Cisco Prime LAN Management (discontinued) vs. DX Spectrum

Although Cisco Prime [LAN Management Solution] is a nice tool and no other 4rd party tools can match its native monitoring and managing capabilities still i have given less rating and that's because it is only for Cisco vendor Devices. Hence if you have only Cisco infrastructure then go for it or else look for another 4rd party tool in conjunction with Cisco prime.

Incentivized

As I said before, not only for Spectrum, but for any monitoring tool, you need to know what is critical in your environment and think about how exactly you should monitor and treat it. If you have done that, everything will work just fine.

• Well Suited - Networking Monitoring
• Less Appropriate - When you need to customize some monitoring and to update the version

Incentivized

• Wireless file detection and planning mode has helped us expand into new areas of our buildings.
• Alerting is detailed when we have issues with hardwired and wireless devices, and Rogue Access Points are easily identifiable.
• Cisco equipment information is much more detailed than other management products' SNMP queries and is an excellent tool for troubleshooting end-device connectivity issues.
• Our KPI reporting for senior management and centralized management of our WIPS 'Wireless Intrusion Prevention' setup have both benefited significantly from the detailed reporting capabilities.

Incentivized

• Polling and traps can be configured to take heartbeats at specified intervals and notify on an event in real-time, respectively.
• Topology of devices gives a high-level overview of network architecture.
• Discovery of devices is simple and secure with the use of community strings.
• Details can be added per device or alarm type for actions to be taken to make troubleshooting easier.

Incentivized

• Maps. One thing that I miss is the fact that you can't see both wired and wireless equipment in the same topology map. For visualization and troubleshooting purposes, that would help a lot, and I honestly don' t think it's that much harder to implement.
• I'd love to see an option to show 'live dashboards,' maps, or other visual tools to publish in a NOC room, or even just to broadcast in a big monitor to allow multiple workmates to check that information. Again, I don't think that would be too hard to implement. I remember a similar feature was available in the first versions of the product, way back in the 90's (yes, I'm that old :-) )
• Sometimes, depending on what screen you are, the solution can be a little slow. I'm not saying the whole system is slow, but sometimes that slowness can bother a little.
• Talking about areas for improvement, one area I think can be improved is the upgrade process. Even for not so large deployments, it can take a lot of time. Having this time decreased would be the right thing to do.

Incentivized

• NOC
• Data Center/Telecom

Incentivized

We are very happy using Cisco Prime LAN Management Solution for the following reason: 1- Ease of use with the GUI. 2- Very well organized dashboard which can view many statistics on your devices. 3- Customized dashboard for different views ( for technical team and executives ) 4- Schedule configuration templates to use whenever we need on whatever device we want.

Incentivized

There are various 3rd party tools available in the market which not only supports monitoring of cisco devices but also supports non-cisco devices, even with these capabilities in these 3rd party tools Cisco Prime has maintained a uniqueness in its products being the native tool from Cisco. The uniqueness is about product supportability for given devices and some of the edge features such as configuration management, detailed heatmaps etc

Other tools I have used are more server/application-centric. CA Spectrum seems to work effectively and efficiently for network devices. Notification delays can be set to grant grace periods in case of network blips or false positives, which occur ALL the time. Other monitoring tools send event notifications immediately and would clear instantly, which while on-call can wake a technician for no reason.

Incentivized

• It has helped us with our quarterly wireless security testing by pinpointing the location of non-approved access points vs. hunting for them via signal strength.
• Saves time by helping to identify network health issues before they become a definitive problem causing downtime.
• With errors detected early, we have noticed our wi-fi network is much more stable thus freeing up our engineer's time elsewhere.

Incentivized

• Proactive monitoring for networking
• To many times to plan an update

Incentivized