Cisco Catalyst Center (formerly Cisco DNA
Center) is a network management system that leverages AI to connect,
secure, and automate customer’s network operations. It harnesses the Catalyst family of switching and wireless through AI-enabled
automation that simplifies the IT experience and streamlines complex network
operations. Offering
operational flexibility, Cisco Catalyst Center can be deployed on-premises on a
physical appliance or in a VMware virtual environment, or in a…
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SolarWinds NPM
Score 8.4 out of 10
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SolarWinds NPM is a monitoring and performance management platform. It provides performance troubleshooting support, auto network discovery, customizable thresholds, and can be rapidly deployed.
There are some other products that provide some of the benefits that Cisco DNA center offers, but I haven't found one solution that matches up against Cisco DNA Center. Our organization prefers Cisco products over others due to their resiliency. Since we have Cisco products, …
I have not used any other products like Cisco DNA Center, as this was really the only SDN product we thought would be worthwhile since we are almost a 100% Cisco shop.
Cisco is still the top of its class in switching/routing even with an increase in competition over the years. Support is great but more documentation is needed so we can find information for ourselves and not always open a TAC case.
We have evaluated SolarWinds Network Performance Monitor (npm) for some time in the past and found that, while it has its merits (cost-effectiveness amongst others), the Cisco DNA Center is a more robust product overall, and is better suited for a primarily Cisco-based network …
SolarWinds Network Performance Monitor is dedicated to network devices so it's really efficient, Zabbix or PRTG are trying to do too many things and it's very complicated to achieve same things as with SolarWinds Network Performance Monitor.
I think if you have Cisco infrastructure and you are looking to do a big hardware install per se, the plug-and-play feature is really helpful to be able to really quickly push out a config to a bunch of switches. That was really helpful for us. It really sped things up. If you need to push out configuration changes to a bunch of switches at once, it can be helpful, I guess if you plan it out. I guess that's the part I'm struggling with is trying to figure out how to streamline that process, but it has the potential there to be really helpful.
Solarwinds NPM is well suited for medium to large networks, it may be a bit heavy for the SOHO environment as most of the tools and reports are designed for monitoring KPIs which may not be critical for a small shop. NPM can handle large networks with several sites and mixed technologies ranging from networks, server systems, storage devices and SLA reporting.
I want to hammer home this swim process. It is amazing how you can upgrade something. It does all the readiness checks for you, does all the compliance checks for you, and it eliminates a lot of potential human error. Maybe you won't copy a file correctly, maybe you didn't check your MD five hash properly. There's a lot of things that if you're doing 50, 60, 70 upgrades over the course of a week or two weeks, you might try to cut corners, or not intentionally, but just human error. You do something repetitive, maybe you skip a step with swim, there is no skipping a step. It checks compliance, it checks your iOS, you download your iOS straight from Cisco from Catalyst Center. It eliminates any fatigue that you might have whenever it comes to doing repetitive things for weeks on end.
We started using the product quite early and as I understand it was quite a new product for Cisco, so it's been developed quite aggressively. So even though we thought we were running the latest recommended version, a month later we realized that we are so much behind that it might take a week to upgrade to the latest recommended versions. In a way, it's good because it's developed so fast, but it's hard to keep up with all the implementations. And last upgrade for us took three weeks because we were so behind and it just takes longer because we've got large-scale deployment.
We utilize Cisco Catalyst Center frequently for many tasks including SWIM and vulnerability mitigation which has provided better options than manual processes
The entire IT staff relies on NPM in its daily operations. It would be impossible for us to maintain our level of service without it. If SolarWinds gets to proud of their product and begins to over charge for it, we would be forced to reconsider and use a different product. But as it stands it is worth the price to renew it.
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.
SolarWinds Network Performance Monitor (NPM) is quite an extensive product, covering all our bases and requirements. There are a lot of customizable options and features which you can work with for their alerting which is really useful. I haven't found anything yet which I thought SolarWinds Network Performance Monitor (NPM) could do, but it actually couldn't so overall it works nicely and does the job.
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.
In all of the times that we called support, someone at SolarWinds had the answer for us in a timely manner. Through thwack and other internet searching, we have been able to resolve all of our issues that arose to our satisfaction. The support staff have always been knowledgeable of their products or had a fellow support staff member to rely on to get the needed answers.
The training is good but during the implementation, you can get situations not learned during the training. The trainer was very open to hearing the questions about use cases and always sharing his experience. I really recommend having official training to take advantage of all features that the NPM can bring.
Make sure your inventory is accurate. Stand up some virtual machines for testing prior to installation. Make sure your database and its credentials are setup. Think about things you want to monitor that may not be obvious - UPS units, Door hardware, PBX systems, Fabric Channel switches, firewalls, routers, switches. Try to setup SNMP on these devices and have an IP that you will assign to the new server. If you do that it will go well.
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 visibility and flexibility. Solarwinds has the ablity to view Netflow which would be an interesting add to DNA Center or an easier path to get or integrate with Stealthwatch.
We selected SolarWinds Network Performance Monitor because of the capabilities of the product versus the price. The tools also work well with their other products and support is fairly good. We have never had a problem when we needed to make a call.
Initial cost is pricy, but management needs to understand the value this provides so make them aware
Reporting could be improved in more detail in our opinion, but it gives a great overview of your environment. High level overview for managers would be greatly appreciated with as little or much detail as needed for certain Cisco gear.
Does not work as well with some older Cisco equipment because they want you to buy new, again the cost impact comes into play.
SolarWinds allows us to proactively address hardware issues before they impact the business. We recently had a server that was experiencing issues sporadically and we were able to use the data from SolarWinds to track down and correct the issue before it tanked the server.
SolarWinds gives our IT department some piece of mind knowing that they'll be alerted of any issues real time.
We can use SolarWinds data to justify needed to replace or upgrade certain equipment that is key to our core business.
