Cisco IOS Is Still King
July 03, 2025
Cisco IOS Is Still King
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with Cisco IOS
Cisco IOS is the cornerstone of our network infrastructure. As a network engineer for my organization, there isn't a single day (or maybe even a couple of hours) that I'm not interacting with Cisco IOS in some capacity. My team and I use it to troubleshoot network issues, make network changes, fulfill user requests, plan network infrastructure changes, monitor device environmentals, apply configuration macros, check for system resource utilization (e.g. CPU, memory), and so much more.
Pros
- Cisco IOS image upgrades usually go very smooth due to thorough quality assurance software testing from Cisco. It also helps that Cisco has very helpful white papers that helps walk you through the upgrade process in easy to follow steps.
- Does a great job of providing network device health data via the various Cisco IOS commands
- It's a fast operating system which makes it a dream to work with
Cons
- By this point, there are several "flavors" of the Cisco IOS such as XE, XR, and the standard Cisco IOS. While they are all fairly similar, there does exist syntax differences between them. It would be ideal if at some point in the future, Cisco is able to unify all of them into one standard operating system which would use the same syntax across all platforms.
- While overall Cisco does a great job of QA'ing their IOS, no matter the release, there's always some minor bugs. I think it's important that Cisco continue to pour resources into their QA team to test their software.
- While I'm very familiar with the graphical readouts of "show processes cpu history" I would love for Cisco to eventually find a more intuitive way to display this data. I can't begin to count how many times I've had to teach more entry level (and even mid level) engineers how this graph is interpreted.
- I do wish that Cisco had something similar to Juniper's "commit check" or "commit confirmed". This helps validate the changes you're about to apply, and catch errors, so that you have a better idea of the impact of the change.
- Cisco IOS has had a positive impact in how quickly we're able to mitigate issues and outages due to how fast it's able to display the exact data we're looking for and because how the relevant that data is.
- Having a stable operating system means less network issues and less outages. It goes without saying how valuable this has been for our organization.
- Fantastic TAC support from Cisco! In the rare instances that we're faced with a very complex issue, or unfamiliar territory, Cisco TAC has historically done a phenomenal job of assisting us and getting us sorted!
Cisco IOS is the most stable I've used, has the best TAC support, has the best knowledge base articles and white papers from Cisco, is the most intuitive, is one of the fastest, and since it's the most widely used network appliance OS, chances are that most network engineers you encounter will have the most familiarity with Cisco IOS than with any other vendor's OS.
Do you think Cisco IOS delivers good value for the price?
Yes
Are you happy with Cisco IOS's feature set?
Yes
Did Cisco IOS live up to sales and marketing promises?
Yes
Did implementation of Cisco IOS go as expected?
Yes
Would you buy Cisco IOS again?
Yes
Comments
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