Item: Cisco Catalyst Center
Rating: 10
Author: Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with Cisco DNA Center

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

It is used to manage the SDA solution for both our biggest campuses. Our biggest drive to introduce it was to do segmentation in our networks in order to improve the security for our users and developers.

Pros and Cons

Pros

It has a nice GUI.
It simplifies management of very complex scenarios we couldn’t set up without it. (Segmentation.)

Cons

The GUI is not very intuitive: if I want to see what IP pools are in use for a specific site, I have to navigate through a lot of sections whose titles don‘t really sound like IP pools can be found behind them.
In Assurance it is not intuitive for me to filter the Client list for example for "clients whose IP starts with 192.168.111.". I always end up trying different syntax, give up, show the entire list and scroll until I manually find the entry (so far we only have 250 clients enrolled).

Return on Investment

So far not much, since we‘re still running in a pilot phase. Once we have WiFi users in it, its impact will get bigger.

Alternatives Considered

I was not involved in picking DNA Center as our final solution.

Support Rating

It is a young product that needs to mature. Right now a software update is a very serious thing and could take several hours and crash and need TAC support. Partners do not yet seem to be 100% up to speed to give high quality support.

Key Insights

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?

I wasn't involved with the selection/purchase process

Did implementation of Cisco Catalyst Center go as expected?

I wasn't involved with the implementation phase

Would you buy Cisco Catalyst Center again?

Yes

Other Software Used

Cisco Identity Services Engine (ISE), Cisco Prime LAN Management Solution, Cisco Meraki Systems Manager

Likelihood to Recommend

It is well suited for a company with campus sites where there is quite a lot of hardware to manage. DNA Center, to me, is a tool to manage a lot of hardware (with auto deployment, templates and so on). It is also great to manage SDA.

Comments

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DNA Center - good product, but needs to mature