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    Overview
    ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price

    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

    Cisco ThousandEyes

    Score9.1 out of 10
    N/ACisco ThousandEyes empowers organizations to assure every digital experience across every network, everywhere, every time.N/A
    Pricing
    Cisco Catalyst CenterCisco ThousandEyes
    Editions & Modules
    No answers on this topic
    No answers on this topic
    Offerings
    Pricing Offerings
    Cisco Catalyst CenterCisco ThousandEyes
    Free Trial
    NoYes
    Free/Freemium Version
    NoNo
    Premium Consulting/Integration Services
    NoYes
    Entry-level Setup FeeNo setup feeOptional
    Additional Details——
    More Pricing Information
    Community Pulse
    Cisco Catalyst CenterCisco ThousandEyes
    Considered Both Products
    Cisco
    Chose Cisco Catalyst Center
    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 …
    Incentivized
    Chose Cisco Catalyst Center
    We are still deploying to Meraki. The dashboard does have many similar features but not a 1:1
    Incentivized
    Chose Cisco Catalyst Center
    Very good products in troubleshooting the network
    Incentivized
    Chose Cisco Catalyst Center
    They work well together
    Incentivized
    Chose Cisco Catalyst Center
    The customers network were already all Cisco so it made sense. However the others are much more light weight and easier to use and implement.
    Incentivized
    Chose Cisco Catalyst Center
    It integrates well with SD-WAN and ISE. So since we had those already, it was an easy choice. However, we have faced challenges with supporting multi-tenancy as I have told earlier. But, we can see our endpoints and get more information from ISE such as what kind of device it …
    Incentivized
    Chose Cisco Catalyst Center
    It's a good evolution.
    Incentivized
    Chose Cisco Catalyst Center
    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 …
    Incentivized
    Chose Cisco Catalyst Center
    We have used Panorama for our Paloalto gear. But DNAC is comparatively so much better due to thing we can achieve with it.
    Incentivized
    Chose Cisco Catalyst Center
    Another SDN product
    Incentivized
    Chose Cisco Catalyst Center
    We were using scipts and home grown templates before
    Incentivized
    Chose Cisco Catalyst Center
    DNA Center is superior in that it can perform remote upgrades and stage the upgrades along with automatically identifying products on the network.
    Incentivized
    Chose Cisco Catalyst Center
    I haven't evaluated similar products.
    Incentivized
    Cisco
    Chose Cisco ThousandEyes
    Offers better native integration with existing Cisco infrastructure.

