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CA Unicenter Network and Systems Management (Discontinued) vs. Cisco Catalyst Center

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    Overview
    ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price

    CA Unicenter NSM (Discontinued)

    Score3.1 out of 10
    N/AUnicenter Network and Systems Management (Unicenter NSM) from CA Technologies reached end of life (EOL) in 2015.N/A

    Cisco Catalyst Center

    Score8.5 out of 10
    N/ACisco Catalyst Center provides an intent-based platform for managing enterprise networks across campus, branch, and edge environments. It combines automation, analytics, and assurance to streamline IT operations, improve security posture, and reduce manual tasks. With integratedAI/ML-driven insights, policy-based controls, and end-to-end visibility across wired and wireless infrastructures, Catalyst Center empowers IT teams toproactively detect issues, enforce compliance, and accelerate…N/A
    Pricing
    CA Unicenter NSM (Discontinued)Cisco Catalyst Center
    Editions & Modules
    No answers on this topic
    No answers on this topic
    Offerings
    Pricing Offerings
    CA Unicenter NSM (Discontinued)Cisco Catalyst Center
    Free Trial
    NoNo
    Free/Freemium Version
    NoNo
    Premium Consulting/Integration Services
    NoNo
    Entry-level Setup FeeNo setup feeNo setup fee
    Additional Details
    More Pricing Information
    Community Pulse
    CA Unicenter NSM (Discontinued)Cisco Catalyst Center
    Considered Both Products
    Discontinued Products
    No answer on this topic
    Cisco
    No answer on this topic
    Key User Insights
    Would buy again
    No answers on this topic
    92%
    Would buy again
    306 Answers
    Delivers good value for the price
    No answers on this topic
    90%
    Delivers good value for the price
    245 Answers
    Happy with the feature set
    No answers on this topic
    96%
    Happy with the feature set
    319 Answers
    Lived up to sales and marketing promises
    No answers on this topic
    83%
    Lived up to sales and marketing promises
    195 Answers
    Implementation went as expected
    No answers on this topic
    80%
    Implementation went as expected
    229 Answers
    Best Alternatives
    CA Unicenter NSM (Discontinued)Cisco Catalyst Center
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    Medium-sized Companies
    Cisco Meraki Dashboard
    Score9 out of 10
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    Score9 out of 10
    Enterprises
    Cisco Prime LAN Management (discontinued)
    Score7.7 out of 10
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    User Ratings
    CA Unicenter NSM (Discontinued)Cisco Catalyst Center
    Likelihood to Recommend
    3.0
    (1 ratings)
    8.4
    (343 ratings)
    Likelihood to Renew
    -
    (0 ratings)
    8.9
    (9 ratings)
    Usability
    -
    (0 ratings)
    7.9
    (19 ratings)
    Support Rating
    2.0
    (1 ratings)
    8.7
    (33 ratings)
    Online Training
    -
    (0 ratings)
    8.0
    (1 ratings)
    User Testimonials
    CA Unicenter NSM (Discontinued)Cisco Catalyst Center
    Likelihood to Recommend
    Discontinued Products
    It's a decent system if you're a pure IT shop and want to become ITIL-aligned. It forces everyone into an ITIL mentality - service level agreements, change management, and asset tracking. It's very rote, for better and for worse. It's not appropriate at all as a customer-facing or non-IT facing self-service tool. You will never get your end users to really understand how to use the interface.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Cisco
    Would recommend Cisco Catalyst Center to medium to large scale organizations that have many cookie-cutter sites and the resources to properly provision all their devices. I would not recommend to teams that do not have a strong network engineering team that can navigate the various intricacies of the platform.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Pros
    Discontinued Products
    • ITIL ticketing (incidents, problems, etc.).
    • Change orders.
    • Matching up its asset management system with incidents/change orders.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Cisco
    • Again, the ease of use of the APIs and the API Explorer provides the tools needed to write these custom workflows that allow us to do a lot of the automation we’re doing now, saving hundreds of hours by using those tools.
    • The product is very intuitive, and there is a lot of support out there in the DevNet community to help with that.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Cons
    Discontinued Products
    • The user interface (UX) is antiquated and clunky. Compared to ServiceNow, it feels like it's 15 years behind.
    • It's complicated - We do routine internal training just to get people to use it correctly.
    • It doesn't have an automated way of discovering assets. Everything has to be force-fed.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Cisco
    • Within its Tasks - Audit, it can sometimes allow plaintext data, including passwords, to be seen. There should be functionality to detect password usage and appropriately obfuscate the data.
