Cisco Catalyst Center vs. Cisco Crosswork Network Automation

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

Cisco Crosswork Network Automation has been great at reducing the workload our engineers face on the day to day aspects of their jobs. CNC has been able to reduce the time it takes to provision a device while using NSO and has provided valuable data to assist in troubleshooting network wide issues. CNC has been a pivotal aspect to our multi-million dollar network refresh

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

• 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

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

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.

Giving this a 5 as CNC classifies to a specific set of users. CNC is not an 'easy to use' product and thus requires some training to ensure that it can be used to the best of its capabilities. CNC can when used fully provide valuable data that Network Engineers would otherwise have to hunt for on their own.

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

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

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

• 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