    So I would say what's sort of unique to ThousandEyes is that it also focuses on infrastructure that is not within the boundaries of your enterprise. That was one of the key reasons why we started using it—to …
    Incentivized
    Chose Cisco ThousandEyes
    Cloud agents feature is definitely the differentiator
    Incentivized
    Chose Cisco ThousandEyes
    ThousandEyes has far more service endpoints available in the Internet and much easier to setup monitors
    Incentivized
    Key User Insights
    Would buy again
    92%
    Would buy again
    306 Answers
    96%
    Would buy again
    118 Answers
    Delivers good value for the price
    90%
    Delivers good value for the price
    245 Answers
    95%
    Delivers good value for the price
    96 Answers
    Happy with the feature set
    96%
    Happy with the feature set
    319 Answers
    97%
    Happy with the feature set
    119 Answers
    Lived up to sales and marketing promises
    83%
    Lived up to sales and marketing promises
    195 Answers
    94%
    Lived up to sales and marketing promises
    89 Answers
    Implementation went as expected
    80%
    Implementation went as expected
    229 Answers
    88%
    Implementation went as expected
    92 Answers
    Best Alternatives
    Cisco Catalyst CenterCisco ThousandEyes
    Small Businesses
    No answers on this topic
    No answers on this topic
    Medium-sized Companies
    Cisco Meraki Dashboard
    Score9 out of 10
    Catchpoint
    Score8.5 out of 10
    Enterprises
    Cisco Prime LAN Management (discontinued)
    Score7.7 out of 10
    Nexthink
    Score7.3 out of 10
    All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
    User Ratings
    Cisco Catalyst CenterCisco ThousandEyes
    Likelihood to Recommend
    8.4
    (343 ratings)
    9.1
    (126 ratings)
    Likelihood to Renew
    8.9
    (9 ratings)
    8.6
    (6 ratings)
    Usability
    7.9
    (19 ratings)
    8.6
    (7 ratings)
    Availability
    -
    (0 ratings)
    7.3
    (1 ratings)
    Performance
    -
    (0 ratings)
    7.3
    (1 ratings)
    Support Rating
    8.7
    (33 ratings)
    6.7
    (6 ratings)
    In-Person Training
    -
    (0 ratings)
    8.2
    (1 ratings)
    Online Training
    8.0
    (1 ratings)
    -
    (0 ratings)
    Implementation Rating
    -
    (0 ratings)
    6.4
    (1 ratings)
    Configurability
    -
    (0 ratings)
    8.2
    (1 ratings)
    Contract Terms and Pricing Model
    -
    (0 ratings)
    6.4
    (1 ratings)
    Ease of integration
    -
    (0 ratings)
    6.4
    (1 ratings)
    Product Scalability
    -
    (0 ratings)
    7.3
    (1 ratings)
    Vendor post-sale
    -
    (0 ratings)
    9.1
    (1 ratings)
    Vendor pre-sale
    -
    (0 ratings)
    9.1
    (1 ratings)
    User Testimonials
    Cisco Catalyst CenterCisco ThousandEyes
    Likelihood to Recommend
    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
    Cisco
    Unified communications real-time analysis is one of the biggest points of the solution. You can see your traffic path and find issues before, during and after the calls. This is very useful for analyzing VoIP and video conferencing problems like in WebEx, Microsoft Teams and Zoom. It helps to see network issues like packet loss, jitter, or latency that can make call quality bad. Another good use case is checking cloud apps and SaaS services. Many companies use external platforms like Microsoft Azure, 365, Salesforce, or AWS. It lets Networking teams see the network path from users to these services so they can find if problems come from the company network, the internet provider, or the cloud service. Also, it is good for companies using mix of on-prem and cloud. It shows how traffic moves between different parts of the network, so IT teams can see where a problem happens and fix it faster. There are different types of agents that we can use in Cisco ThousandEyes. Enterprise agents can be use for a relative big amount of synthetic test. Endpoint agents are install in user PC or MAC laptops to check network quality from the client side. WebEx devices also have built-in agents that help to see performance problems in meetings, making it easy to find what is causing a bad call. Maybe it's not the best solution if what you want to measure is not HTTPs based or hasn't an API. Also if your scenario is Zoom Rooms, you won't have the same level of integration that it has for WebEx and Microsoft solutions.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Pros
    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
    Cisco
    • Cisco ThousandEyes does the holistic discovery of the end components, the network components, and it's really fast at identifying where the issue is, which is not normally identified by the classic monitoring tools. So it's quite a fast identifying the issue of the networks and Cisco ThousandEyes also provides a very good real user end user monitoring experience for the end customers. So those are the two real life and also very good examples for Cisco ThousandEyes.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Cons
    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
    Cisco
    • The elephant in the room is going to be cost. ThousandEyes is a great tool, but you will pay for it. There are other services that do a good job at providing a smaller subset of features compared to ThousandEyes. If all you need is that particular subset of features, ThousandEyes may not make fiscal sense for your organization.
    • As a subset of the cost issue, within the last 18 months or so the pricing on enterprise (local) agents has been modified in a way that seems not to benefit the customer. Previously enterprise agents had a flat monthly cost associated with them with unlimited test usage (the only limit on test usage was based on concurrent tests running at any given point in time). This meant that instead of using a cloud agent and paying per-test, you had the option of spinning up an cheap Digital Ocean droplet and creating your own cloud agent for external testing without using Cloud Agents. When the change was made they eliminated the flat per-agent cost and instead treated the pricing the same as that of the cloud agents but cutting the number of "cloud units" per test in half for tests run from enterprise agents. For organizations with under-utilized enterprise agents, this may be helpful financially, but for organizations that push their local agents to the limit, the cost skyrocketed.
