BlueCat DNS and DHCP Server for AWS

My main use case for BlueCat Integrity is monitoring firewall status. We use BlueCat Integrity for watching CPU utilization, memory, and disk. Generally, we are using it for health checks and live checks.

BlueCat Integrity positively impacts our organization because it helps us take quick action. For example, when a core dump is created, the Indeni alerting sends an email and can suggest a solution for us, helping us quickly decide about the firewall.

The best feature is the BlueCat support team globally, as they work very well. The integrity with LDAP connection and the alert connections with email are working well. Those alert connections help our team day-to-day. For example, we have an alert from Check Point firewall, and we have integrated it with Check Point products, all products with MDS and CMA, which are Check Point's firewall management systems.

A specific example where BlueCat Integrity helped our team save time is when we checked the core dump file. Although the firewall deleted the file, Indeni sent us a log, and we understood which process crashed. Indeni helps us with that. Indeni automatically fetches servers for us through IP scanning.

I chose a rating of nine out of ten because I think the surface can be much more improved. Of course, maybe I could give a ten, but sometimes my customers have a problem with Indeni. I have already discussed that, for example, Indeni gets some data from different commands, but the real command on the firewall side is different, so sometimes we have to double-check whether Indeni's result is true or false.

For example, when we check the logs sent by email from Indeni, some output like the memory output was different from the real memory usage on the firewall. BlueCat sent us an email, and when we checked that, BlueCat sent us the general memory usage, but we need to know system memory usage.

I have been using BlueCat Integrity for three years.

BlueCat Integrity is stable.

Generally, BlueCat Integrity's scalability is good.

Customer support is very good.

I did not use a different solution before. We are working with Indeni and trust them.

We have seen a return on investment as it provides us with fewer employees needed.

I think the pricing is not cheap.

I did not evaluate other options before choosing BlueCat Integrity.

BlueCat Integrity is easy to use.

BlueCat Integrity has helped reduce human error for our team.

BlueCat Integrity has helped our organization reduce downtime, and we saved a significant amount of time because of it. It has helped with critical items like core dumps, crash files, and CPU spikes. Indeni can check these files and share their locations with us, allowing us to quickly check files as Indeni suggests. If that file really happened, we share it with the product owner, and they help us quickly.

BlueCat Integrity performs very well in supporting hybrid infrastructures, and I can highly recommend it to other product owners, as it shows very good performance on both on-premises systems and in the cloud.

Some advice for those looking into using BlueCat Integrity is that it works very stably and can provide us with quick returns from the systems. BlueCat checks system status live, and if it catches a problem, it helps us know what is wrong and responds quickly. I would rate BlueCat Integrity a nine out of ten overall.

A specific example of how I use BlueCat Integrity to manage the DDI environment for my customers is when a customer calls and wants additional IPs to figure in their network along with DNS records. We use BlueCat Integrity for assigning IP addresses and also providing records for DNS, A records, PTR records, C names, and other DNS-related services.

In addition to managing IPs and records, we also do monitoring reports, whether they are weekly or monthly reports, but monitoring is conducted 24/7.

Regarding the detailed search engine, I find it saves time, reduces chances of making errors, and is very convenient, making it easier for everyone to work and be more productive.

BlueCat Integrity has positively impacted our organization by allowing us to do our job in a timely manner, making customers happy, reflecting the overall performance of our company, and receiving great feedback, which results in more business and trustworthiness with customers, whether they are existing or new.

As I mentioned, since it is fairly new, we will definitely work with BlueCat based on what we discover going forward by using it day by day. For now, it is performing well and gives us what we need, but I will definitely provide feedback in the future.

I would rate customer support a 10 because they are always ready to help, whether it will be through phone calls, support tickets, or portal, which makes it a great company to work with.

For our private cloud, we have our own product that we are developing right now, but we have used Microsoft before and Amazon in the past.

BlueCat Integrity is easy to use based on my experience because it is very intuitive, thanks to the features and the great development that they have done with it, making it fairly easy to use since you have a lot of features and capabilities that I find really useful.

