Cisco Catalyst Center vs. OpenText Network Node Manager i (NNMi)

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

[Micro Focus Network Node Manager i (formerly HP Network Node Manager)] is like you implement it, setup monitoring and alerting and forget it forever until any major activity is there and that is possible because of the product's stability. Another reason for product stability is less features as compared to other vendor tools and its own inbuilt database.

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 infrastructure monitoring.
• Interface monitoring.

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

• Most customers would like to see NNM get away from using some Java applets.
• In environments where we see more than 10 different network device vendors in production, we see issues with L2 mapping. Different vendors use different L2 protocols. This can cause an issue with L2 discovery and mapping.

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.

NNMi's user interface is described as well-designed and intuitive, making it easy for users to navigate and perform tasks quickly, thereby enhancing the overall user experience. The system offers a powerful network discovery mechanism that maps out your network's physical and virtual topology, enabling you to visualize connections between devices and identify potential issues. Fault monitoring is at its best. NNMi provides a unified environment for viewing faults, availability, and performance data, consolidating essential information into a single platform.

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

Support is long and arduous and often are unable to help resolve the issue. We often have to do escalations or duty manager to get things moved. Even with a technical account manager, we do not see much improvement from a support point of view. This is an area where Micro Focus has a lot of improvement to do.

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

NNMi is best suited for enterprise-grade, large to very large infrastructure. You have fewer servers to install the product and manage all your devices through a single server, which also enhances ease of use.

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

• Improved Network Monitoring Experience
• Business stability has increased by using this product due to proactive monitoring capabilities
• Capacity Planning has improved due to out of the box reports availability

Incentivized