    • Occasionally, Catalyst Center does not sync changes properly within templates, which requires deleting and reconfiguring the template version. Better processes here would be beneficial.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Likelihood to Renew
    Discontinued Products
    No answers on this topic
    Cisco
    I think new products are often "half-baked" or over hyped when they release, as was the case with DNAC. We were well ahead of the curve in acquiring it. But as it has matured it is now a fantastic addition to our infrastructure. I think we are easing into a stage where it is hard to envision a large organization NOT having Catalyst Center in place. If for nothing outside of the mapping and troubleshooting aspects; using it as a "source of truth".
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Usability
    Discontinued Products
    No answers on this topic
    Cisco
    Cisco DNA Center is going to help us in security, simplicity and ease of administration. Cisco DNA Center is complete management and control platform that simplifies and streamlines network operations. Cisco DNA Center offers a single dashboard for every core function in your network. With this platform, IT can become more nimble and respond to changes and challenges faster and more intelligently.
    Read full review
    Support Rating
    Discontinued Products
    We have to hire 2 full-time 3rd-party consultants to run this application. That tells me it's not a very IT-friendly, vendor-supported application. Compare that with, say, SolarWinds, which is much easier for regular IT staff to customize without sacrificing features and capability. Sure, we have to bring in Loop1 to consult for us when we need to do a major SolarWinds config change or need a really unusual custom query built, but we never need more than 10 hours of consulting per month.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Cisco
    El soporte de CISCO DNA Center es muy bueno, responden a mis dudas pero no he tenido oportunidad de reportar un incidente o determinar un tiempo de respuesta critico. The support of CISCO DNA Center is very good, they answer my questions, but I have not had the opportunity to report an incident or determine a critical response time.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Online Training
    Discontinued Products
    No answers on this topic
    Cisco
    It was informative, but the labs were not available long enough for us to get intimately familiar with CCNA before it was closed. The course instructor was well informed and got us as close to ready as she could.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Alternatives Considered
    Discontinued Products
    I did not select CA. If it were up to me, I would migrate us to ServiceNow. The user interface on ServiceNow is 100% more modern and 200% more user friendly. With ServiceNow, the front page for end users makes it clear: one button that says "Ask for something" and one button that says "Report a problem". That's what our end users need. The biggest problem we have in our organization is that our end users don't report issues to the Help Desk often enough and rarely ask for things through the Help Desk. A clean, simple self-service option like this would open up a world of new information for our customer service team.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Cisco
    Cisco Catalyst Centeris basic zero-touch provisioning out of the box. You just rack and stack the switches, patch 'em in, and the controller pushes the config automatically. No need to console into every single box or spend hours script-running over CLI.The AI-driven assurance and telemetry are top-tier. Instead of getting flooded with useless syslog alerts when a link drops, it correlates the telemetry data to give you proactive health checks. It literally pinpoints wireless anomalies and bandwidth chokepoints before the users even start opening tickets.It handles fabric microsegmentation like a boss through SD-Access and TrustSec. You can easily enforce group-based policies right at the hardware level. It drops IoT gear, guests, and corporate traffic into their own secure buckets dynamically, without you having to manage a trillion messy VLANs and ACLs.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Return on Investment
    Discontinued Products
    • It helped make us an ITIL shop.
    • It was integral during our large IT consolidation 10 years ago in merging 10 different IT departments into one by converging on one ticketing system for all IT issues.
    • Its lack of user-friendliness has gated us from being able to deploy a true self-service IT help desk.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Cisco
    • I have used it for upgrading devices, and it's does a great job at that, however out operations team for whatever reason has not adopted the feature.
    • Overall it feels like Cisco Catalyst Center has been huge waste of time. I feel like my time would be better spent on other projects and looking at other products and tools
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    ScreenShots

    Cisco Catalyst Center Screenshots

    Screenshot of AIOpsScreenshot of BaselinesScreenshot of PoliciesScreenshot of HealthScreenshot of Network HierarchyScreenshot of PoE