Cisco DNA Center Reviews

My experience with Cisco DNA Center is with selling it and receiving feedback from my customers. I have not personally done any configuration or management with it.

I have worked with the demo and also presented it to customers.

My clients use this solution to give them more visibility into their network, and the management mode helps with to troubleshoot and fix problems.

People like to use the dashboards to get an overview of their network.

If you have a bottleneck in your network then this solution can fix it.

DNA Center is easier to use than Fortinet FortiManager.

The pricing of this solution could be improved.

There is a limitation with the number of VRFs that you can have in your network, and this has caused us problems with some customers.

This solution does not support IP version 6.

I would like to see better integration with Cisco Meraki.

I have been working with this solution for about a year.

It is easy to expand this solution because it is easy to configure, add new sites, and get bigger because you already have the plan. With the configuration already done, it's just plug and play.

The only problem with scaling DNA Center is that it doesn't support IP version 6 yet.

Our clients have between 3,000 and 8,000 users.

We have not been in touch with technical support for this solution.

I have experience with several solutions including FortiManager. Cisco DNA center is easier to use. Also, competitors like Fortinet and Aruba do not have a similar system. They are working on it and trying to get it, but they just don't have a DNA Center.

The initial setup is easy and straightforward if you follow the steps and you have a normal network. However, if you have an advanced network and a lot of things to think about then it can be an issue. For example, if you have a network with a lot of VRFs then it may be an issue because DNA Center can't handle it. If you are starting from a greenfield rather than a brownfield then it should be easier.

My advice for anyone who is looking into implementing this solution is to start with Cisco Assurance and do the mapping of the network. I would suggest asking for help from the partners to help with the installation. You can do it on your own but you will easily save the money that you spend on the consultants because they are experts. You will not waste time getting it up and running, and you will be back on track quickly.

This is a good solution but nothing is perfect. That said, they are ahead of the other vendors. 

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.

I use DNA Center for network administration. Four people in the IT department use this solution.

There are some software problems from version to version. It takes a long time for DNA Center to recognize the video and control access devices.

I've used Cisco DNA Center for about one year.

DNA Center is scalable. 

At the first level of Cisco support, no one can give you a solution, but the second level can help you.

A third-party integrator installed DNA Center for us.

Cisco's suite is expensive. The full solution, including DNA Center, costs more than a million US dollars for a five-year license.

I rate DNA Center seven out of 10, but it's not accessible to all companies who would benefit from the solution.

We use the solution for location tracking. We have to monitor the traffic in our environment since we have more than 3000 visitors per day.

We can monitor all devices and get the required information using the product.

The solution needs to improve the dashboard. The dashboard is very difficult to understand for someone using it for the first time. We took around two months to connect our environment to Cisco.

I have been using the solution for six months.

The network team uses the solution in our organization.

When we struggled to connect our environment to the solution, we raised the issue thrice. However, the team was not able to resolve our issue. Finally, we figured out that we had to upgrade our wireless controller and install the proper certificate. I am not happy with the support.

Cisco should invest some resources to educate the users about the product. Overall, I rate the solution a six and a half out of ten.

I am a solution architect. I design for the data center and I also write technical presentations.

Cisco is a leading network company. Every organization uses networks and data centers. The data centers are mainly on-premise enterprise environments.

Cisco has been used in our organization for 14 years.

From the recent DNA point of view, there are some stability challenges with Cisco, but very minor. 

I have not worked with Cisco technical support for over three years. From my experience, Cisco support is available. They have their own SMEs in each area. There is a gap in between the information shared between Cisco and the technical teams. Cisco should provide a clear view of what has caused the problem when they do the RCA. By providing more information, we can be more proactive and do the upgrades if it is impacting security compliance.

Neutral

We have been using Cisco for so many years that setup is straightforward. The DNA solutions are there and SD-Access is in place. With these, we have come to zero touch provisioning. Deployment is easier than it was five or six years ago. 

We have a large Cisco portfolio in our organization. We have a three-year license with them.

I would rate this solution a seven out of 10. 

I like the visibility, instant build, network, policies, and the ability to control access. I also like that you can visualize your whole network.

Cisco could improve the security side of their solutions.

We have been using this solution since 2005.

