BlueCat Integrity Reviews

We use BlueCat Integrity to manage all of our IP addresses. Whenever we deploy a new device or anything that needs an IP address, we consult our IP address manager. This includes anything that is not on our DHCP scope, mainly server-based systems. We manually enter the DNS names for these IP addresses. We use DHCP for quite a few systems, but we set reservations for certain endpoints that require static IP addresses, such as admin desktops that we only want to allow those IPs through.

We have BlueCat Integrity deployed on-premises. We have three servers: a master and two IP address managers, which are devices that serve up IP addresses and handle DHCP.

BlueCat Integrity is easy to use for those who are accustomed to Windows. There was a slight learning curve, but it wasn't difficult at all. Everything is laid out very well. Creating records, CNAMEs, subzones, and so on is all quite straightforward. I didn't have any problems with it and didn't need to call support or ask other people for help most of the time. It's very well laid out. BlueCat gave us a quick overview when they helped us set it up, and from there, I was able to figure everything out on my own. I would say it's quite intuitive.

BlueCat provides us with a single pane of glass view. This is a convenient feature to have but not necessary.

Since implementing BlueCat, we have experienced fewer problems, anomalies, and strange issues. Our desktop support staff no longer complains about not receiving DHCP addresses. BlueCat seems to be more reliable.

BlueCat has helped reduce downtime.

BlueCat has freed up around 20 percent of our staff's time, making it easier and quicker for us to manage IP addresses, since we didn't have an IPAM system or even use Windows before. We now only use Windows for DNS integration, so having a reliable source for IP address management has been helpful.

I'm a security engineer, so I do a lot of deployments, especially for POCs. When we need a new server built, we request an IP address from the infrastructure team. We verify that the IP address is not being used through IPAM, DACP, and the DNS server. These tools are essential for anyone who works in IT, but they are not unique to us. 

One complaint about the interface is BlueCat's handling of subzones. We have many subzones in our domains, so getting to each one requires a lot of clicking, instead of having them all listed out for us. I'm not sure why BlueCat chose to do it this way but this is an area for improvement.

I have been using BlueCat Integrity for almost eight years.

We have not had any downtime. BlueCat Integrity is stable.

We previously used SolarWinds IPAM, but it was terrible, so we switched to BlueCat, which we have found to be more reliable.

We had some concerns about the deployment so we hired a team for the implementation. We had around five people from our organization who helped with the deployment.

We hired consultants to help us implement BlueCat to minimize downtime during the transition. They were very knowledgeable and did a great job.

The professional DNS and support services were quite good. I had no serious problems, and everything went smoothly. We didn't encounter any major hiccups.

We have seen a return on investment from reducing downtime, and even just managing IP addresses helps.

BlueCat's pricing is good, though not as cheap as SolarWinds'. However, we are happier with the BlueCat product. We paid around $5,000 per year for SolarWinds, and now we pay around $20,000 per year for BlueCat, but we have less downtime and fewer issues with DNS and DHCP.

Before selecting BlueCat Integrity we evaluated the offerings from SolarWinds and ManageEngine.

We chose BlueCat because it offered an all-in-one IPAM, DNS, and DHCP solution. We received some good recommendations from consultants, and we made our decision based on reviews. Everyone who had used it seemed to like it.

I would rate BlueCat Integrity eight out of ten.

BlueCat has helped us reduce our total cost of ownership by around $2,500 per year since we implemented it eight years ago.

With BlueCat, I can rest knowing I have peace of mind and don't have to think about it.

We do patches on the systems every few months.

For medium-sized and large businesses, It is very important to have an IP Address Management solution. No one wants to have IP conflicts, especially if we are manually assigning IP addresses or using only a ping tool. An IPAM solution can help reduce downtime more reliably than Windows or some cheaper products.

For those who can afford it, I recommend using professional services. They can help to smooth out the deployment process and show how to use the tool more effectively. A lot of training is not required, but having professional services walk us through everything can be helpful to get our IT team comfortable with the product and to ensure that our update process is properly documented.

We use BlueCat Address Manager for the DHCP and DNS servers.

