Early look is good, but pricing and compartmentalization is ugly
July 30, 2019
Early look is good, but pricing and compartmentalization is ugly
Score 4 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with Cisco DNA Center
DNA Center is being used primarily for assurance in one department. In the future, we will use the automation and provisioning and hopefully spread it to be used in the other departments. It is currently addressing the issue of having historical data and information when attempting to troubleshoot endpoints, but we hope to use provisioning to automatically deploy devices without having to have a trained on-site presence in the near future.
- Historical visualized data: This data is comprehensive, and available for viewing without having to ask an end user to repeat this task.
- Path Mapping: Endpoint path data will show the network health between two endpoints
- Network Templating: The ability to set network configurations across multiple devices in a specific role is vital.
- Image management: This allows us to set a single golden image, which can be used across the infrastructure effortlessly.
- Initial setup: This was unnecessarily complex. You can tell that the product had more developer input than it really should have.
- Documentation on initial setup: this could have been written a lot better.
- Mapping: The hierarchical view is great, but I think most people would also like the option of seeing a traditional network diagram.
- Integration with ACI: My customers want to see end-to-end networking across the infrastructure, not just endpoints. If I have ACI ruling my datacenter but it's not visible DNA center, I have to swap between 2 tools to observe visibility. That isn't something I really want to do
- ISE Integration was a hassle: Ended up having to call TAC to make this work
- Licensing costs: Licensing costs for DNA advantage are asinine.
- IPAM support is extremely limited: Only Bluecoat and Infoblox at the time, that's pretty limited. I'd like to see it integrated with windows native IPAM and Solarwinds IPAM
- Downtime has been decreased and is a positive impact.
- Learning curve has been a negative impact.
- Adoptability has had a negative impact.
- Deployment times have decreased and is a positive impact.