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…
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 …
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 …
It integrates well with SD-WAN and ISE. So since we had those already, it was an easy choice. However, we have faced challenges with supporting multi-tenancy as I have told earlier. But, we can see our endpoints and get more information from ISE such as what kind of device it …
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