It provides a single-pane-of-glass view of our IP address space. It's pretty critical for us because the whole organization depends on it for IP address assignments. We have a big network. To assign an IP, I don't want to go to different servers or give the wrong IP. I can just go to Address Manager, which gives me a complete view of everything. Even while troubleshooting, I don't have to jump through two different things or four different things to solve a problem.

It's flexible. For example, just the day before yesterday, I ended up upgrading it from one version to two jumps. It happened pretty seamlessly. In the past, I had to jump, for example, from 9.1.0 to 9.1.1 and so on, but recently, even though we were down two versions, we were able to do it in one shot. That was big for me.

It has helped reduce human error, especially if you're looking at it from the perspective of having one pane. You don't want IP conflicts. If I was using two different platforms for my big organization, it's possible that I could assign the same IP to something else, and then there would be a conflict. It reduces errors in that sense because you have one Address Manager that provides a complete view of the organization. If I assign an IP, it's one IP that we know about.

It reduces downtime. For example, while troubleshooting an issue, if I had to look at several panes, it could take me an hour to get to the bottom of the issue, whereas, with BlueCat, I can literally jump into my Address Manager and look for that specific IP. I get to know immediately which subnet it is. I can then track it within two or three minutes.

It has helped to consolidate tools. We are currently doing consolidation. We are integrating with another company, and in addition to DHCP, we are about to get BlueCat for DNS as well. We are in the process of working with BlueCat to move DNS from AD to BlueCat.

It has definitely helped free up our IT staff for other projects.

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.

It's pretty robust. I haven't experienced any issues with it since I've been working with it. 

It's easy to use and easy to understand. It's pretty user-friendly. I like its user interface. It's pretty easy to use once you get around it. With the new version of the software, they changed the whole interface. From version 9.1 to 9.3, it's a totally different interface. The new interface is even better. 

The DNS and DHCP servers for guests are separated from the main organization. A lot of times, it doesn't allow you to choose a default IP space. When I log in to the GUI, it doesn't default to where I want it to be. So far, I haven't been able to find out how to change or specify that so that it defaults to a particular space, such as the main org. If I'm looking for the IP space for guests, I need to toggle and go to the guest site. Most of the time, I want the IP space for the org to be my main space, but it doesn't give me the ability to do that, or I haven't been able to find that over the last two years. I want the org one to be the default one, but a lot of time, it defaults to the guest.

The company has been using it for years. I've been using it for about two years since I've been with the company.

It hasn't broken. Since I've been here, the application itself has never broken. In the past two years, we haven't had any problem with it, not even one single day. That's something huge in my field.

We have more than 15 sites. We have more than 50,000 employees.

I love their customer service. They are pretty awesome. I've been working with them over the last few weeks on the version upgrade. I'd rate them a 10 out of 10. They haven't made me upset yet.

An example of their service is that I made a mistake today where instead of putting in a ticket as a standard request, I put it in as urgent. After I hit submit, I got a conference invite within a minute because it was urgent. I thought that was exceptionally fast. I don't remember that with Infoblox or any other organization.

Positive

Before I joined the company, I used a totally different platform. This was new to me, but I was able to get around it without any issues. So, there is ease of use.

I used Infoblox previously. Compared to Infoblox, I found BlueCat easier to use. When I used Infoblox, my networking experience wasn't that great. That might have been a part of the issue. It felt more difficult for me to use, but when I came to this organization, they had BlueCat, and it was totally different. It was the same concept but a different platform. I didn't have any difficulty with it. I was able to jump in and use it. So, if I have to compare these two, it was easier for me to use BlueCat.

I wasn't involved in its deployment. The deployment was done before I joined this organization.

In terms of maintenance, they require us to keep up with upgrades.

It provides a good service and experience. There is a single pane of glass, and Address Manager provides a full view of everything. Most solutions do have that, but the big thing for me is stability and not having any issues for a long time. When we had Infoblox, the remote sites would die pretty often. All of the sudden, the site wouldn't receive IP addresses because the little box at the site died. You have to go and either kill the process completely or reboot the device. That was a problem. I have not seen that with BlueCat. We have more than 15 appliances at different locations, not just a single one. Over the past two years that I've been around, none has gone down.

