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Cisco Secure Firewall Management Center vs. SolarWinds Pingdom

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    Overview
    ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price

    Cisco Secure Firewall Management Center

    Score8.9 out of 10
    N/ACisco Secure Firewall Management Center (formerly Firepower Management Center) are a firewall policy and intrusion detection appliance management system, providing an administrative nerve center for managing critical Cisco network security solutions. It provides complete and unified management over firewalls, application control, intrusion prevention, URL filtering, and advanced malware protection. Easily go from managing a firewall to controlling applications to investigating and remediating…N/A

    SolarWinds Pingdom

    Score8 out of 10
    N/ASolarWinds Pingdom is a website uptime monitoring and alert tool, with additional reporting and Real User Monitoring capabilities. Pingdom is part of SolarWinds’s DevOps package, enabling full-stack monitoring as a service.

    $14.95

    per month

    Pricing
    Cisco Secure Firewall Management CenterSolarWinds Pingdom
    Editions & Modules
    No answers on this topic
    Synthetic Monitoring
    $10
    per month
    Real User Monitoring
    $10
    per month
    Enterprise
    Custom Pricing
    Offerings
    Pricing Offerings
    Cisco Secure Firewall Management CenterSolarWinds Pingdom
    Free Trial
    NoYes
    Free/Freemium Version
    NoNo
    Premium Consulting/Integration Services
    NoNo
    Entry-level Setup FeeNo setup feeNo setup fee
    Additional Details——
    More Pricing Information
    Community Pulse
    Cisco Secure Firewall Management CenterSolarWinds Pingdom
    Considered Both Products
    Cisco
    No answer on this topic
    SolarWinds
    No answer on this topic
    Key User Insights
    Would buy again
    96%
    Would buy again
    23 Answers
    98%
    Would buy again
    52 Answers
    Delivers good value for the price
    100%
    Delivers good value for the price
    23 Answers
    98%
    Delivers good value for the price
    52 Answers
    Happy with the feature set
    96%
    Happy with the feature set
    23 Answers
    98%
    Happy with the feature set
    52 Answers
    Lived up to sales and marketing promises
    88%
    Lived up to sales and marketing promises
    15 Answers
    96%
    Lived up to sales and marketing promises
    43 Answers
    Implementation went as expected
    96%
    Implementation went as expected
    23 Answers
    100%
    Implementation went as expected
    49 Answers
    Features
    Cisco Secure Firewall Management CenterSolarWinds Pingdom
    Firewall Security Management
    Comparison of Firewall Security Management features of Cisco Secure Firewall Management Center and SolarWinds Pingdom
    Feature
    Cisco Secure Firewall Management Center
    8.1
    21 Ratings
    2% above category average
    SolarWinds Pingdom
    -
    Ratings
    Policy planning and rule management8.021 Ratings00 Ratings
    Automated Policy Orchestration7.019 Ratings00 Ratings
    Device Discovery8.019 Ratings00 Ratings
    Policy Compliance Auditing8.019 Ratings00 Ratings
    Attack Path Simulation Testing7.516 Ratings00 Ratings
    Anomalous Event or Behavior Deviation8.019 Ratings00 Ratings
    Vulnerability Scans8.516 Ratings00 Ratings
    Firewall Rule Cleanup9.518 Ratings00 Ratings
    Best Alternatives
    Cisco Secure Firewall Management CenterSolarWinds Pingdom
    Small Businesses
    No answers on this topic
    No answers on this topic
    Medium-sized Companies
    Palo Alto Panorama
    Score8.7 out of 10
    SolarWinds Web Performance Monitor (WPM)
    Score8 out of 10
    Enterprises
    Palo Alto Panorama
    Score8.7 out of 10
    No answers on this topic
    All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
    User Ratings
    Cisco Secure Firewall Management CenterSolarWinds Pingdom
    Likelihood to Recommend
    8.5
    (24 ratings)
    4.5
    (64 ratings)
    Likelihood to Renew
    10.0
    (1 ratings)
    10.0
    (4 ratings)
    Usability
    8.0
    (4 ratings)
    10.0
    (7 ratings)
    Availability
    10.0
    (1 ratings)
    -
    (0 ratings)
    Performance
    -
    (0 ratings)
    6.0
    (1 ratings)
    Support Rating
    8.0
    (7 ratings)
    4.1
    (54 ratings)
    Implementation Rating
    9.0
    (1 ratings)
    -
    (0 ratings)
    Ease of integration
    8.0
    (1 ratings)
    -
    (0 ratings)
    User Testimonials
    Cisco Secure Firewall Management CenterSolarWinds Pingdom
    Likelihood to Recommend
    Cisco
    FMC is feature-rich and user-friendly. Cisco firewalls can run on standalone mode (FDM) but fewer features are supported on FDM. FMC is a must when working with Cisco Firewall. Migration from Cisco ASA to Cisco FTD is easy. There is a tool (FMT) that converts and imports the cisco IOS configuration file to FMC. FMC runs in VM or can be purchased as a physical appliance. The downside is that FMC is not quite fast and has bugs, especially when running in the older version 5x. and 6x.
    Read full review
    SolarWinds
    I believe the scenarios we used it for were quite well covered, from the executive perspective. The downtime alarms worked very well and were easy to setup, uptime monitoring tools were clear and easy to use, even for non-technical people (C-level) and the SLA management tools allowed us to spend less time, and have less friction, with our clients
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Pros
    Cisco
    • Great protection and security against the multiple digital virus attacks.
    • Provides detailed logs to track any threat and helps to secure the network promptly.
    • VPN service for remote access of important organizational applications.
    • Best management tool for controlling data and bandwidth resources.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    SolarWinds
    • The alerts are very responsive offering quite detailed timing information
    • The UI for reports is very clear and set up of reports is very intuitive
    • Customer service was good when there were problems - e.g. lapsing billing causing reporting to go down
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Cons
    Cisco
    • Stability when managing firewalls, we're having issues with Firewall 01 and Firewall 02 remaining in sync
    • Reporting when it comes to access control policy rules - there is no way to export a report of the rules easily. Using a custom Python script on the Cisco forums is the only way to easily export a CSV.
