Cisco Catalyst Center vs. NetBrain Technologies

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

Although there are many products in the market that provides very simple and easy fault and performance monitoring metrics in notification format, reports and emails etc However NetBrain is a specialized tool when it comes to network issues troubleshooting for various kind of scenarios such as multicasting issues in a site can be detected live and bottle neck can be highlighted by a simple click of troubleshooting button.

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized

• Network discovery
• Config comparation
• Runbooks

Incentivized

• 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

• After every release one or the other things stop working
• API call to create INC's in SNOW,Remedy

Incentivized

I gave an 8 out of 10 because Cisco Catalyst Center has been really helpful for monitoring the network, troubleshooting issues, managing segmentation, and automating some tasks. It makes day-to-day operations easier and gives good visibility into the network. It’s not a 10 because there are still areas that could be simpler or more integrated with other tools we use, so there’s room for improvement, but overall it’s a valuable platform that we plan to keep using.

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.

This is a easly tool that i've worked.

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

A little bit of Prime, which I believe was its predecessor. I’m not really familiar with it. We never really used it to its full potential. We’ve also used things like NetBrain and SolarWinds for event management, but they don’t give us the end-user troubleshooting that Cisco Catalyst Center provides. It stacks up much better in some areas, but because of its proprietary approach—limited to only Cisco Catalyst and Meraki, and limited support on other Cisco devices—it doesn’t fully serve as a single pane or single source of truth for our network equipment because of that reason.

Incentivized

The others were cumbersome, slow and there is a huge learning curve for the installation, configuration and just daily monitoring. NetBrain was the easiest of all to setup then let it run and build our network and map it out. Once it was complete, we immediately identified several circuit issues that we were unaware of within our network. With the maps and information gained, we were able to present to [management] and prove a case that we needed larger circuits in several areas.

Incentivized

• 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

• Network automation is up to date.
• Quicker failure discovery and resolving due to the path discovery.
• Less time spent on documentation.
• Much more details in the documentation.

Incentivized