Checkmk vs. Cisco Catalyst Center vs. LogicMonitor

In our organization which is a mash up of different hardware, software it was important to use an independent tool that wasn’t linked to one manufacturer incase a piece of hardware was dropped from support for example, we also value open-source software highly in our field. It’s important to in our IT environment to be able to customize and tweak software that we run. We don’t use the cloud monitoring aspect so Cannot comment on that side of the software.

Incentivized

Security with identity-based access control and segmentation via integration with Cisco ISE, supporting zero-trust architectures. Centralized Management for a large campus environment with centralized management of wired and wireless equipment. Automation of tasks like: provisioning, configuration, and software upgrade, reducing manual effort of those tasks. It could be improved to Multi-Vendor Support.

Incentivized

The example I will give will explain my rating for it. One employee left our company due to a personal issue, and at that time, our team was working on a highly secure project. He wanted to take revenge on our company, so he began hacking our systems from the outside. Since it appears that someone without authorization is attempting to access our systems, LogicMonitor simultaneously alerted our team to the problem. We stopped that threat with LogicMonitor.

Incentivized

• Device Management
• Monitoring Network Quality
• Device Quality of Service
• SNMP
• IOT Monitoring

Incentivized

• I enjoy having a more modern tool for viewing PSIRTs and CVEs on our catalyst devices.
• I enjoy all the different views I have for my inventory.
• I think templates work well for zero day configuration.
• I love the newer features for showing what configuration is going to be changed and deployed before you deploy it.
• I like that I can see in-band and out-of-band configuration history.

Incentivized

• It shows us system issues right away so we can fix them fast.
• It finds new devices on its own, so we do not miss anything.
• It alerts us only when something really unusual happens.
• Its dashboards make it easy for everyone to see system health.
• It helps us see trends so we are ready for busy times.

Incentivized

• Updates
• mobile interface
• Agent for android devices

Incentivized

• Granularity. And so for us, and our use case might not be the same as a majority of customers, but we have a environment which frequently changes. So we're not a traditional corporate environment which stays relatively static or still reprovision. We want to reconfigure our environment to meet whatever the needs of our customers are. And at the moment it's like for some of the ways that we have to configure it, we just want to give something a little tap, but we have to hit it with a sledgehammer, which then often has knock on impacts other services.

Incentivized

• Segmentation at an instance level not just the resource when clients are sharing the same device but shouldn't see each other's relevant data
• ARM CPU support for collectors to allow for a lighter weight appliance deployment
• WMI collection with a Linux collector so a windows collector would not be needed or a virtual appliance template that can be used to deploy collectors

Incentivized

Very helpful software and I highly recommend to have on hand as a tool for testing, troubleshooting, and monitoring.

Incentivized

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

This product has met virtually all of our needs. It was easy to implement and has been simple to support. Customization has been intuitive with many options available. They keep adding features and expanding available options. The future of LogicMonitor looks even better than it is today which is very promising. The management and support teams at LogicMonitor are always helpful

Incentivized

Overall Checkmk is a great product that is made and ran by a European company that is open source and highly customizable, great support if needed. On prem support is a must for our organization which Checkmk supports. Our organization has been using Checkmk for over 5 years now Performance of the software runs excellent on its own Linux server, for any company with a good Linux admin, you can have a lot of un tweaking and creating custom checks for every aspect of your environment.

Incentivized

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.

Set up is super easy. Just stand up a small Linux or Windows server to act as a collector. There are no agents to install on monitored devices and all you need is SNMP or WMI access. When creating dashboards, all you have to do is find the widget on the device you want to show up and choose the menu option to add it.

Incentivized

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

The sales team support we received was top notch. They worked hand in hand to make sure the product met all expectations. So far we have not really had to work with support that much; we have worked with setup team after purchase to deploy product fully. No issues so far and we are four weeks in.

Incentivized

Add good training

Incentivized

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

The training is good but room to improve

Incentivized

I did not truly dedicate myself to implementing LogicMonitor. However, I overheard the IT team members explain that "LogicMonitor is perfect for us as it has made most of the work automated, and implementation and training sessions were perfect for us." Thus, I can state that everything went smoothly with our implementation.

Incentivized

Checkmk free version is far superior to PRTG free version. For the paid versions PRTG was more efficient and easier to use. Checkmk provides unlimited services on their free version while PRTG is limited. We like to use the free version to avoid monthly or annual costs while still utilizing the same SNMP features.

Incentivized

We started out with using Cisco Prime infrastructure and we migrated to DNA center or Catalyst Center from Prime Infrastructure. We found that it wasn't apples to Apples migration. It wasn't exactly, it wasn't a direct upgrade. There were a lot of key differences, but yeah, I think that that was probably the most similar thing

Incentivized

Basically, we did not have any idea about it and how to choose, but we asked one of our former bosses, as they were very experienced with it, so they helped us by clarifying a few things between New Relic and LogicMonitor, as they told us that if you are looking for an automated option, then there is no better option than LogicMonitor.

Incentivized

Pricing seems to be getting more and more aggressive, I worry that it's going to turn into ServiceNow or SAP and everything minor feature will be an extreme cost that prices out us and our customers

Incentivized

Haven't really used it but our initial onboarding PS was disappointing. Felt like we were being told what we needed to cover as opposed to what we wanted to cover. In addition, we were pushed into using the PS in tight time frames and we were not ready to do so.

Incentivized

• avoid downtime
• Plan updates based on usage of a VM or network switch to avoid impacting users
• User satisfaction increased due to less visible downtime or issues with our IT infrastructure.

Incentivized

• Yeah, I mean that last one for sure. The software independent of the hardware, I mean, it's just easy. They made it so easy to just, and fast and efficient to upgrade your entire organization within days, weeks, months. And you're not spending, your maintenance windows get a lot shorter. You can schedule more maintenance windows just because you know there's going to be some type of consistency with it and there's just, I'm sure there will be a hiccup one day, but there just hasn't really been too many issues with us using that product, especially for maintenance, window upgrades, things like that.

Incentivized

• We Eliminated an on-prem monitoring tool which was in excess of 25 servers
• A decrease in time to response from our Network Operations Center resulted in a more consistent client experience
• Dynamic alert thresholds helped reduce alerting by about 10 to 15% as soon as we turned it on for volatile metrics like CPU and memory

Incentivized