Cisco Catalyst Center vs. SolarWinds ipMonitor

Overview
ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price
Cisco Catalyst Center
Score 8.6 out of 10
N/A
Cisco Catalyst Center delivers a comprehensive, software-defined approach to managing enterprise networks. It simplifies operations by integrating automation, real-time monitoring, security policies, and advanced analytics into a single interface. Designed to support complex networking environments, Catalyst Center optimizes efficiency, enhances security, and ensures seamless connectivity across wired and wireless infrastructures.N/A
SolarWinds ipMonitor
Score 8.4 out of 10
N/A
SolarWinds ipMonitor is a lightweight performance monitoring tool. It enables monitoring from a single console and out-of-the-box visibility, with some automation available.
$1,570
installation
Pricing
Cisco Catalyst CenterSolarWinds ipMonitor
Editions & Modules
No answers on this topic
ipMonitor - 500 Monitors
$1570
installation
ipMonitor - 1000 Monitors
$2620
installation
ipMonitor -2500 Monitors
$5770
installation
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
Cisco Catalyst CenterSolarWinds ipMonitor
Free Trial
YesYes
Free/Freemium Version
NoYes
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
NoNo
Entry-level Setup FeeNo setup feeNo setup fee
Additional Details
More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
Cisco Catalyst CenterSolarWinds ipMonitor
Considered Both Products
Cisco Catalyst Center
Chose Cisco Catalyst Center
Cisco DNA Center was easier to deploy, and of course, having all Cisco hardware integrated made it faster. The newer GUI seems to operate smoother than older java based web GUIs.
SolarWinds ipMonitor