    • BGP monitor peering sessions have been less than reliable. The data doesn't seem to be an issue, but the sessions seem to bounce or fail altogether on a fairly consistent basis. The routers or servers with which your routers peer sit behind some firewalls that have caused issues in the past.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Likelihood to Renew
    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
    Cisco
    The software does it's job extremely well and the system makes it very user friendly to get into. When looking for software I prefer to not need a PHD to operate it. Having a great UI and simple setup makes it easy to include more members of our team to get more value out of the platform.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Usability
    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
    Cisco
    There is definitely a learning curve to ThousandEyes, but once you understand how the client deployment works and how to set up monitoring, things go pretty smoothly. I think the initial setting up of clients on endpoints can be a little tricky though.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Reliability and Availability
    Cisco
    No answers on this topic
    Cisco
    Being cloud hosted means that you are at the mercy of Cisco web services, but we've had absolutely no issues with its availability.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Performance
    Cisco
    No answers on this topic
    Cisco
    The client is very lightweight on endpoints and the user interface is very fast and fluid.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Support Rating
    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
    Cisco
    You have online support from the tool itself 24/7 and they are very responsive. We also have a specific account manager and specific engineer assigned to help us with very specific questions for our environment. The level of response to our requirements is always super high. We have requested specific features to be added and these have been developed and introduced very quick tot he product (within weeks). Their DevOps and agile approach seems to pay off.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    In-Person Training
    Cisco
    No answers on this topic
    Cisco
    Our Cisco reps actually had someone teach us a few things about the functionality of ThousandEyes, and it helped a lot. The training was good and we had follow-up assistance as well when we had questions about the monitoring and reporting functions. Overall, we were satisfied with the training and support.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Online Training
    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
    Cisco
    No answers on this topic
    Implementation Rating
    Cisco
    No answers on this topic
    Cisco
    Our implementation was pretty straightforward, with some issues loading clients on endpoints. We didn't have any notable issues, and I don't really have any additional insights.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Alternatives Considered
    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
    Cisco
    No one is better than the other. I can get different data and sometimes similar data, it's important to compare values and verify the data between the tools. Additionally, there are other functionalities that ThousandEyes has that the others don't, but it is also the other way around. I will always recommend to have available not 1 or 2, all possible available for your job.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Contract Terms and Pricing Model
    Cisco
    No answers on this topic
    Cisco
    The contract was fair and rolled up into some of our other contracts, so it was no big deal getting it up and running.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Scalability
    Cisco
    No answers on this topic
    Cisco
    I think this product would be infinitely scalable since it's all cloud hosted and can support thousands of endpoints if needed. We are only using it for a limited number of endpoints, so we never really considered scalability.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Return on Investment
    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
    Cisco
    • Building the trust from our Merchants is core when you come to renewal time. Trust builds partnerships, builds stickiness and allows for easier upsells or contract renewals.
    • Having a champion in IT that touts your service is important to the business, it removes a large portion of friction in the business to get services implemented and working to its peak.
    • Flexibility in pricing can be better. How they measure the number of agents being used can get thorny. When you build and tear down virtual servers a lot it can appear there are more agents running than there are. Once we understood how they measure we were able to better utilize the product efficiently.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    ScreenShots

    Cisco Catalyst Center Screenshots

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

    Cisco ThousandEyes Screenshots

    Screenshot of Global availability issues for users trying to use Slack application.Screenshot of The path visibility feature pinpointing where in the transit path an outage or event is occurring.Screenshot of ThousandEyes Internet Insights™, which combines a massive data set with algorithmic outage detection to provide near real-time insights into a business's SaaS applications.  and networks. Internet Insights can be used to manage digital experience at Internet scale.Screenshot of ThousandEyes Event Detection diagnosing events as server or network issue.