It's definitely stable.

It's definitely scalable.

The initial setup can be easy depending on the knowledge you have.

It takes one or two people to maintain the solution. However, it depends on the client and the type of service required. 

The licensing cost for Cisco DNA Center is not more than that of other solutions.

If I were to give pricing a score from one to five, I would give it a score between three and four.

We are happy with this solution; we cannot design data center switches without Cisco DNA.

On a scale from one to ten, I would rate Cisco DNA Center at nine.

It can assess traditional networks.

The automation features are significant and reduce configuration time. This means outstanding functionality. By deploying the controller automatically, the rest becomes automated.

When it comes to deploying wireless fields, integrating defaults into the DNS interface can be challenging.

I have experience with Cisco DNA Center.

In the dashboard, we observe that the integration with IT is functional. However, when inspecting the system, we encounter occasional errors in the desktop.I would rate it 8 out of 10.

I would rate it 8 out of 10.

Deployment is not difficult; it could take approximately a day to complete, assuming we have all the necessary information and the initial email from Cisco.

Maintenance can be challenging because we're unsure about the number of applications utilized in the studio.

I would rate it 7 in terms of pricing.

Overall, I would rate it an eight out of ten.

We deploy the Cisco DNA Center through Cisco Prime Migration, and we use Cisco DNA Center to monitor all the wired connections, endpoints, and switches such as access switches, data center switches, and routers. We also manage the wireless access points through the Cisco DNA Center.

We get reports on availability, health, manageability, logs, and critical errors. We monitor and maintain all the network devices using the solution.

We deploy DNAC for customers who want to manage and monitor all their Cisco Advantage licensed network devices. 

The best feature of Cisco DNA Center is the visibility page, which is unavailable in Cisco Prime. You can see everything on a single plane of glass on the dashboard, and you don't have to be a technical person to view different data and statistics. For example, you can see the issue alarms, errors, topology, and availability. So the tool gives you good visibility into all that's happening within your network infra. It also provides visibility into your computing environment. Application and performance analytics in huge detail is available in the DNA center.

The reporting is fantastic in both Cisco Prime and Cisco DNA Center, so I rate that feature a nine out of ten. My company migrated clients to the Cisco DNA Center, and the reporting is incredible.

Fresh deployments is not easy to set.

During single-node deployment, you must configure the node as if it is in a cluster.

I've been using Cisco DNA Center for two years now.

Cisco DNA Center is a very stable tool.

The solution is very scalable.

We have had a very great TAC support experience on Cisco DNA center.

Positive

We previously used Cisco Prime. DNAC is much more intuitive and better.

The initial setup for Cisco DNA Center is more complicated compared to Cisco Prime.

We had an in-house deployment.

My company uses Cisco DNA Center.

I'd tell anyone planning to use Cisco DNA Center to use it, especially when you have Cisco products or devices, such as wireless, security, and voice. Cisco DNA Center is the best product for  network monitoring and management. You can use Cisco Prime, but I prefer Cisco DNA Center because the visibility available there. You can see almost all information on a single page of the dashboard. If you have a Cisco environment, it's best to go for Cisco DNA Center.

I would give Cisco DNA Center an eight out of ten overall.

The availability endpoint is in the Cisco DNA Center dashboard, which allows us to push configurations and address compliance issues to all devices on Cisco network from a single location.

Cisco DNA Center provides operational support, compliance support, security vulnerability detection, and automatic scheduling.

They should include UTM features in the product. 

I have been using Cisco DNA Center for five years.

The product is stable.

The technical support services need improvement.

Negative

Cisco DNA Center can be deployed as a server or an appliance. It is up to you to choose which one meets the requirements. DNA Center can manage various endpoints, automatically adding new devices to DNS and integrating them with other Cisco devices. To do this, the DNA Center must be able to access the Cisco website. Therefore, this box should have internet connectivity with support for the Cisco website. DNA Center will then fetch the 802.1x authentication and client deployment information from the website and automatically deploy it to the box. It will take at least one or two days to do with automated and manual. We need to check both sides so that it's covering entire devices. Its maintenance is easy as well.

Cisco DNA Center is a good product. There could be more features added to the dashboard. Overall, I rate it a ten out of ten.