentation needs to be done manually.