Cisco DNA Center Reviews

We use this solution for network assurance and automation, network segmentation with ISE integration, and LAN automation deploying new devices out into the switching estate.

This was for a TSA project that we were doing for a client.

It relieved some of the operational burdens on the IT staff. It makes troubleshooting a lot of issues much quicker from a central single pane of glass, whether it's a switch issue or authentication issue with ISE, or a wireless connectivity issue. 

DNA center is very capable of being able to address well, identify the issue, suggest remediation steps, run remediation, run commands against a switch to check the proper connectivity for example, and also address all our remediation steps that the IT person could take.

Rather than having to log into the individual switch DNA center, you can basically run your commands, run your troubleshooting, all from DNA and attempt to remediate the problem.

I think that their LAN automation is a very good feature. It takes advantage of the plug-and-play capability from the catalyst switches. 

We'll do a zero-day configuration, which is a good feature. 

Also, wired and wireless assurance, client health, and network health are valuable, especially with the wireless sensors deployed. It can give you a good idea of what's going on in the RF environments.

The template feature is really good, you have free templates and then associate those templates to a tag, tag a device with a certain role, and just program devices that way rapidly.

It's pretty robust. The wireless assurance and telemetry, as well as the security and the segmentation capabilities, are outstanding.

They deploy rapidly. They are scalable throughout the entire organization. With just a few clicks, it really removes a lot of the human error that you would normally have with access control lists.

It takes a lot of the human element out of configuration.

You can create VRS and VNS and deploy those system-wide, application policies with a few clicks and segmentation with a few clicks.

With their provisioning status, if there's a failure in provisioning or in some type of task that DNA is trying to push out to a switch or whatever device, sometimes the task status errors or the provision errors are a little bit big. 

I think they could provide a little more detail to someone when a task fails. It's an error code that tells you that this task has failed, but it doesn't get too deep into why it failed. The task failure reporting or provisioning failure reporting could be a little bit better in the UI, with more information given to the user.

From the CLI you can get much more information from MagLevs.

Also, the UI could use a little bit of improvement. I know that things have gotten a lot better in version 2, but I haven't worked with version 2 yet.

A feature that I would like to have seen is the true debt disaster recovery, which is now available in the 2.2.1 version.

More detailed information would be helpful, but you can get that information from the CLI but not everyone is comfortable working in the Linux shell.

I have been using Cisco DNA Center for approximately two years.

The last version that I worked with was Version 1.3.3.6.

Currently, the latest is version 2.X.

It is very stable. I would rate the stability an 8.5 out of 10. 

We had an issue with the DNA center database. 

With the DNA center, you have to be a little patient. 

We may have been trying to ask it to do too much at one time, and it created a problem with the database that escalated to the business unit to get cleaned up.

That was really not so much an issue with the DNA sensors, it was because we had spooled up a lot of tasks and you have to be a little patient with DNA.

My impression of the scalability is all positive. 

It's highly scalable. DNA itself is deployed as either a single node or a three-node cluster.

We were deploying it in a single node state, but my impression of it is quite positive. I like it a lot.

DNAC itself is an orchestrator and its collecting audit assurance, and telemetry. The entire IT staff of the end organization will be using the DNA center. It's probably a staff of 15 to 20 people. 

In terms of endpoint end-users, that DNA is collecting assurance and telemetry from several thousand. It's being fully utilized.

I have had a fair amount of interaction with technical support. I would rate them outstanding. Their DNA team is solid.

I didn't use any other solution previously.

Standing up the DNAC appliance itself is pretty straightforward.

The deployment was a phased approach. We did three DNAC appliances across three regions globally. 

To stand up the appliance itself doesn't take long at all. It takes a few hours, but it was a phased migration strategy, one site at a time over a period of several months, we would do one or two site migrations a week.

There were an existing network infrastructure and a new network infrastructure that we were standing up in parallel to the old and then cutting it over on a weekend.

We have a handful of people who have access to the regional appliance made up of network admins and help desk personnel.

Once it's deployed and built out, it runs on its own. There is not much to with it unless you need to do a package or a software upgrade for the appliance itself.

There is no further deployment unless they are going to stand up a new site and integrate that into the DNA architecture. As it is now, everything is already up, which is what we did.

We did the deployment, the integration, and the site migration from start to finish. Then we do a low-level design and handover and workshops.

We have approximately 10 users that would have some type of operational role in DNA.

It's being highly utilized and leveraged in the organization.

We did not use a consultant or an integrator. I completed it myself. We are Cisco Partners.

This is taken care of before I am involved. It's handled by our presales engineer, and I work on the project delivery.

