BlueCat Integrity Reviews

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. 

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 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 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.

We use BlueCat Integrity to have visibility into our address management.

BlueCat Integrity is fairly straightforward. I have been using it myself for quite a long time. The actual user interface is a little dated, but that is being addressed in the upcoming release.

BlueCat Integrity provides a single-pane-of-glass view of our IP address space, which is important for our organization to see what is being utilized.

For the six years we have been using BlueCat Integrity, we have begun to transition from Microsoft to BlueCat DHCP and DNS. The ability to easily view our options and zones is a significant improvement over our previous approach. The user interface has improved over time, but it is still somewhat dated. A major UI overhaul is planned for release 10, which is scheduled for release next spring.

BlueCat Integrity can help reduce human error by pushing changes to multiple places with only one human input, reducing the likelihood of errors. Compared to our previous solution, BlueCat has reduced human errors by 25 percent.

BlueCat Integrity has not really helped us consolidate any tools. We were already using one Microsoft tool, and now we are using one BlueCat tool, with the advantage of only having to use one interface with BlueCat Integrity versus multiple with Microsoft.

BlueCat Integrity is a solid product. It does not have flashy features, but it is reliable and we have few problems with it. BlueCat does a good job of keeping the product up-to-date with security patches and updates. BlueCat Integrity provides us with flexibility and visibility that we did not have before.

The most important improvement is that it would be nice to have more built-in tools for bulk updates and bulk changes. I understand that there are APIs for this, but that requires coding skills. I am no longer a coder, so it would be helpful to have built-in tools for imports and other tasks.

The UI is outdated and needs a modern refresh.

The RFC is over 25 years old, and some record types have become obsolete. I would like newer DNS record types, even if they are not part of the RFC.

I have been using BlueCat Integrity for six years.

We originally used Microsoft for DHCP, DNS, and IP address management. We have since migrated to BlueCat Integrity for better visibility into our address management. Multiple people are able to manage using BlueCat Integrity.

The initial deployment was straightforward. The basic deployment took one month, but the full deployment with the server took around six months and was completed by two people.

Originally, we compared BlueCat Integrity to other products. It was not the cheapest nor the most expensive solution, but it was among the more expensive ones. Overall, I would say that it is priced fairly, though perhaps a bit on the high side.

I would rate BlueCat Integrity eight out of ten.

BlueCat Integrity is deployed in our corporate environment across multiple locations around the world.

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 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.

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.

It primarily serves as our DNS solution.

The insight into the overall health of our network, particularly in terms of DNS functionality, is positive. This visibility proves invaluable when troubleshooting and resolving issues. It provides a holistic view, including information on DNS and DHCP services, making it a thorough and effective tool for monitoring and managing DNS functionality.

DNS security is safeguarded comprehensively from end to end.

It offers a unified view of our IP address space through a single pane of glass. Whether using IPM or Integrity with DNS, you can easily correlate and match all assigned IPs with the DNS configuration. This integration ensures that each IP address in IPM corresponds to a DNS name, providing comprehensive visibility.

It has been seamlessly integrated with various IT operation manager platforms, including SolarWinds. While it might not be accurate to label the integration with Integrity as direct, it's apt to say that our BlueCat solution is monitored by SolarWinds. Additionally, for internet access, such as reaching domains like Google.com, we rely on Cisco Umbrella.

It helped us in minimizing human errors by facilitating automation through the use of scripts.

The design with BlueCat ensures minimal downtime as it is highly redundant. In the event of a server failure, multiple servers seamlessly handle the traffic, making the occurrence of downtime highly improbable.

It did not contribute to the consolidation of any previously used tools or applications.

It assisted in saving time for other projects.

One of the standout features of BlueCat is its foundation on Linux, making it one of the earliest DNS solutions. This inherent stability, derived from its Linux-based architecture, provides a well-established and reliable platform. Once you become familiar with the technology, managing it becomes straightforward.

It primarily supports DNS high availability failover when the servers share the same subnet. 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. In such cases, setting up high availability becomes challenging, often requiring manual failovers.

We have been using it for approximately five months.

There were no stability issues.

It provides good scalability capabilities.

I am satisfied with its customer service and support. I would rate it eight out of ten.

We were using NS-1 previously but decided to switch, primarily because IBM acquired the company, and subsequently, they discontinued the solution.

The initial setup was somewhat challenging, but it wasn't overly difficult.

The deployment process spanned approximately two months. The overall project required four resources, including roles such as design and project management, to complete it.

I am not sure about the exact pricing, but I believe their cost is lower compared to Infoblox.

The previous solution reached its end, leading the vendor to discontinue the service. During the customer review, we evaluated options between BlueCat and Infoblox.

