Cisco Nexus Dashboard vs. SolarWinds Engineer's Toolset

Nexus Dashboard is a vital tool for Cisco data center Nexus deployments, in my opinion. By utilizing multiple applications in the suite, a business can utilize orchestration, monitor services and traffic, test deployment scenarios, verify upgrade processes and readiness, etc. The capabilities of the system can allow for SAN MDS controls, traditional Nexus NXOS integration, and/or essential ACI tools

[SolarWinds Engineer's Toolset is] a great tool for monitoring database servers, highly recommended. The very good thing is that it keeps the history for two weeks, and you can see the time slice for all the server activities. Helps a lot to identify the memory and CPU bottlenecks, research blocking issues and kill the sessions, if necessary.

Incentivized

• It provides monitoring for our overall ACI Fabric which includes the Controller, Spine, and Leaf Switches.
• It gives you a single pane of visibility of all of your ACI fabric using Nexus Dashboard, no need to login to each of the multiple ACI fabric controllers.
• Provides an assurance analysis to to your ACI fabric before implementing any change in configuration, they have the Pre-change analysis prior to the firmware upgrade.
• Gives you the overall health of your Fabric and provides anomaly severity.

• Debugging Tools
• Saves Time for basic checks
• Ping, Telnet, SSH right from the console and hence easy user management from console itself

Incentivized

• Flow Telemetry - Need to overcome the restrictions of 20000 flow/sec. No DataCenter is small enough to pump only 20K flows per second. And we want to use this product for proactive monitoring so we cannot decide on a small segment to monitor flow for beforehand.
• Creating tags and label for clubbing certain entities so that we can create customized dashboards to monitor and provide access to Operations team
• Scheduled Reports and Reporting capability is lacking

Incentivized

• The unifying component that is intended to be the initial interface to the tools seems clunky. I prefer to start the tools individually rather than using it.
• The port scanner could use some improvements to make it easier to use.

Incentivized

I think Nexus Dashboard is a phenomenal product, allowing us to simplify, automate and troubleshoot our network. It has helped me greatly in my drive towards private cloud. Furthermore the innovations I'm seeing from the product teams is very exciting

Incentivized

For the end user, it is relatively easy to use. However, some training and practice is a must because the NSO is not as straightforward as the traditional router CLI. For the administrator, Cisco Network Service Orchestrator (NSO) is just like another program running on the Linux system--there is no big difference.

Incentivized

Very easy to use and intuitive. Just be careful with the WAN Killer...it does what it says.

Incentivized

Great and effective automation functionalities and the tools on network security management are the best and easy data reports building. Cisco Nexus Dashboard Fabric Controller feature for the network monitoring and easy management of various services and even offers the best analytics and also powerful integration tools for easy data migration.

here was never a need to contact support, as the system includes several commands that allow for self-healing. Even if, after the upgrade process, one of the processes was not running, I was able to quickly find the appropriate sequence of commands that definitively resolved the issue. The entire architecture was designed in such a way as to be resilient to the failure of one node in a three-server setup.

Incentivized

Our organization uses it regularly. It is reliable, and we keep finding new uses for it

Incentivized

Honestly, the product implementation took 1–2 days to comprehensively manage the client’s entire infrastructure. The delivered on-premise solution, provided as physical servers, quickly builds the required environment in which individual data centers are rapidly added. The data collection process takes some time but also depends on the number of devices in the network.

Incentivized

The Cisco Nexus Series switches perform admirably in our blended distributed system. We have been dealing with any of these sorts of switches for over 5 years and have been exceptionally happy with their functionality. Several of our other computer networks in our data rooms have proved effective with Cisco equipment. Because of the simplicity of maintenance and the high quality of technical support provided by Cisco representatives, there is a high level of trust in these switches.

Incentivized

These tools complement the Engineer's Toolset. They are excellent at detecting most issues and at keeping the network monitored and protected. However, when it comes time to dig into an issue, especially a hard to fix intermittent issue, these products lack the granularity of monitoring needed for these types of issues. Having said that the toolset is not made to do full time enterprise level monitoring. With these tools and the toolset I am able to have a more complete view of the network and deliver higher levels of service and quicker responses to issues.

Incentivized

The platform is very well done, and to date, I have had no complaints about the implementation of the platform and no security issues or vulnerabilities. Cisco in all its product releases new versions to resolve security issues or bugs that appear on the platform, this is a big plus.

• Because it guarantees us expandable network services and without any interruption, providing a better service to each of our clients has been possible.
• It has allowed us to keep the services innovated, doing this process in a reduced time, since it does not require a long programming, so implementing new services is done at a rapid pace.
• Its automation has allowed us to reduce the burden of manual configurations, so having errors has also decreased.
• Because it is based on an automation and orchestration model, providing faster and larger-scale services is possible.

Incentivized

• Spend less time downloading free buggy tools
• All the tools in one spot, so you don't have to look around for tools
• Get to the solution sooner

Incentivized