I do know that Cisco does offer some really good promotions for DNA Center to bring the costs down. But again, I don't really know the details of those promotions. I just hear about them and I know they're out there, but I don't have specifics on that.

Cisco DNA does not have a Cloud solution. It's an on-premises appliance.

They may stand up if they bring in another heritage. They may have some heritage or legacy sites that they may bring over to the new network.

We are multi-national. Our organization is based in London, New York, and Sydney. Our clients are all multi-national global clients.

We do have some regional clients as well, but we are well-positioned to serve multi-nationals across three regions.

My advice is to read the release notes thoroughly. Understand how to deploy, in a single or three-node cluster. Most importantly be aware of release notes and read the documentation.

Do your homework, read the manual, it's there for a reason.

Be patient when standing up a new fabric site. Don't do too many tasks at one time.

The biggest lesson that I have learned is to be patient. When you have a series of tasks that you need to do, don't initiate too many at one time, initiate three or four, allow those to finish, and then continue on.

From when I first started working with DNA, it's come a very long way.

From a programmability standpoint, it really is quite solid. I really like the LAN automation capabilities.

In terms of software-defined networking, I think it's an outstanding product. I would rate Cisco DNA Center a nine 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.

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.

Our primary use case is for real-time data transmission. I'm a senior manager and we are customers of Cisco. 

I think the processing is a good feature and the product also has a high level of accuracy.

I'd like to see them focus more on the digital side of things. 

I've been using this solution for four years. 

We've had some stability issues recently and that's something they could work on. 

The solution is scalable, we have around 100 users. 

The initial setup is quite complex and requires some expertise.

There is some room for improvement so I rate this solution eight out of 10. 

We use it to manage and monitor our branch network equipment.

It gives us automation capabilities for pushing out a configuration to branch networks. It also provides visibility into the health of user network devices.

There should be an option for automation of template deployment by using the stored data. It is not easy to save configuration information for lots of devices without using other tools. There should be a tighter, better repository of information that can be merged with the templates.

I have been using this solution for three years.

Its stability is good.

I haven't really got a view on that one because we haven't had a need to scale. 

In terms of its users, we probably have 15 people, which also includes our partners, who use it as well as manage it.

I have used their support. I would rate them a four out of five.

I didn't use any similar solution previously. 

It was relatively quick. I don't remember exactly, but it was probably in the order of a month or so to implement. 

We had help from Cisco themselves on Advanced Services, but from my memory, it was relatively straightforward. 

It is a good product. It does a good job. I can't think of any specific technical challenges we've had. 

I would rate it an eight out of ten.

We are using Cisco DNA Center for four key major areas. The first area we use it for is for setting the policy for multiple devices and from one single point of configuration. 

The second use is for provisioning because we will have a lot of switches and access points. The provisioning has been very helpful for us. 

The third use is the assurance module and the fourth use is automation. 

We have not started the automation phase. We used it for policy, provision, design, and assurance.

Since using the solution three or four people can do what 10 people could previously. It has been a benefit to the organization.

We have many people from the team who manage a lot of devices. By using Cisco DNA Center, it has taken some of that burden away, we are impressed with it. We did the investment in CAPEX, but in the OPEX was very low. 

The unity of configuration is a benefit. Only one trainee was configuring all devices. It was very helpful for us because, if we have a lot of people configuring, it was confusing. We can unify the configuration through all devices and create a standardization for the organization. The automation is available but I have not started with it at this time.

I have been using Cisco DNA Center for approximately two years.

The scalability is good, it is quite extendable.

The support is close to us in proximity and very helpful. We have never had a problem working with them. 

Cisco DNA Center was a new technology for us, at the beginning, it was not easy to do, but Cisco did a lot of training with us to a level we could handle everything. The team is managing itself now without the assistance of Cisco.

After we received all the hardware, it took us around one month for the implementation and another month for training. The solution was up and running but we were training on that solution.

The implementation of the Cisco DNA Center was done internally.

My advice to others is if you are a large enough company to have the Cisco DNA Center technology, you must try it. It may be useless for small enterprises, but for the large enterprise, for multi-site organization, it's impressive and it saves a lot of money and time.   

I rate Cisco DNA Center a nine out of ten.

We are a solution provider and this is one of the products that we implement for our customers.

Our clients use this solution to manage their network, including their access points.

The most valuable feature is the integration with Cisco devices and infrastructure.

The Wi-Fi analytics are helpful.

The monitoring features are very useful for network engineers.