To someone at an organization who doesn’t think that they need a full-stack, integrated DDI management solution, I would say that in our current situation, for some reason, we ended up not combining DHCP and DNS. We only had the DHCP and then DNS was being done by AD. That caused us a tremendous amount of problems in terms of just integrating systems and so on. So, it would make more sense to have an integrated full stack of it so that it's doing everything that you need instead of having it piecemeal. That became very prominent when we were doing our merger with the new company. They were using the full stack of it, and we were not.

Overall, I'd rate it a 10 out of 10.

It provides us with IPAM, which is managing our address space, along with DNS and DHCP services.

Integrity supplies DNS resolution, which is how everything runs, the devices or host need to resolve a name, and it provides those answers in a quick, orderly fashion and everything is humming in the network. Without it, meaning if things were failing and breaking down, we would be impacted.

There are some RFCs that Integrity abides by so that you can't create records that are not in accordance with RFC standards. Other tools I've seen will let you create those records but Integrity doesn't allow you to do so. You don't make those mistakes.

In addition, there were some areas in our organization where address space was still kept on spreadsheets or that used other tools to support DNS or to manage the address space. Integrity has become the single source of truth for our address space. Using the database within Integrity has given us the ability to create UDFs (user-defined fields) and populate them with additional data that provides security information, devices, and application owners.

In that regard, what's in the database is not Integrity's problem, but it's only as good as what you put into it and remove from it. As long as the data you put in is accurate and, when you decommission things, you remove them, it's fine.

The most valuable feature is its stability. The product is very stable, and that's key.

The tool is also very easy to use and navigate. You do have to have some DNS or IPAM experience, and understand how they work, to navigate.

We are integrating with more and more tools every day, not with a canned solution, but through an open API solution where we're creating calls and writing to Integrity, back and forth.

BlueCat Integrity provides a single pane of glass view of your IP address space when you are a small company. But if you acquire multiple other companies, there are other products on the market that provide a better view than the way BlueCat handles it, although Integrity still does provide that functionality. Our company has been acquired, and has acquired other companies, and we have address conflicts because a company we purchased is using the same address space and it gets very difficult to see it in one view.

The way that Integrity handles it is that it creates multiple configurations and you have to bounce back and forth to see how that address space is being used. It does provide us with a way to manage multiple environments but it requires some additional hardware for some of the Microsoft integration when it comes to handling dynamic updates.

Also, a problem with integrating Integrity with ServiceNow, for example, is that we're in the cloud with ServiceNow, and there is a compatibility issue with that in terms of communicating back and forth.

And one of the big pushes within our organization is multi-factor authentication. Integrity is not up to snuff yet for supporting some of the new standards for multi-factor authentication, specifically on the BDDS.

One more negative is that, 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.

One of the other pieces that has been a sticky point for our organization is some of the API functionality. A lot of it used to be SOAP. In the new versions they're releasing it's going to be RESTful APIs, which is what we were always looking for. It's just taken BlueCat a little bit of time to catch up with some of the other vendors that provided that already.

I've been using BlueCat Integrity for about seven years.

It's kept us pretty much in "the nines". We haven't had any issues with it. There are always the little one-offs and "gotchas", but overall, the product is very stable. It provides the solution that we're looking for.

It's very scalable, based on the hardware you throw at it, like with any product. Typically, you build it for what you have, but when you need to scale up, you need to add more CPUs and memory to the boxes to handle more. It's very easy to scale.

Our Integrity deployment is global. We have multiple instances. The two government entities we work with have their own, independent Integrity environments. We also have one for our legacy environment, which has about 100 BDDSs in it, and we have it in our new organization, which has about 50. The new organization isn't global but the old organization was. So we have about 150 DNS servers deployed globally, handling DNS and DHCP. I expect BlueCat would consider this a medium-sized deployment. I know they have others that are a lot larger than this.

The support is very good. They can provide us with solutions to pretty much any weird requests we come up with. They have supported us on some crazy requests from our business side for things that typically don't come in and we have to reach out to them for advanced services to support them. There are always situations where things are not working as expected and we also work with them when going through upgrades or changes.

We're a company that acquires a lot of other companies. For example, we're integrating an environment that has Infoblox, which is an Integrity competitor. We're taking all of that data, with the help of Integrity's professional services, and importing it into BlueCat and supporting that environment from Blue BlueCat's hardware. And then, we'll decommission the Infoblox appliance so that we have all the IPAM data within one system.

