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IBM NS1 Connect pros and cons

Vendor: IBM

4.8 out of 5

11 reviews
100% willing to recommend

Pros & Cons summary

IBM NS1 Connect features geo-load balancing, geo-fencing, and low latency DNS queries, enhancing user experience and reliability. Its API-first approach and managed DNS capabilities enable automation and sophisticated traffic steering. Integration with observability platforms aids in traffic management. However, testing capabilities, monitoring reliability, and client setup complexity need improvement, and a simpler API agent and executive-level reporting dashboard are needed for better operational efficiency.

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Prominent pros & cons

PROS

Filter Chain in IBM NS1 Connect allows for effective geo-load balancing and geo-fencing, enhancing user redirection and content delivery based on geographical data.

Low latency access to DNS queries in IBM NS1 Connect significantly boosts customer experience by rendering content on pages more quickly than industry standards.

Observability features in IBM NS1 Connect facilitate comprehensive traffic behavior monitoring and rapid adaptation to changes, which improves overall traffic management and system reliability.

API-first approach of IBM NS1 Connect aids in extensive automation and metrics collection, streamlining DNS and application traffic management.

Integration with Terraform in IBM NS1 Connect simplifies infrastructure deployment, allowing for automatic DNS configuration and management.

CONS

IBM NS1 Connect's monitoring and telemetry system has issues with false positives, although they are working on improvements.

The geo load balancing language and Filter Chain setup can be challenging to understand initially.

There are requests for IBM NS1 Connect to provide easier, more reliable testing capabilities such as a simulate-filter feature.

The complexity of setting up NS1's client solution is noted, with a preference for a simpler API agent.

There is a demand for executive-level focused reporting and dashboard solutions to better utilize the reporting metrics.

IBM NS1 Connect Pros review quotes

SM

Sargurunathan Mohan

Technical Lead - Production Engineer at a media company with 1,001-5,000 employees

Jun 24, 2021

The Filter Chain is one of the most valuable features, for geo-load balancing and geo-fencing. The Filter Chain is the most useful because it allows us to do several things. With geo-fencing we can redirect a particular user to a particular answer. That's very valuable for us. Filter Chains with monitoring is our strategy to provide redundancy.

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JM

VP of Technical Operations and Devops at a consultancy with 5,001-10,000 employees

Jul 29, 2021

We find that the low latency access to DNS queries has a direct effect on the customer experience. Visiting a site, whether it's an AdTech-based solution or marketing tech, the fact that whatever we're rendering on a page can be rendered better than the industry standard, in terms of time, ensures a better user experience.

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VP Information Technology & Cyber at a computer software company with 1,001-5,000 employees

Aug 30, 2021

Everything we download into our observability platform so that we can also track any changes in traffic behavior or things like that is also something that we use quite a lot. I'd say traffic management, the speed of updates, and observability are the top three things that we use.

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KS

Engineering Manager at a computer software company with 1,001-5,000 employees

Sep 2, 2021

Monitoring is really important for us. We really care about reliability, and we want to make sure that we can remove some points of presence in our sector and in our edge network really fast when we experience any problems. So, monitoring that NS1 provides for DNS is really important for us.

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reviewer1689438

Director of Site Reliability Engineering at a media company with 1,001-5,000 employees

Oct 7, 2021

The fact that it's an API-first platform for DNS and application traffic management is one of the reasons we looked into NS1. We use it for a lot of automation and metrics gathering and it's been great.

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Valentino Volonghi

Chief Technology Officer at a tech vendor with 501-1,000 employees

Feb 15, 2022

For starters, it integrates with Terraform and a lot of our infrastructure is effectively built out using Terraform. That makes all this stuff extremely easy... when we deploy, all the entries are created and configuration is done.

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VP of Infrastructure & Security at Algolia

Mar 4, 2022

We leverage two things from Managed DNS that we couldn't do with any other solution. One is their filter chain technology, which allows us to shift some of the intelligence we need for the traffic steering to the DNS. The second one is data sources, which enables us to manipulate multiple records simultaneously using NS1's internal message DOS. In our case, we are trying to direct the traffic in over 150,000 different NS1 records to an arbitrary set of repeating responses.

