Item: Cisco Catalyst Center
Rating: 8
Author: Verified User

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Cisco DNA Center is being used by external business units in our organization to improve their network documentation. One of the main features that makes Cisco DNA Center powerful is the ability to create a network map and an inventory sheet. This allows the team to save an enormous amount of time in understanding the network design. Moreover, Cisco DNA Center is compatible with iOS legacy devices. This means that you can still use Cisco DNA Center if you have old devices in your network. After testing it on smaller sites, now we're starting to rule it out in bigger sites.

Pros and Cons

Network mapping
Inventory

The licensing model
Old devices have limited functionality

Return on Investment

Reduced time spent on network documentation
Fast incident resolution

Alternatives Considered

NetBrain

We have checked other solutions like NetBrain, and we discovered that Cisco DNA Center is way simpler to use, and it gives us exactly what we need. Even though it provides much less information, this tool is capable of showing you exactly what you need. Also, in terms of pricing, Cisco DNA Center is less expensive.

Support Rating

Support for DNA Center is okay. Cisco is trying to make sure we spend the least possible time troubleshooting, and we spend time taking care of our networks. We can see this in how the TAC solves the issues. They always try to be quick and carefully listen to the customer requests.

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 DNA Center, IBM Netcool Network Management, NetBrain

Likelihood to Recommend

Cisco DNA Center is a good option to gain some time in network documentation activities like with network maps or network device inventory. Cisco DNA Center is an excellent option if your network is using IOS-XE only devices, which means you will have full support for the different modules. Moreover, you can automate some of the actions by using the Cisco DNA Center API.

Products Replaced

Yes - One of the main features we used in DNA center was the visibility feature, we've needed the abbility to see how our network was interconnected and what is the relationship between the devices. We've replaced netcool functionality of network mapping fonctionalities of the IBM tivoli suite with DNA center, even though the products are different. DNA Center provided us a more granular, easy to understand view of our network. On top of that we could do basic operations to our switching and we could automate the setting up process of a devices.

We wanted to replace the IBM solution because we needed a more simple way to visualize our network. DNA center provided these features and it added automation capabilities.

One downside of DNA center is it's limited information of Non cisco devices. I think DNA center would be a much more powerful product if it could integrate different vendors and provide similar user experience than with Cisco devices.

Key Differentiators

Product Features
Product Usability

In our case, the key element was the features and the usability of the product. In our environement we have a lot of Cisco devices from different kinds (CAT 9k, ISR's, among others). DNA center provided the feature of visualizing the network interactions between those devices. It also provided automation capabilities that could help us improve our day to day activities. The features we've found very interesting where:

- Zero touch provisioning
- Centralized control plane where we can push config commands to all devices

this opens the door to many automation use cases that we're yet to discover.

Evaluation Lessons Learned

As networks evolve, we have more and more multi-vendor networks, if we had to do the process again, we would put more emphasis on multi-vendor support of DNA center. This would add more power to the tool.

DNA Center is very powerful for cisco environements, with added support for multi-vendor it would be a better tool.

Cisco DNA Center: Network documentation simplified--make your life easier!

Overall Satisfaction with Cisco DNA Center