One of the negatives we had with Infoblox was their support. Almost every request that we would submit to them would require a call to our sales group to ask "What's going on? We're not getting support." With BlueCat the difference has been night and day. We have a group of people who specifically look at our account and track our cases and requests.

Our company also supports government environments where we adhere to a lot of STIG (Security Technical Implementation Guide) requirements. The majority of what we work on with BlueCat's advanced services is making sure the system supports these requirements for hardening the system, so that they're not vulnerable in any way. The government has a lot of higher standards than a normal organization.

Positive

When we did switch it was because we were sold on it by the sales team. They stated that they could take our existing data, integrate it easily, and get the environment up. There was also a significant cost difference compared to the other products that were out there. The fact that the price was reasonable compared to some of the others was another driving point.

It was a fairly easy integration. To stand the environment up is very easy. I was the only one involved on our side.

The challenge is getting everybody else to change. When you're talking about 100,000 devices needing to change their DNS entries, that's a little difficult to get done. It takes years, and there are people who read the request but just never get around to doing it. There are ways to overcome some of those things and get everyone to use the product. It's just how much you have to band-aid it to make it work.

Their support services were great. It didn't take long. We reviewed a lot of the data and it was flawless. We were able to cut over everybody using it without any impact. I give kudos to their group.

The solution has reduced our total cost of ownership. With one of the other vendors, the overall cost to replace our existing setup was double, and that's why we didn't go with them.

Overall, it's a decent price for the product. There are other vendors that have support models and costs that are, sometimes, double what BlueCat charges.

We've pretty much used, or looked at, every other product out there.

One of the better things about Integrity is that the underlying code it uses is an ISC DNS and DHCP. It's not like some of the other vendors that have created their own version of DNS. 

For example, Infoblox has its own and things are not OPEN standard. And even Microsoft's DNS is not OPEN standard. There are things that they can do in there that you probably couldn't do in a bind environment, but how it works could be a little quirky. At least with bind, you know what you're working with.

BT Diamond IP is the same thing. They created their own bind version instead of using the standard. What happens there is that you get vulnerabilities on their product, whereas with bind, it's an open standard and you're going to get vulnerabilities and CVEs corrected sooner than later.

In our case, it has been a challenge to make sure we get the correct information. We are using some additional tools to get that corrected. One of the things we've purchased is Forward Networks, which discovers your network and all the devices and all the connections. We are populating Integrity from that data. So if a subnet no longer exists, it will delete it, and if host records are no longer on the network, it will delete them. It will also discover and add subnets that we may not have known about, such as when some remote site has a subnet that is not represented in Integrity.

If someone at an organization doesn't think that they need a full-stack DDI management solution, I would have to ask them how they are handling it now. If you don't have an IPAM solution, and the size of your organization would be a big piece of it to get your return on investment, I can't see how you wouldn't. I know of a company that is managing all of its external zones manually, and there is a team of about four people handling that. They could probably do that with one person if they had the correct setup using Integrity.

We use it for getting an IPAM solution in AWS, which is our first use case. The second use case is we also use it for our on-premise networks to manage the IP ranges. We have distributed all the IP networks, and for DHCP and DNS, we use this software internally for our enterprise network.

We started seeing the benefits of Micetro immediately because as we started using it, we didn't have to go back to the Excel sheets that we were earlier following and then updating as we moved along. If somebody's using it, we could see for DHCP if the IP allocation is getting full or not, and it would give us an alert. If the users are completely using it, then we know that we need to allocate some more IP range to any site, and that really helped us.

The integration that we did is easy to build up for the on-premise network, and everything regarding DHCP was a good experience for the on-premise team that I'm working with in building up the DHCP and the DNS for the on-premise network.

The initial deployment was fairly easy because we started with the DHCP product for the enterprise network, and the experience with that was very good.

They can improve their support for the CDNV application, which is Cloud Discovery and Visibility. I had to chase BlueCat support a lot for this application, and the support was not good. The CDNV application administration documents were not updated, and they are doing it via a containerized architecture, but that didn't work. We faced a lot of issues during the implementation of CDNV for duplicate files and everything during the initial process.