BlueCat Integrity has indeed reduced human error, probably by 90%, because they have done a great job of simplifying everything, meaning there are a lot of features that you can check for errors, and it will not let you make any errors.

We are working towards consolidating some tools or applications for our customers with BlueCat Integrity, but we are still in the phase of developing or working with it.

BlueCat Integrity has helped free up our IT staff for other projects. It saves a lot of time because it has great features, allowing our team to work on a project bringing new customers on board, with less personnel working on DDI day-to-day operations.

The key drivers for moving to BlueCat were automation initiatives, security incidents, and application modernization. Automation initiative, security incidents, and application modernization played a huge role in our decision to move to BlueCat because our company deals with a lot of requests and special orders from customers. Automation is crucial in providing services; security incidents help us navigate difficult challenges, and application modernization definitely allows us to provide better service without errors or downtime.

I advise others looking into using BlueCat Integrity to consider it because it is the best product in the market right now based on my experience. If you need something that looks into details, minimizes costs, and provides customers with fewer errors or no errors, I would recommend BlueCat Integrity for their companies. I would rate this review a 9 overall.

BlueCat Integrity's primary use case includes DDI records in my day-to-day work. To be specific, I manage DDI DNS records, modify, create, and delete DNS zones and sub-zones, then handle DHCP reservations, and process tickets that come through.

The monitoring capabilities in BlueCat Integrity are exceptional; everything is available and easy to access. There are options where you can quickly check the syslog and other resources, making troubleshooting straightforward.

Bluecat Integrity is very user-friendly, and all the options are integrated and clear, which is one of the things I appreciate about it. There are shortcuts for creating DNS entries in BlueCat Integrity, and this automatically generates PTR records while also validating whether the IPs are in use. Those capabilities are very easy to demonstrate and implement; they are visible on the screen. I have used other DDI tools such as VitalQIP, and those are not this easy and user-friendly.

Bluecat Integrity is very useful when I am troubleshooting an incident, saving significant time when I review logs and everything. I can quickly track the audit log, which is really valuable. The UI is structured very logically, and the configuration hierarchy is straightforward. The network blocks and zones are clearly organized, which is something I appreciate. Additionally, the permissions and roles help separate administration responsibilities, which is also a great feature. Overall, the integration between DNS, DHCP, and IPAM combined with the centralized visibility and control works well for my day-to-day DDI operations.

One thing that I miss in BlueCat Integrity is that for a DDI record that is added and deleted, in InfoBlox, you do not usually need to deploy; it just gets added and everything processes automatically. Here you have to deploy the server responsible for that zone, so that is an area that could be improved if possible. The other thing is that managing PTR records and the reverse zone is much simpler in InfoBlox than in BlueCat Integrity, so that aspect is something that could be improved.

BlueCat Integrity is stable.

Regarding scalability, I would say it is one of the strong areas from my experience.

The customer support is great.

In my previous organization, I was using different DDI tools, but here BlueCat Integrity has been used from the beginning. When I had a discussion with the management, they evaluated TCPwave, EfficientIP, and also checked InfoBlox before settling with BlueCat Integrity.

My advice to organizations considering BlueCat Integrity is to have a clear understanding of their DNS, DHCP, IPAM architecture and operational process before any implementation or switching of tools. BlueCAT Integrity works very well in environments where management is centralized, and visibility and governance are important, especially for medium to large enterprise networks; for small enterprises, I do not think it is that useful. I would rate this product an eight out of ten.

I work as a SOC for DDI. I have been working in this domain for the last nine years, and my total experience is 12 years. I have been using BlueCat Integrity to host our DDI services for one of our elite customers in the aviation industry. We use BlueCat Integrity to manage internal domains, domain records, and their zones, and we are managing their DHCP scopes for more than 170 sites. We used BlueCat Integrity over Infoblox solution to migrate all the services from Infoblox's legacy solution to BlueCat Integrity.

BlueCat Integrity is a straightforward tool that supports all the basic requirements to host DDI services. One of the best features is its ability to have at least three BAM servers in a redundancy failover setup, which really helped to make the BAM highly resilient. In case two of your main sites go down, it can failover to the third site, which is very effective in case of a disaster recovery. Overall, BlueCat support is also good. We received relevant support from the BlueCat product team for whatever issues we faced during the implementation of the product, and it was up to the mark.