We have had a lot of problems with the Cisco switches and have needed to upgrade the operating systems, which means that we have to upgrade the DNA. When we upgrade the DNA it means that we have to upgrade the ISE, also. If it is a large cluster then this process is painful.

DNA Center has been on the market for a few years and they need to update it.

I have been working with DNA Center for about two years.

This solution is scalable.

Cisco's technical support is good. We have had problems and still have an open case but this has been related to the switches. Cisco is good at helping both the partners and the customers, too. 

Cisco DNA Center is something that I recommend. We do not sell just the product, but rather, the entire DNA solution. We don't just upgrade a switch. Instead, we upgrade the entire network. DNA is definitely good for the customer.

Overall, this is a good solution but it has been a few years since it has been updated.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.

We are an educational environment that is similar to a university, but we only teach management and leadership. We have a variety of visitors every day, more than 2,000 of them, and they are unknown to us. This makes it very difficult to centrally manage using a traditional network.

We are currently in the second round of the implementation phase for this solution. We have two buildings with the solution implemented now, and we are working on other buildings. We are on the same campus but we are doing the work in four phases. Now that two are complete, we have two more that we are about to finish.

Everything is secure in our environment, so we are using the overlay of the DNA Center to separate the visitors and the employees and the trainers. We are using a multi-segmented network, so DNA was a very good solution for us to deal with this type of environment.

Prior to implementing DNA Center, it was very difficult for us to create a large number of VLANs for our switches. This has made it possible for us to meet the need of maintaining connections when people move between buildings on the campus or travel to another campus.

The most valuable feature is the DNA analytics, which is very good for us.

It is very important for everyone to be able to see everything that is happening in the network from one location. It is simple to manage and it is all done from a single dashboard.

We set up the identity service and it is amazing for us to have an identity for each user. All of the network policies are set according to one's identity.

The ability to trace attacks if they occur is very good in terms of security. The security is part of the network layer. Generally, security has been improving with Cisco solutions because it was not as good in the past.

If a device is lost then it is very easy to replace. I just drag and drop the configuration from the old device to the new one and after a few seconds, the new device is working with the same configuration that we had before. It does not have to be configured manually.

The network, data center, and SD-WAN are all being treated as different services, but I would like to have only one solution to manage all of them. Data is traveling from the inside to the outside layer, and I want to be able to fully control all of the data going in and out. It should not be set up as multi-service, but rather a single one.

If you have old Cisco hardware such as switches or access points, or they are from another vendor, then they will not work with this solution. The hardware will still function but you will not be able to control it with DNA.

I have been working with Cisco DNA Center for two months.

This solution has been stable since it was installed two months ago.

The scalability is one of the reasons that we chose Cisco DNA. We have ten buildings within the same campus and when we implemented the PoC, Cisco said that scalability is very important for us.

We have had about 3,000 people using this solution to this point, but we are not yet at full capacity. We expect to have more than 4,000 concurrent users.

We have not been in contact with technical support.

Prior to using Cisco DNA Center, we had a traditional network. We had switches and routers from Cisco, HP, and Dell. We switched because we are joining all of the buildings together and given their size, the number of visitors, and the scalability that we need, we had to switch to DNA.

The initial setup is straightforward except for the issue that this solution is incompatible with switches or access points from other vendors. That is very bad.

It takes us about two weeks to deploy this solution in one of our buildings. This includes installing the hardware, software, access points, and everything.

We have a technician from Cisco to do the implementation for us.

During deployment, there were eight people from our staff and five people from Cisco.

For maintenance, for each building, we have two or three technicians at various levels. We have other administrators as well, although they are responsible for different solutions such as SAP and ERP. The same person is responsible for multiple technologies.

Our licensing agreement is for three years.

The Cisco Digital Network Architecture is the first solution with these types of capabilities that I have used. It allows me to monitor everything in the network, including end-to-end packet travel and tracking the specific packets.

This solution is really stable and scalable.

My advice for anybody who is considering this solution is to consider the size of the environment. If there are a very large number of switches or visitor access points then I recommend DNA. However, if there are a small number of switches and access points then I would recommend the Cisco Meraki because it is fine for small and medium-sized networks.

The biggest lesson that I have learned from working with this solution is that this technology is much easier now. I think it's a revolution in networking and wireless communication where it is becoming easier and nothing like traditional networking. It is now an overlay and an underlay network. All of the people working in this field have to be up to date with the technology. It is very new and there are many capabilities when it comes to network control, analytics, and security compliance. IT people have to adapt to new technologies.

I have not yet tested the IoT for our smart building because we don't use it in our current location.

I would rate this solution a nine out of ten.

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.