The CDNV application documentation was not good, and also the support should have been better. We faced a lot of issues in getting support and finding the right person who can help us with issues, so that was always a challenge in the past year from the BlueCat team.

With scalability, if I'm planning to scale it to other instances, there are multiple versions of BlueCat running, and if I want to scale it in other regions as well, I need a license, and then all the stuff that comes with it. There were issues when I was working with the team on it concerning the license, the gateway, and how it is going to look.

We've been using the BlueCat DNS, DHCP, and also their Cloud Discovery and Visibility (CDNV) software for two years now.

We have not experienced any instability with Micetro.

With scalability, there is an issue.

They can improve their support for the CDNV application, which is Cloud Discovery and Visibility. I had to chase BlueCat support a lot for this application, and the support was not good.

Neutral

We faced issues, but we did not use any alternatives to Micetro, and we are planning for alternatives right now, looking for possible solutions.

The initial deployment was fairly easy because we started with the DHCP product for the enterprise network, and the experience with that was very good.

It took close to three weeks. It was less than a month, approximately two sprints, but it was fairly easy.

There were three people working on this for the deployment process.

We started seeing the benefits of Micetro immediately because as we started using it, we didn't have to go back to the Excel sheets that we were earlier following and then updating as we moved along.

I don't have much idea on the pricing because that's completely with the vendor and the VPs, and the stakeholders who are buying this product.

We faced issues, but we did not use any alternatives to Micetro, and we are planning for alternatives right now, looking for possible solutions.

If I were to put the support on a scale from one to ten, I would give a score of four.

We are users without any partnerships with BlueCat.

Somebody needs to see how the application is running on it, and it also needs to be updated. The versions of BlueCat need to be updated, and while we faced some challenges there, it went with support.

Overall, I rate Micetro a seven out of ten.

We use it for IPAM, DNS, DHCP, and cloud solutions.

We've enhanced security with the toolset. It has given us a better, real-time jump on issues that might crop up versus an issue that has already arrived and now we have to deal with it. We can catch it a little bit before it goes off, which is great. Other tools, like antivirus or malware, catch it once the machines are trying to download the packages. With DNS, you catch that as it's trying to attempt to go and ask for the download, so it's a couple of steps before, which makes it to be a lot faster in saving a lot of extra work that would be needed.

It provides a single-pane-of-glass view of our IP address space, which is very important for us. It's an item that can be used across the board for multiple teams—from network to platform teams. It's an easy-to-use portion of the toolset that's out there.

We're using its integration with ServiceNow. It's a great integration. We're expanding on those out-of-the-box tools with which integrations are provided. So, we're able to expand our capabilities. We're looking at other automations as well to expand.

It has helped reduce human error. Prior to BlueCat, which was a long time ago, we used to have spreadsheets and notepads of our records of where DNS is, what's being kept, what's not being kept, which networks are available, and which ones aren't available. I've run into some colleagues in other organizations that still do this today, and I'm surprised because we've had a lot of overlaps. We've had machines being built that are stepping on top of other machines. We've had production outages, whereas now with the IPAM capability and the real-time view into it, all those mistakes are pretty much gone. We don't have any overlap. We don't see any other machines taking over IP space from other machines. That's pretty much gone. It provides a great single source of truth for what's in our infrastructure.

It has helped to reduce downtime. When there are issues, a lot of fingers point back to its DNS. With the toolsets and with what's provided in diagnostics, we're able to prove and provide reliable information to lessen an outage in some areas so that they can start concentrating on items other than DNS. We're able to jump in and reroute and move items around to make things move faster.

It has helped to consolidate tools or applications. We rely on multiple Microsoft solutions, Linux, Unix, and Red Hat. We're able to take all that and have that under one umbrella for DNS. We're now able to streamline that type of configuration.

It has freed up our IT staff for other projects. The resiliency that it provides had me focus on being able to do other work for DNS or other tasks that are assigned to me outside of DNS. If we were looking at it in terms of manpower, it has saved about one manpower's worth of work for a year.

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.

From the time that I've been using it and the input that I've been having into their engineering, they're very flexible in seeing what the issues are. They're very flexible in working on new changes within the product. I've had great input on issues that we've run into in our world when using their products.