No answer on this topic

Features
Cisco Catalyst CenterSolarWinds ipMonitor
Network Performance Monitoring
Comparison of Network Performance Monitoring features of Product A and Product B
Cisco Catalyst Center
-
Ratings
SolarWinds ipMonitor
6.7
24 Ratings
19% below category average
Automated network device discovery00 Ratings6.710 Ratings
Network monitoring00 Ratings8.024 Ratings
Alerts00 Ratings8.223 Ratings
Network mapping00 Ratings6.619 Ratings
Customizable reports00 Ratings4.223 Ratings
Best Alternatives
Cisco Catalyst CenterSolarWinds ipMonitor
Small Businesses
NinjaOne
NinjaOne
Score 9.1 out of 10
NinjaOne
NinjaOne
Score 9.1 out of 10
Medium-sized Companies
Intermapper
Intermapper
Score 8.4 out of 10
PingPlotter
PingPlotter
Score 9.4 out of 10
Enterprises
Cisco DNA Analytics and Assurance
Cisco DNA Analytics and Assurance
Score 9.0 out of 10
PingPlotter
PingPlotter
Score 9.4 out of 10
All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
User Ratings
Cisco Catalyst CenterSolarWinds ipMonitor
Likelihood to Recommend
8.6
(235 ratings)
9.0
(24 ratings)
Likelihood to Renew
8.7
(4 ratings)
8.2
(1 ratings)
Usability
8.0
(18 ratings)
8.2
(6 ratings)
Support Rating
8.1
(33 ratings)
8.8
(7 ratings)
Online Training
7.3
(1 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
User Testimonials
Cisco Catalyst CenterSolarWinds ipMonitor
Likelihood to Recommend
Cisco
It is not appropriate as a source of Truth. Templates don't give me enough automation capablities to want to use them for Day-N configuration changes. I'd rather run a simple SolarWinds job or look at doing something more complex with other tools and stacks (e.g. Python, Ansible, etc.) I'm not sure what Cisco Catalyst Center is supposed to be used for. The name suggests it should be the application I go to for managing all my Catalyst devices, but instead it feels like I'm always fighting the tool and it's easier to do tasks with some other more specialized tool. The software feels like it was designed by software engineer, but not network engineers.
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SolarWinds
SolarWinds ipMonitor is well suited in situation where customer do not wants to hold the responsibility of underlying monitoring infrastructure management such as Servers, Database, website and their high availability. And of course when you need Network, Servers, Services fault and performance monitoring. When you have specialized network monitoring requirement such as Configuration backup, netflow traffic analysis then this is not the right tool.
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Pros
Cisco
  • That's a good one. Because its power is only exceeded by its mystery, it makes our life easy. Prior to having Cisco Catalyst Center in place, a simple change, a simple change to put a network out into service, each of a building might have taken hours or days worth of change planning. Now it takes us longer to raise the paperwork, run it, and go through a change board process and it does to execute the intent and turn it into an actionable service.
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SolarWinds
  • Both network devices and servers may be easily located on the network.
  • It notifies the user whenever any network device undergoes a change in status.
  • Powerful reporting capabilities that provide vital data about your network's devices (uptime, space, utilization of resources on your devices)
Read full review
Cons
Cisco
  • Kind of just like what I just covered where pushing out the configuration, it can be a little bit tedious to go through those steps to apply the template to a network profile and then apply that network profile to a group of switches at a specific site where I want to make a change, and I'm looking at this as more of a, it's a small change where I feel like the switch profiles in the network profiles are more of a grand template for the entire switch. Where I'm going testing, I'm just trying to make a minor adjustment to one little configuration, it becomes a little bit tedious.
Read full review
SolarWinds
  • It is a very complete and versatile software, but its price can be somewhat high for small companies.
  • During the analysis of the collected data the process can be somewhat slow, so it takes more time than expected.
  • Its configuration process can be somewhat complex since it requires several configurations so having prior knowledge is helpful.
Read full review
Likelihood to Renew
Cisco
The first impressions using the tool, led us to believe that it will be very helpful going forward. There's a lot of potential to implement other features in the network
Read full review
SolarWinds
I have very few pieces of software, that are specific to IT and IT services, that just work. Honestly, I don't need the support as it never breaks, but I believe in rewarding vendors that make valuable products
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.
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SolarWinds
SolarWinds ipMonitor is a perfectly decent network mapper and performance metric gatherer, but it is held back by the UI, which can be hard to navigate once you have more than a couple dozen assets in there. It is fairly priced, but it also sometimes takes a really long time before results come in.
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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.
Read full review
SolarWinds
Although I had not much support ticket with ipMonitor support team but I can share my overall experience with SolarWinds products and support team. I am working with SolarWinds support team since last 7 years and in last 2-3 years I have seen a significant improvement in knowledge documentation which is helping end users to troubleshoot problems by themselves. Apart from this SolarWinds phone call based support is very nice as tickets and emails might take some time but a direct phone call can get your job done quickly comparatively.
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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.
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SolarWinds
No answers on this topic
Alternatives Considered
Cisco
It did a lot of good things for us. But the capabilities that we used it for were just probably a lot of what we're using it for right now, which is upgrades and configuration pushes to all of our gear, but it doesn't have quite the robust features that I've learned about this week. So as far, I'm still pretty new in the network world. I've only been doing the job for seven years, so I've really only known Cisco products and I haven't reviewed anything outside of Cisco, but just from what I've worked on and they've all done what I've needed them to do. And with Catalyst Center it'll do even more
Read full review
SolarWinds
We were trying to evaluate different providers and ipMonitor suited us because we had on-prem and cloud instances and management decided to check the paid tool. The ipMonitor is a very responsive tool and it served the purpose well but as IT is evolving and needs are changing, we discontinued the ipMonitor and shifted to Zabbix due to the customization which was the need at the time.
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Return on Investment
Cisco
  • Well, it's hard to justify because the University is not a profit organization and people usually ask us for dollar value, but we don't have one. As long as their reputation is good, the students are happy, and the experience on the campus from a student and academics are good - I think that's a success for us.
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SolarWinds
  • We currently use an outside service to monitor critical network nodes. We will do away with that service shortly.
  • We no longer have to wait to hear from our users if there is a network device down. We will be proactively alerted and we can begin to remediate immediately helping to limit downtime.
  • After initial setup and some tweaking, it requires little to no time to maintain.
Read full review
ScreenShots

Cisco Catalyst Center Screenshots

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

SolarWinds ipMonitor Screenshots

Screenshot of Screenshot of Screenshot of Easy to navigate GUI interfaceScreenshot of Remediation FunctionalityScreenshot of Network Discovery Wizard