Cisco Catalyst Center Review
June 12, 2024

Cisco Catalyst Center Review

Eric VanDam | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 6 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Modules Used

  • 2357

Overall Satisfaction with Cisco Catalyst Center

We started out by deploying all of our new 9200 Series Switches using the plug-and-play. After that, it was mostly the assurance that we were using, just monitoring port configuration errors, performance, and metrics throughout the network. We also use a little bit of the wireless features, but we are not fully Cisco Wireless, so we're only able to use a little bit of that, but that's really just for our switch infrastructure.

Pros

  • I really like the assurance. I like that I can go through and find problems on the network that could be a mismatch VLAN between two interfaces, port errors, like physical errors that we otherwise probably would need to wait for a customer to complain or we have that we can see that ahead of time and be proactive and say, Hey, I'm noticing that this port is having some errors on it. We might want to check that out ahead of time before it becomes an issue. So that's really useful. And then also being able to configure the network. I think that the programmability part of it, I think I have, I've been having some struggle with that initially, just having to apply. So I have my script, my template that I want to deploy, but in order to deploy it, I have to apply it to a template or a profile and then I have to assign that profile to a group of switches that I want to program. I think it gets a little bit messy and a little bit convoluted, but other than that, I mean it's really helpful. It does automate right now, I think it seems a little convoluted with the process.

Cons

  • Kind of just like what I just covered where pushing out the configuration, it can be a little bit tedious to go through those steps to apply the template to a network profile and then apply that network profile to a group of switches at a specific site where I want to make a change, and I'm looking at this as more of a, it's a small change where I feel like the switch profiles in the network profiles are more of a grand template for the entire switch. Where I'm going testing, I'm just trying to make a minor adjustment to one little configuration, it becomes a little bit tedious.
  • I think just going back to that initial, that switch refresh that we did when we installed all the new switches, I think that was the positive impact of being able to automate that or push out all the configs really quickly using the plug and play. That saved us a lot of time.
  • Cisco Prime LAN Management (discontinued)
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 think that that was probably the most similar thing.

Do you think Cisco Catalyst Center delivers good value for the price?

Yes

Are you happy with Cisco Catalyst Center's feature set?

Yes

Did Cisco Catalyst Center live up to sales and marketing promises?

Yes

Did implementation of Cisco Catalyst Center go as expected?

Yes

Would you buy Cisco Catalyst Center again?

Yes

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.

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