The ease of use is where I got to give a little knock on them. Once you start using the tool, it becomes very easy. It's actually quite easy to use. The problem that I run into is documentation. The documentation could be a little bit richer. Documentation has always been a little pet peeve for me with them.

Sometimes the documentation does not really show real-world applications. Need to get tickets into support to get more details on how an item is supposed to operate or some CLI sequence may be missing in the docs.  

I am hoping to see an improved robust process to mass import/export IPAM data in their next major release.

We've been a customer of BlueCat since about 2013.

It's very stable. We've only run into one issue this past week and a half ago. We had roughly two outages all this time, and it was the second outage. That was due to a bug not in BlueCat software but in the underlying Linux bind. We actually hit it, and we were able to work around it and fix the issue and get moving again. In ten years, there were only two outages, so the system is very stable.

It scales very well. We're able to move and change things on the fly. We're able to bring up, bring down, not lose a beat, and still be in production without issues.

They're hands down fabulous. They're there in a pinch. We use their enterprise solution for support, and they are top-notch. I can't say anything wrong with them. They're there when you need them.

You have to work out a schedule with them. They just don't sit there and wait for Dave Muscat's call. Just put it that way. I have to schedule it with them, but they're there. In some cases, when we have issues where some people contact me with problems, or our customers need to have something resolved, and I'm not hitting it, I put in a ticket. It's a quick and easy process.

They're usually pretty good at responding. They sometimes respond within 15 to 20 minutes. They're sometimes a lot better than what they put out there in their SLA. We're on the phone talking quickly. In our outage situation that we had last week, within minutes, there was already an email with a link in there to jump on a call so we can start working on the issue. I'd rate them an eight out of ten.

In terms of comparing their support with the support for our previous solution, the previous solution that we had was a free Microsoft solution, so there was no support tied to that. That was just us and googling.

Positive

We had a mixture of many products. It was Windows, Sun Solaris, and spreadsheets. 

We used to be part of a division of another company, and we were being sold off into our own company. I happened to raise my hand at a meeting with only a couple of weeks left to go before the actual cutoff date. I asked what we are doing for DNS. I was told that we just put a bunch of machines together to which I said no. You don't just put a bunch of machines together. You have to have a hierarchy of a solution. There was a third-party management company that was managing our separation, and they formed a little group that looked at three different products, and BlueCat won that process.

In terms of the deployment model, we have both environments. We're on-prem with all virtual servers, and we're also in the cloud. It's an Azure cloud, but it's private to us.

Ease of deployment is there once you work out the nuances of the documentation. Once you read between the lines, It goes quite well. Deploying virtual machines is a very easy process. They've really matured in deployments of their DNS Edge solution and patching.

In terms of the deployment duration, technically, we're still deploying after all these years. When we first launched the project, the initial deployment and cutover were in the vicinity of 12 to 18 months because of the sheer amount of data that we needed to migrate. We were working with all the teams. We're in the healthcare field, so there were a lot of HIPAA regulations and time frames based on the contracts we had.

Only I was involved in its deployment. Its original deployment and any subsequent deployment were done by me. I finally got my first person to help me this week.

When it comes to maintenance, I do have a group of three guys in India. They take care of patching, and they take care of the upgrades. They take care of the low-level tickets that come in and get generated in our ServiceNow platform. They handle requests to add or remove a record.

Our outage levels have gone down to almost nothing. We're roughly 99.8% outage free at this point in time since using the product. We've only had two medium-sized outages, and neither one of those outages caused an outage. It has been reliable enough.

I can sleep at night. I haven't said that about any other product I've dealt with, whether it's Microsoft, Linux, Cisco, or anything of that nature. I can sleep at night knowing the type of redundancies and configurations that have been put in place and the collaborative engineering work that we and BlueCat have put together to make things solid for us.

They're competitive. The way they run their model is good. Could it stand some tweaking? Sure. There are some items there. One of the things I looked at in the recent past was their container solutions. You have to pay for licensing to use their containerized platform, but the licensing doesn't include the container licensing itself. I'd love to be able to have one big package per se.

