Hi there. Josh Stephens here – Head Geek™ at SolarWinds. You know, as Network Engineers, we spend a lot of our days using Telnet or SSH to connect to devices like routers, switches, firewalls, and other CLI devices making config management changes. You know, we do config backups. We update access lists. We do all kinds of tasks from the command line. Now, many of us, unfortunately, do this all manually without a configuration management tool.
And so today I want to tell you about my favorite configuration management tool, which just happens to be from SolarWinds, Kiwi CatTools. Kiwi CatTools is a light, tactical configuration management application. Very, very flexible, and super geeky. Lots of cool things you can do with it. Lots of scripting applications. Easy to extend it to new devices. Lots of things you can do. You read all about it on our community THWACK.com.
Also, it's easy to get started by just adding devices in and then away you go. Creating jobs and activities to back up configurations. Using the compare functions to say, for instance, compare running a startup configuration from the same device and see where things have changed.
Now, of course if you have a more enterprise need for config management, you want to consider Orion
® NCM or Orion Network Configuration Manager. That's really an enterprise-type application to run on a server, take care of the whole company. Whereas Kiwi CatTools, again, is a tool-based approach. Tactical. Run on your laptop. Lightweight. Great application for users like me.
Now the best thing about Kiwi CatTools, I haven't even mentioned yet, which is you can download it for free right from SolarWinds.com. Now, the free version of Kiwi CatTools* has a limitation where it will only manage five devices. If you have more than five devices, you can actually, download the evaluation version of the licensed copy for Kiwi CatTools right from SolarWinds.com and try it out as well.
Again, Josh Stephens here with SolarWinds. I want to talk to you a little bit today about config management and my favorite complete management tool Kiwi CatTools. Thanks a lot. Have a great day.
