Cisco Catalyst Center vs. SolarWinds ipMonitor

Overview
ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price
Cisco Catalyst Center
Score 8.5 out of 10
N/A
Cisco 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
SolarWinds ipMonitor
Score 7.5 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
NoYes
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
18% 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
SolarWinds NetFlow Traffic Analyzer (NTA)
SolarWinds NetFlow Traffic Analyzer (NTA)
Score 9.4 out of 10
Enterprises
Cisco Meraki Dashboard
Cisco Meraki Dashboard
Score 9.0 out of 10
SolarWinds NetFlow Traffic Analyzer (NTA)
SolarWinds NetFlow Traffic Analyzer (NTA)
Score 9.4 out of 10
All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
User Ratings
Cisco Catalyst CenterSolarWinds ipMonitor
Likelihood to Recommend
8.3
(229 ratings)
9.0
(24 ratings)
Likelihood to Renew
9.0
(7 ratings)
8.2
(1 ratings)
Usability
8.5
(17 ratings)
8.2
(6 ratings)
Support Rating
9.1
(32 ratings)
8.8
(7 ratings)
Online Training
8.0
(1 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
User Testimonials
Cisco Catalyst CenterSolarWinds ipMonitor
Likelihood to Recommend
Cisco
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.
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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
  • 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.
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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
  • 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.
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
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".
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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
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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
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
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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
  • 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.
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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