They were flexible with us. We were in a model at the time where we owned the licenses, and as time progressed forward with the product, we're now in a subscription-based model, which makes it easier for us to move the product around the way we need to use it. It has made that easier for us.

I've never been the person who brings numbers into the equation when I'm dealing with the product. So, I don't know about the total cost of ownership, but according to me, it's well worth every dime we pay for it. It has streamlined our business across the board.

We evaluated Men&Mice and Infoblox. BlueCat won that process just for ease of use and ease of installation. We were also not looking at solutions that would sit on top of a Microsoft product at the time.

Make sure you have your data available. You should have your IPAM data and your DNS data. You need to be able to bring it in, so you need to have a mechanism to pull that. You can test the solution, probably in a small VMware environment. It doesn't have to be cloud. It doesn't have to be anything elaborate. If you have a small lab, you can probably throw this together.

To someone at an organization who doesn’t think that they need a full-stack, integrated DDI management solution, I'd say that I don't care how big or how small an organization you are. You need some type of solution to manage your network. You need to have at least some type of IPAM. You need something that's going to keep track of your network space and your DNS space. You need to be able to look at it at a glance and be able to manage those systems and make changes on the fly. Whether you're a small school or a small business, you need to have something.

Overall, I'd rate it a nine out of ten. The reason why I rate it a nine is the documentation. I've always had problems with their documentation.

We would like to utilize BlueCat Integrity to initiate operations in multiple regions, aiming to establish a disaster recovery, scalability, and resilience plan for the APAC and MA regions.

BlueCat Integrity is user-friendly, thanks to its powerful API. Our technicians appreciate the solution's excellent graphical interface, which makes it easy to comprehend.

BlueCat Integrity is flexible, fast, and quite optimized.

Currently, our company is satisfied with BlueCat Integrity, which has granted us peace of mind. 

The most valuable features are scalability and cloud infrastructure.

During our testing phase, we encountered some issues with Active Directory and DNS reverse lookups.

I have evaluated BlueCat Integrity and will be implementing it in July. 

In the limited contact I have had with BlueCat Integrity's support, they have been excellent.

Positive

We previously utilized Microsoft on-premises, but we transitioned to BlueCat Integrity for cloud support.

The deployment process is straightforward. We intend to deploy based on regions and site types, such as forward operating bases, followed by administrative offices, headquarters, warehouses, and finally factories or plants.

Our management decided that there is a return on investment and that is why they have decided to move forward with BlueCat Integrity.

BlueCat Integrity meets our expectations and aligns with our budget forecast.

We evaluated Infoblox and chose BlueCat Integrity because it uses fewer resources and offers a better price. We appreciate their support and consulting services, as they understand that BlueCat Integrity is not widely known in the world due to being newer in the market. However, they compensate for this by providing effective consulting services that offer proof of concept and demonstrate value.

I give BlueCat Integrity a ten out of ten.

I suggest that any organization which doesn't believe they require a comprehensive, integrated DDI management solution should consider utilizing the consultation services offered by BlueCat Integrity. This will help them understand the value it brings.

I recommend that organizations try BlueCat Integrity, as they will love it.

We primarily use BlueCat Integrity for DNS purposes internally. 

We deployed BlueCat Integrity using a hybrid model because many of our applications are finance-related. This product helps us to secure those applications and always helped our internal applications to work in secure environment.

BlueCat Integrity is very user-friendly. Its interface is easy to navigate and has all the features we were looking for, compared to other vendors. This made it easier for us to manage and deploy in our complex environment, which includes multiple domains and acquired companies.

We have integrated ServiceNow with our DNS server. If any alerts are created or any issues are detected, we receive an alert directly in ServiceNow, which is then routed to a specific team.

BlueCat Integrity provides a single pane of glass view of our IP addresses, which is useful for our organization. We sometimes lose track of which IP address range is assigned to which server or team, but BlueCat Integrity keeps track of everything for us, making it easy to see at a glance which IP addresses are assigned to Team A or Team B for example.

BlueCat Integrity helps to prevent human error. If we enter incorrect information, such as an incorrect subnet, BlueCat Integrity displays a pop-up message stating that the information is incorrect and that we should recheck the configuration. This is an add-on feature that is not available in other solutions.

