Cisco Catalyst Center General Review
June 12, 2025
Cisco Catalyst Center General Review
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with Cisco Catalyst Center
We were given Cisco Catalyst Center for free in 2020 as part of a campus refresh project, and it was simple enough to setup for greenfield devices via PnP DHCP, however it has been tedious to deal with in regards to managing brownfield devices and using its features post onboarding. We would like to use Cisco Catalyst Center for telemetry, but for several years we have not been able to get any telemetry data from properly licensed Catalyst devices. Recently we ran into an issue with deploying NBAR app telemetry configuration to our devices using Cisco Catalyst Center. We currently record our Netflow data from access ports, and our devices are unable to run the telemetry config and netflow configuration on the same interfaces. Our Cisco resources have been unable to recommend a supported solution or any documentation for getting Netflow and telemetry on our network.
Pros
- I enjoy having a more modern tool for viewing PSIRTs and CVEs on our catalyst devices.
- I enjoy all the different views I have for my inventory.
- I think templates work well for zero day configuration.
- I love the newer features for showing what configuration is going to be changed and deployed before you deploy it.
- I like that I can see in-band and out-of-band configuration history.
Cons
- Brownfield device onboarding. I have turned most of the network hierarchy configuration settings off for brownfield sites as it often causes more problems.
- When certain configurations get automatically deployed is not intuitive. I often have to remind myself when and what configuration gets deployed when I discover a device versus when I assign a device to a site versus when I provision a device.
- App telemetry has not functioned for us since we got the product 5 years ago due to conflicts with our Netflow configuration.
- It's annoying that the product doesn't really function as a source of truth. It requires a lot of overhead to remember which devices get access to which features. And Nexus devices can't be managed by this product so I don't have a centralized inventory. Perhaps this is not the product to use a Source of Truth though.
- I have used it for upgrading devices, and it's does a great job at that, however out operations team for whatever reason has not adopted the feature.
- Overall it feels like Cisco Catalyst Center has been huge waste of time. I feel like my time would be better spent on other projects and looking at other products and tools
- ThousandEyes
- Cisco Catalyst Switches
- Cisco AnyConnect
- Cisco Umbrella
Mostly VPN issues. We currently have small user reports every week that we have been performing root cause analysis on for months.
We are moving to Prisma Access.
Do you think Cisco Catalyst Center delivers good value for the price?
No
Are you happy with Cisco Catalyst Center's feature set?
Yes
Did Cisco Catalyst Center live up to sales and marketing promises?
No
Did implementation of Cisco Catalyst Center go as expected?
No
Would you buy Cisco Catalyst Center again?
No
Comments
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