Cisco Catalyst Assurance vs. Colasoft Capsa

So not everyone is in need of a smart AI checking their network metrics looking for issues before they happen or finding and alerting on problems that the network staff may not have noticed, but if you have the budget for it, it could be a huge time saver for your whole department.

Incentivized

Capsa is highly recommended to be used in small dense areas of a network where it makes sense to be able to run analytics off of a mirror port to gain insight into traffic trends. It is a costly product to install in branch locations, and requires a decent spec hardware to run appropriately

Incentivized

• Identify devices and their connectivity to the network
• Troubleshoot device connectivity paths
• Give us visibility into possible issues with network devices

Incentivized

• Robust Application. Able to handle traffic that most businesses will throw at it.
• Easy to use. Easy to setup captures and filter down to specific traffic types.
• Relatively cheap for what it's able to accomplish.

Incentivized

• Recommendation actions can be improved
• Feel like bit sluggish after some times, may be resources not optimised
• Some integration gaps there.

Incentivized

• Needs options to scale to 10Gb/s networks. The cutoff for performance looks to be around 3Gb/sl
• Needs API access to trigger capturesl
• Needs Agents for remote capturesl

Incentivized

Cisco DNA Analytics and Assurance definitely has a steep learning curve. While it's had an upgrade to its onboarding, it's still a very technically heavy application that requires knowledge of Cisco networking and terminology. I think keeping that in mind helps with the expectations, but anyone can use the application with a little training and experience.

Incentivized

We moved away from Solarwinds during the breach. Haven't touched them with a 10 foot pole since.We looked at Splunk but decided to stick with a Cisco product since we are a Cisco shop

Incentivized

Colasoft performs more like the traditional wireshark as opposed to other solutions that tend to focus on graphs instead of giving you the raw data. I personally prefer the raw data, and then the ability to build graphs upon this (which Capsa can do). This allows for quicker analysis and makes it easier to relate to.

Incentivized

• Loads of time saved diagnosing network issues.
• Much effort saved having to determine network performance metrics by hand.
• The Cisco brand is generally safe and trusted so you get that additional peace of mind.

Incentivized

• While the product doesn't detect malware, it has helped track down malware infected machines by using data from other applications to run filters to look for known traffic destinations for that malware. For me this is a huge ROI since malware can be the great unknown.
• Relatively cheap compared to the feature set.

Incentivized