For a medium-sized company, having a DNS solution is essential. Whether it's BlueCat, Infoblox, or another option, it's crucial for smooth operations. While it's technically possible to work with Linux Spine or other solutions like F5 DNS, they are often challenging to manage due to the absence of a graphical user interface. Having a dedicated DNS solution tailored for medium-sized companies, like BlueCat, is indispensable for scalability and efficiency. Before implementing BlueCat, it's advisable to ensure that employees undergo training. You may consider requesting an evaluation license from BlueCat to set up a lab for training resources dedicated to working on the BlueCat DNS solution. Additionally, exploring a POC could be beneficial. Overall, I would rate it nine out of ten.

The purpose of the solution is to provide DNS, DHCP, and icon services for the corporation and all subsidiaries. 

I like that it's a single source of truth for us. We automate against it. We use APIs against it due to the fact that it is where the data is. The solution provides a single pane of glass view. And we use it as a single source of truth. It’s crucial for us.

It’s flexible. The tool can certainly be customized to no end. You can make a lot of stuff work if you're willing to divert from the standard options, which of course then brings the risk that you're not running the planned configuration. We have a few border cases, so we actually do that.

The solution helped our organization reduce downtime. Compared to where it was before, even if it's a very theoretical question, I’d say the downtime has decreased.

BlueCat Integrity helped us consolidate tools or applications. Through an API and having the data there we were able to build some tools that have allowed us to get rid of a lot of other tools.

It is not that easy to use. It's not rocket science, however, even compared to other products in the BlueCat portfolio, it's one of the most complicated.

The big downside of the customization is when there are new releases and you have to customize all of it again since you’ve diverted from the standard.

One of my biggest criticisms is that you need additional pieces of software. Competitors have a lot of these things built into one solution. BlueCat doesn't. I need additional resources to actually do things. You actually need a lot of add-ons from the solution's portfolio. While some of them are provided, most you have to pay for separately. In reality, they should just be part of the product.

The reporting capabilities need improvement. It holds a lot of information, and that information is easily accessible in the tool and through API. However, for instance, the moment anybody who is not a user of the product asks me for some information and I just want to run a report to hand back to them or something like that, it gets utterly complicated. 

Quite a few times we have not been able to pull reports out of the tool and provide them.  

Usability needs to be better. The main structure basically hasn't changed in years. It's got a bit polished, however, it doesn't really have a modern UI-based tool. That said, the product is being used by IT professionals. Still, sometimes the old design makes things unnecessary and difficult.

I've been using the solution for four years now. 

BlueCat is stable. 

The solution is scalable in multiple ways. There are lots of ways to scale. 

While we did not exactly use anything else from the DDI side, we were using Windows DNS.

The main reason for the adoption of this product was to have one centralized management system. That was one of the key drivers. Also, we wanted visibility and stability for having that single source of truth.

We're running one special environment that is fully deployed in the cloud, and our main environment is deployed on-prem remotely.

It's easy to deploy on-prem and even easier to deploy the cloud version. Our migration team deployed the solution. They were comprised of three people. It took us a year to deploy, however, we had to make the whole transition to remote work first. 

We use the solution globally. We have it across a few production campus facilities and 25 subsidiaries globally. 

We have to run the updates. We're on our own for that. We basically do the data. When we get the notifications, we go into scheduling the when, what, and how internal testing will take place. We plan to do all of this in-house.

Of course, we have to monitor the devices themselves. They sometimes act up, and sometimes the product does not report certain issues efficiently and then we have to dig into the log file. There is a lot of proactive maintenance in that regard. The good thing is that the product is so standardized and open. At the end of the day, of course, I would prefer not to have to do it. 

BlueCat helped with implementation. During the design phase, we had some workshops with them and they provided good insights and best practices.

We have witnessed an ROI while using the product. The ROI mainly comes from the initiative itself, including centralizing data and having automated server deployment. We've saved money across a variety of products, so it's hard to pinpoint an exact number. 

We are paying for an enterprise license. I'm not aware of the exact cost. The pricing, as far as I understand it, is fair. It's not cheap and also not expensive. 

We use the API to do certain calls, however, not with ServiceNow or any other ITSM. It's more for other really technical tools that need specific kinds of information. We don’t really do integrations.

To anyone at an organization who doesn't think they need a full stack integrated management solution, I'd say, actually, this is an absolute must-have. Automation really is the biggest driver. I could not see how someone could ever do any meaningful automation without having this kind of platform. Also in terms of security, it's important for security initiatives. You simply need to have the visibility of your network. That's another big one. 

If a person is interested in the solution, it's important to evaluate the product. Look for a reference customer and dig into the possibilities of the product.

I'd rate the solution eight out of ten.