It has helped us reduce downtime. When we used Windows DNS, we had many issues, such as the server hanging occasionally. We had to reboot the entire server during production hours, which caused major incidents. BlueCat Integrity has minimized these incidents, and we now have zero downtime. Nothing has happened on our site since we implemented it. All major incident calls have been eliminated.

BlueCat Integrity helped us consolidate by eliminating our old DNS server, which we used to track command-line or third-party utilities. This saved us costs, as we no longer need to purchase licenses for those tools. Everything is now visible through BlueCat Integrity.

It helps us free up staff time. With our old DNS system, we had to engage all of our staff many times, such as at midnight, during the day, or operations. This took a lot of time for us to process the product queue. For example, if I wanted to send someone on training, I had to cancel it because of these issues. But now, 

We have peace of mind because we no longer receive major incident calls late at night or early in the morning.

DNS aliases, which we use extensively in our applications are a valuable feature. We simply provide the alias to users, and they cannot see the real IP address or DNS name. This feature is specific to each application and is very powerful for us.

- DNS load balancing features for A records for most of clusters we use for GoAnywhere MFT applications.

I would like the GUI to be similar to AWS and Azure, where we can simply click on an item to expand it and see all the information on one page, without having to click to the next page.

I have been using BlueCat Integrity for over 12 years.

BlueCat Integrity was down only once in the last year for a security patch.

We have not had any issues with the scalability of BlueCat Integrity. We have already implemented a load-balancing solution with seven appliances, so if we need to replace one, the others will take over. We have the same setup in staging, development, and lab environments. We test all new changes in the lab environment before moving them to staging and then to production. This is a very well-balanced product.

Awesome customer service from BlueCAT whenever we needed. 

Positive

Originally, we used Microsoft DNS, but it had many problems. We had to purchase and constantly monitor many tools with Microsoft. If we skipped an option during configuration, we would continue to receive error messages, and we would have to check the event logs to keep track of those errors. BlueCat Integrity is very easy to manage, so we chose it.

Multiple teams were involved in the step-by-step implementation. The infrastructure architecture team analyzed the requirements and then passed them to us for the proof of concept. Once the POC was completed, we implemented the changes in the development environment, then in the staging environment, and finally in the production environment.

With the help of BlueCat support , internal team implemented as a team work.

Our management very happy with BlueCAT supports and services.

We worked closed with our BlueCat TAM and work on cost and pricing based on our business partners requirement.

We evaluated BlueCat Integrity and other vendors and found that BlueCat Integrity was one of the most reliable options in terms of both security and administration. Their support team was also helpful and quick.

I give BlueCat Integrity a ten out of ten.

BlueCat Integrity does not require maintenance. There are no specific patches and the solution updates automatically so we don't have any additional downtime.

The value and security that BlueCat Integrity adds to an organization demonstrates the value of a full-stack integrated DDI management solution.

BlueCat Integrity is the most reliable DDI solution with awesome customer support. Whenever we have any issues or urgent customer or business needs, they are always there to help. We call them and they immediately start working on the issue, and they come up with a solution quickly. We can usually implement the solution within one or two days. Their customer support is that good.

We use BlueCat Integrity for IP networking.

BlueCat Integrity is easy to learn and use. It provides a single pane of glass view for our IP address space. The Single pane of glass is important because it allows us to manage our large environment in one place.

It has helped reduce human error by 70 percent and has helped reduce downtime by 80 percent.

We have been able to free up staff time to focus on other projects and tasks.

BlueCat Integrity's automation capabilities saved us around 80 percent of our time.

It has improved our network stability and has saved us around 40 percent of our costs.

BlueCat Integrity's scalability and user-friendliness are the most valuable features.

BlueCat Integrity can improve by increasing the amount of updates it releases.

I have been using BlueCat Integrity for two years.

I would rate the stability of BlueCat Integrity ten out of ten.

I would rate the scalability of BlueCat Integrity ten out of ten.

BlueCat's technical support is knowledgeable and quick to respond.

Positive

The initial deployment is straightforward.

BlueCat Integrity is affordable.

I would rate BlueCat Integrity nine out of ten.

We have five users within our organization.

Our client is an enterprise organization.

I recommend BlueCat Integrity to others.