    • Support for policy and route-based site-to-site VPN was not available until 6.6.0 and later. This forced us to purchase ASAs to bridge that gap.
    • Dashboard reporting - when clicking a link for more information, nothing displays. Currently working with Cisco on the support case, which has been escalated.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    SolarWinds
    • The PagerDuty integration could be a lot better. When you use the PagerDuty integration, it doesn't send any information about which check failed! It just sends a message like "Timeout (> 30s)" -- this isn't very helpful when we have hundreds of checks. We've worked around this by using both the PagerDuty and Slack integrations and having them both post to the same Slack channel. But this means that when an engineer is paged from PagerDuty, they have to go to Slack (or Pingdom) to find the details about the page; it's not available on the page itself.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Likelihood to Renew
    Cisco
    We are very satisfied with SecureX and it's adaptive, active nature in protecting or data and systems. It's easy to administer, update, review notifications and update when necessary. Cisco's security practice fits into our needs and continues to evolve as global cyber events change. SecureX is easy to migrate to new cisco gear as we upgrade to newer models when supports ends on older gear. Enabling fast ROI during these capital expenditure projects.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    SolarWinds
    Recently added features have made Pingdom less intuitive for our requirements. While Pingdom has a broad offering and remains a good value, it is becoming more than we need. Our customer base is becoming more and more global and Pingdom still lacks Asia-Pacific monitoring, which we will need within a year.
    Read full review
    Usability
    Cisco
    Overall usability is an eight for me because it is easy to manage the firewall policies and monitor the devices' health. The configurations are all done in the GUI which makes it more convenient and hassle free. You can also see the devices' health and the progress of the task thru its taskbar.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    SolarWinds
    Pingdom is easy to use, very intuitive and has a very short learning curve. From the onset, we've been able to jump in and leverage the tool to accomplish our goals for page speed performance and discover the insights we need to make improvements. Its a well-designed tool and makes for a good user experience.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Reliability and Availability
    Cisco
    Since moving to Cisco secure management center from firepower management center we've had no application issues, outages or any other problems. It's always been there for us and always provides us the necessary protection and notification when we need it. Been very happy with all of our Cisco systems over our tenure to date.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    SolarWinds
    No answers on this topic
    Performance
    Cisco
    No answers on this topic
    SolarWinds
    Interface is unnecessarily complicated and frequently responds slowly.
    Read full review
    Support Rating
    Cisco
    We have the direct support of the manufacturer through its service channels, the attention is 24/7, and the response time is acceptable. The support for this tool is almost nil. It all depends on the level of implementation is carried out so that it can fail and request collaboration. Anyway, the manufacturer backs the entire Cisco Firepower Management Center (FMC series appliances) solution.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    SolarWinds
    Support responded the same day to my query, as I was setting the product up but couldn't find the setting I needed. This was successfully resolved in a short time frame, so I was pleased with how quickly we were able to get this resolved. I haven't needed to contact support since.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Implementation Rating
    Cisco
    Cisco secure firewall management center is easy to install, moderate to setup in conjunction with firewall hardware, and administration of policy changes afterwards is pretty straight forward. And flexible to add more advanced security configurations as needed. Cisco support website is pretty good for researching how to documentation too. Cisco secure firewall management center enables integration to SecureX - the cloud security protection service. And AMP which protects packet flow with real time analysis. Cisco secure fmc is the evolved name for cisco firepower management center so for those customers who have firepower this is a simple migration.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    SolarWinds
    No answers on this topic
    Alternatives Considered
    Cisco
    We are managing multiple customers having a large number of Cisco devices that need to be managed by a single platform. For that reason, we have selected the Cisco Firewall Management Center than checkpoint firewall management. It simplifies and automates newly bought cisco firewalls at remote branch offices to manage, configure and troubleshoot them.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    SolarWinds
    1. PRTG Network Monitor was a far more complicated tool to use and set up albeit it does both Internal and External monitoring. The setup wasn't intuitive and there are too many configuration options to complete to form an alert
    2. Amazon CloudWatch is specific to AWS resources and cannot be easily use outside of the AWS Ecosystem
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Return on Investment
    Cisco
    • It's a very straightforward and user-friendly tool that has enhanced the total detection of malware and other threats t from intrusion into our network.
    • Provides stable deep network scanning, security visibility, and protection from unauthorized access.
    • The platform modular allows us to deploy across multiple budget cycles.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    SolarWinds
    • Honestly, we have 4 other products that overlap this functionality whose organizations provide far superior support. At this point it is an unnecessary expense.
    • In my opinion, their lack of support responsiveness and commitment has impacted our IT agility.
    • Its time to explore other alternatives.
    Read full review
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