BlueCat Integrity supports automation via REST API, with which we were able to automate the standard DNS workflow request by using Python scripts in which API V2 version was very helpful. They have a built-in Swagger portal which helps to simulate API calls, and using that, it was pretty easy to design the framework and the code to implement DNS automation.

BlueCat Integrity has really brought a positive impact on the new environment because the ease of implementation and the support from the product team was very good. We were able to implement BlueCat Integrity with their other different products including BlueCat Gateway solution, with which we were able to put different uses of DNS in different categories.

BlueCat Integrity overall is a very mature product. However, the console and the web interface do require built-in features which they have improved in their 25.0 version.

They need an improvement in out-of-the-box features wherein they can enable the backup feature to be taken from the GUI itself. The documentation also lacks in the basics of providing what needs to be configured while implementing that solution.

BlueCat Integrity does not offer all the features out of the box, and the customization with BlueCat is very limited. One has to be very clear with their requirements in terms of what they want to achieve in the target design before making a purchase decision.

Overall, this is a good tool, though it needs a lot of improvement in terms of customization and helping customers to effectively deploy the environment according to their requirements. They need to pick up on the areas where other OEMs are pretty good, such as having Kea-based DHCP engine.

I have been using BlueCat Integrity for the past three years.

BlueCat Integrity is stable.

In terms of scalability, we can deploy the servers on demand, and if we have the virtual infrastructure up and ready, we can scale without a need for licensing because our current business licensing model is not on the basis of the number of handles.

BlueCat customer support is really friendly. We have a weekly call set up with BlueCat support team wherein they address all the open issues in our environment. In case we need immediate support with any issue, they engage the engineering team and try to resolve it as soon as possible.

Customer support is good. As we are on the platinum services support model, we get a turnaround time to attend to any issues.

Previously, we used Infoblox NIOS solution. The reason for switching from Infoblox to BlueCat was the business split in the customer environment. Infoblox was a legacy solution and was retained by a different business. BlueCat was the new OEM used in the new business setup.

The process for migration from Infoblox to BlueCat Integrity was easy and yet complicated because we had BlueCat support and professional support, but we did all the migration during specific change timelines. We used to open each site which hosts a local DHCP and DNS solution. We migrated on a site-by-site basis. It was a pretty streamlined process because there was a transition team who did a discovery for the entire site and informed us about how many scopes and what domains are in use for that site. We staged all the required DHCP scopes, IP addresses, and DNS domains along with the records before the migration window, and on the day of the migration window, we only needed to update the DHCP helper address. Once the traffic came to the new DHCP server, the new DHCP server gave the new DNS server information, which cut over the entire traffic for that site.

There were many times where we had a requirement to import bulk configuration to take over the sites from the legacy environment to the new environment. We used to reach out to the professional services team with raw data in the desired format, which they would digest, and within a couple of days, we would get the XML file which BlueCat migration engine supports. We would import that file and make the environment stage before the big migration day. We got help from the BlueCat support team in this way. There were many times we reported bugs in the product, which they were able to identify with the help of their engineering team and they opened the product enhancement feature or were able to provide the fix for that issue in the next hotfix.

We did see a return on investment as we only have a team of six who are managing BlueCat Integrity infrastructure 24/7, and with the help of automation, we were able to reduce the headcount as we automated most of the requests using BlueCat Integrity API.

I was not a part of pricing, setup cost, and licensing as it was done by the customer itself.

We did see a cost reduction in overall infrastructure as BlueCat Integrity offered services at much more effective rates compared to other OEMs.

We did evaluate different products including EfficientIP and Infoblox.

We are using BlueCat Integrity's robust APIs to automate our DNS standard changes for adding DNS records including A records, CNAME records, and PTR records. We are also using APIs to automate the IP allocation and DHCP requests.

We are not using BlueCat Integrity's intelligent NetOps capability in our environment.

BlueCat Integrity performed a very good job in meeting the hybrid environment requirements and met my expectations. I would rate this review as a 9 out of 10.