Network Configuration Manager, usually shortened to NCM, is the SolarWinds product that keeps a record of how routers, switches, firewalls and wireless access points are configured, backs those settings up and checks them against policy. It is commercial software and runs as a module of the SolarWinds Platform, the Windows framework once known as Orion, alongside the monitoring tool Network Performance Monitor.
The vendor is now privately held. In April 2025 Turn/River Capital closed its purchase of SolarWinds, at an enterprise value of roughly 4.4 billion dollars according to the official announcement. The name is also tied to SUNBURST, the supply-chain attack uncovered at the end of 2020. Orion updates shipped between March and June 2020 had been tampered with, and the SolarWinds security advisory lists NCM among the affected products.
What SolarWinds NCM is for
Its first job is to pull the configuration of every device in its inventory at regular intervals and archive it over TFTP, SCP or SFTP. Each new copy is compared with the previous one and with an approved baseline, so an engineer can see which lines were added or removed, when, and from which account. An email alert can go out as soon as a difference appears, and a known-good version can be pushed back to the device when an edit has broken something.
The second job is change management at scale. Rather than typing the same command on two hundred switches, an administrator writes a change template, sends it for review and approval, then schedules it for a maintenance window. The same workflow runs scripts or prepares Cisco IOS image upgrades. SolarWinds names Cisco, Juniper, Palo Alto Networks, HP, Dell, F5, Aruba, Brocade and Ruckus among the vendors it supports.
Compliance is the third pillar. NCM evaluates configurations against internal policies and ships ready-made reports for frameworks such as DISA STIG, NIST FISMA, HIPAA and PCI DSS. It also draws on the US National Vulnerability Database to flag network operating system versions with known flaws.
On the open source side, the closest equivalents are Oxidized and RANCID, which keep configurations under version control in Git or CVS without a real approval workflow. NCM is not a substitute for NetBox, which also appears in our software library. NetBox models the network as it is supposed to be, whereas NCM captures what is actually running on the devices, and the two complement each other.
Who is it for?
NCM targets network teams in companies, public bodies and service providers that run dozens or thousands of devices from several vendors and must show, with reports to back it up, that their configurations follow policy. It fits most naturally alongside Network Performance Monitor, with which it shares a console, a database and alerting.
The constraints are significant. The main server installs only on Windows Server 2016 through 2025, together with Microsoft SQL Server, .NET Framework 4.8 and the .NET 8 runtimes. Even the smallest profile calls for four cores and 16 GB of RAM according to the documentation, on the application server and again on the database server. Pricing is not published, and NCM does not measure network performance on its own. For plain archiving, a small office would be better served by Oxidized, which costs nothing but needs a Linux host.
Download SolarWinds NCM safely
An evaluation is requested from the registration page on solarwinds.com. A business contact form unlocks the SolarWinds Platform installer. No credit card is required and the trial is fully functional for 30 days. A production license key is needed after that, sold in seven tiers by number of managed devices, from DL50 up to the uncapped DLX, with prices given on request. NCM is also bundled into SolarWinds Observability Self-Hosted, the offering formerly called Hybrid Cloud Observability, from the Advanced tier upward, which the vendor lists from 14 dollars per node per month on a multi-year contract billed annually.
Existing customers fetch their files from the SolarWinds Customer Portal. After SUNBURST, installing a platform executable found on a forum or a file-sharing site would be especially reckless, because a tool holding administrative access to every router naturally attracts attackers. Patches matter too: release 2026.2.3 from September 2026 fixed two critical remote code execution flaws in the shared platform.
Frequently asked questions
Is SolarWinds NCM free?
No. Only the 30-day evaluation costs nothing. After that you need a license sized to your device count, or an Advanced or Premier tier of Observability Self-Hosted, which includes NCM.
Does NCM run on Linux?
No. The main polling engine and any additional polling engines require Windows Server. Only the SQL Server database may be hosted on Linux.
How does NCM relate to NetBox?
NetBox documents the intended state of the network, while NCM archives and checks the configurations actually present on devices. They can therefore coexist, one acting as the reference and the other as the check.