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Head of Reliability Engineering at a financial services firm with 201-500 employees

Feb 16, 2022

It massively speeds things up. Today, we allow developers to deploy services and have externally facing DNS scrapers that are created automatically without the addition of human intervention.

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Principal Engineer at Hudl

Jul 21, 2022

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

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Senior Network Systems Engineer at McKesson

Jun 8, 2022

The provisioning is great. They have an API service that is simple to use and very quick. The changes that we make are replicated worldwide in a matter of usually milliseconds, sometimes seconds. They are done very rapidly. That's something that's obviously priceless when we're dealing with things like DNS.

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IBM NS1 Connect Cons review quotes

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Sargurunathan Mohan

Technical Lead - Production Engineer at a media company with 1,001-5,000 employees

Jun 24, 2021

The Filter Chain simulation is really good in the UI, but it would be nice to have something similar in the API so that we could simulate and test things before we deploy them.

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JM

VP of Technical Operations and Devops at a consultancy with 5,001-10,000 employees

Jul 29, 2021

We would really like them to become a DNS registrar.

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VP Information Technology & Cyber at a computer software company with 1,001-5,000 employees

Aug 30, 2021

There could maybe be additional ways to manage traffic. There are no major improvements we're looking for. It's a very complete solution.

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IBM NS1 Connect

Free Report: IBM NS1 Connect Reviews and More

Learn what your peers think about IBM NS1 Connect. Get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions. Updated: January 2026.

881,082 professionals have used our research since 2012.

KS

Engineering Manager at a computer software company with 1,001-5,000 employees

Sep 2, 2021

We care about monitoring and telemetry work, and NS1 provides a pretty good system for monitoring. We can monitor our endpoints and points of presence around the world. If there are any issues, we can easily remove them from our network, but this area needs some improvement because it is not always reliable in NS1. In the past, we had a number of false-positive cases when the monitoring system told us about some problems in our infrastructure that were not true. NS1 is improving the system, and we are constantly talking about this with them. I know that they are releasing a new version of their monitoring system, which is really important for us, but this is a different area where we would expect them to improve.

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reviewer1689438

Director of Site Reliability Engineering at a media company with 1,001-5,000 employees

Oct 7, 2021

I would like to see the UI updated to allow me to do finer searches. I would also like to have the ability to get reports that can sort based on various metrics. For example, I would like to be able to say, "Show me the top 10 records by total queries" in an easy-to-digest format.

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Valentino Volonghi

Chief Technology Officer at a tech vendor with 501-1,000 employees

Feb 15, 2022

We use the geo load balancing functionality and there are a couple of things that are helpful there. But the language itself is something we had to get used to a little bit. Some of my folks made a few mistakes in rolling out the Filter Chain...The Filter Chain setup is a bit hard to grasp at first. It would also be nice to have a way to simulate changes in addition to staging.

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VP of Infrastructure & Security at Algolia

Mar 4, 2022

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

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Head of Reliability Engineering at a financial services firm with 201-500 employees

Feb 16, 2022

We use our client in our infrastructure to communicate with NS1. This client is a bit complex in the way that it is set up. NS1 has their own client solution that you can deploy into your platform to do this, but even that is a bit complex. So, I would like a very simple, thin, light API agent that we can deploy into our platform to communicate with NS1. That would be welcome.

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Principal Engineer at Hudl

Jul 21, 2022

I would love to see improvement in the testing capabilities they provide. They have a simulate-filter feature so that you can simulate how your traffic would flow, based on their Filter Chains. I believe that was shut off for quite some time. Having that as a way to test our load-balanced CDN structure would be fantastic.

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Senior Network Systems Engineer at McKesson

Jun 8, 2022

The reporting metrics are great from an API standpoint, but it would be a little bit nicer if there was some type of dashboard around that. There should also be some type of reporting that's more executive-level focused.

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