Likelihood to Recommend 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.
Read full review Cisco Catalyst Center does a good job configuring the switches and forming the fabric using recommended configuration and specific switch setup. Managing switches through inventory is another job Cisco Catalyst Center does well. On the other hand managing access to infrastructure (host onboarding for example) is one tedious job. To set 48 access ports on a switch takes more time than it would take an engineer connected to a switch using CLI.
Read full review Pros ITIL ticketing (incidents, problems, etc.). Change orders. Matching up its asset management system with incidents/change orders. Read full review I think it abstracts the technical detail of what actually needs to be configured on the devices. So you can specify the intent and it'll do complex technical commands on the devices. You do not necessarily need to know I'm from a technical background, so I do know that, but on a scale, it's very easy just to click a few buttons and say what you want and it'll just do it for you. Read full review Cons 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. Read full review Learning curve is pretty steep Setting golden images is tricky and cant always get it to work as advertised. Takes a couple times. Having a recent problem where it stopped working and Cisco TAC only explanation is that 3850 is no longer supported. When I initially set up, couldnt find documentation. I set up a lot of IP addresses and assigned them to DNA. Cant find where these are located. Troubleshooting with TAC, they always want me to run some scripts that I have no clue how to do. Ability to be able to access configuration backups would be great. Read full review Usability 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 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.
Read full review 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.
Read full review Alternatives Considered 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.
Read full review The software upgrades and ability to integrate with the wireless telemetry data set Cisco DNA Center ahead. However the automation with Change Control, Intent and better path mapping (even across MPLS and WAN Circuits) make
NetBrain a needed tool to get that gives you that visibility and flexibility. Solarwinds has the ablity to view Netflow which would be an interesting add to DNA Center or an easier path to get or integrate with Stealthwatch.
Read full review Return on Investment 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. Read full review Initial cost is pricy, but management needs to understand the value this provides so make them aware Reporting could be improved in more detail in our opinion, but it gives a great overview of your environment. High level overview for managers would be greatly appreciated with as little or much detail as needed for certain Cisco gear. Does not work as well with some older Cisco equipment because they want you to buy new, again the cost impact comes into play. Read full review ScreenShots