Cisco Prime [EOL] Reviews

The solution helps with the management and support of the enterprise network. 

The tool's performance is fine. 

The product needs to improve its stability. 

I have been using the product for more than 15 years. 

I would rate the solution's stability an eight out of ten since I have encountered bugs in the past. 

My company has 30-50 users for the product. 

The tool's setup is easy. One engineer is enough to handle the deployment and maintenance. 

I would rate the product an eight out of ten. 

We use the solution as a monitoring tool for management and configuration.

The technical support team is very good.

The product needs to improve its interface and reporting. The setup should be made easy.

I have used the solution for years.

The product is not at all easy to deploy. It needs quite a bit of server, and the person installing must have the knowledge to handle and manage the product.

If we have a license for Cisco DNA, we can use the same license for Cisco Prime.

I recommend the product for medium to large enterprises. I would recommend SolarWinds over Cisco Prime. SolarWinds is user-friendly, has a pretty good UI, and allows us to customize the report. Overall, I rate the solution a six out of ten.

We use Prime to manage all our Cisco products like wireless controllers, access points, switches, etc. 

The endpoint information Cisco Prime generates helps us troubleshoot, and it's also useful for compliance reporting and endpoint identification.

Cisco Prime is a little outdated. It will soon be discontinued and replaced by DNA Center, which offers similar functionality.

I have used Cisco Prime for about 10 years. 

I rate Cisco Prime 10 out of 10 for stability. 

I rate Prime eight out of 10 for scalability. Prime is a management tool, so the scalability is there. It's sufficient for our environment. 

I rate Cisco support eight out of 10. Overall, Cisco's support team is knowledgeable. They easily understand our questions and provide solutions fast. However, some of their engineers take longer, so I have to deduct a couple of points. 

Positive

I rate Cisco Prime nine out of 10. All Cisco products come with a quick start guide that tells you every step. The initial installation takes a few hours, but it takes longer to integrate and populate the system to capture all your information. You can complete the deployment in two days. 

I rate Cisco Prime seven out of 10 for affordability. All Cisco solutions are expensive. 

I rate Cisco Prime eight out of 10. I recommend it. It's a useful tool for managing large Cisco environments. 

We use it primarily for managing the wireless infrastructure, which is the use case in our current scenario.

Cisco Prime, from a management perspective, has good reporting.

For our use cases, where we have reachability issues, we can fine-tune and bump up the coverage by increasing the signal strength. The insights that it provides are great.

The initial setup is easy.

The solution scales well.

It has proven to be quite stable. 

Migrating from on-prem to the cloud is seamless.

The solution offers excellent documentation. 

If you look at some of the wireless site-survey tools that are available in the commercial space, Cisco should include similar solutions, which would help our on-plant engineers when they're doing a site survey. For example, there are some great features in Ekahau. We use it primarily for doing heat mapping, WiFi design, and spectrum analysis. Prime has certain limitations when you compare it with Ekahau. If they can't build a product, they should go for an acquisition.

Mostly, we are happy with the features on offer. Their roadmap is also clear with the DNS Center and the DNS Center stability. Once it becomes more stable and accepted across the industry, I don't see any major challenges. Cisco Prime is more of a network management solution, NMS. The roadmap is clear and Cisco wants to position DNS Center as an immediate replacement for all these other Cisco products, which is absolutely fine.

We've used the solution for more than five years. 

It is pretty stable. On a scale of five, five being the highest, we could rate it at four. 

There are very minor issues. However, those are very negligible in nature. Overall it is a very decent tool.

The product is scalable. 

We have three people working directly with the solution in our organization. They are across the globe and offer 24/7 coverage.

The product is used on a daily basis. 

If you asked me five years ago, the complexity was less. Now, the complexity has increased. So the quality of work also has taken a slight hit with respect to their tax support especially. 

Earlier, on a scale of one to ten, if you asked me, ten being the highest, their tax support was somewhere about seven and eight. Now it has gone to five and six since you hardly get CCIE-certified engineers when you are dealing with certain advanced issues, and that is where we lose a lot of time. That is a concerning factor that they need to address.

It's been a gradual decrease since they have started already losing out some of their customer base to multiple competitors out there in the market. The decision lies with Cisco - whether they want to position themselves as a LAN-networking gold-standard or a platinum-standard player in the market. They need to move very quickly, especially in the wireless area.

Neutral

We use Cisco products predominantly.

I have tested Meraki as well, and I'm very comfortable with Prime since, for the kind of data that we use as a performance metric scale, Prime provides us with what is very essential. Meraki may be glorified reporting in a simplified way for more non-technical people. Good, technically sound people will tend to go more toward Cisco Prime.

We have used Aruba AirWave with Cisco Prime. The major advantage is that Cisco has a DNS Center under their roadmap, which provides a single pane for your entire network troubleshooting stack, right from the user device all the way back to your application. That is possible through DNA Center, whereas Aruba AirWave still needs to catch up in that area.

It is straightforward to set up. It is not complex at all.

I'd rate the ease of setup at a three out of five. Eventually, we will be moving to DNA Center, and DNA Center provides a lot more under a single umbrella. So, as far as their roadmap, they're going in the right direction.

Originally, it was an on-prem server where we installed Cisco Prime. Right now, we are moving to the cloud, and it has been very seamless since we migrated from on-prem to the cloud. Cisco's support was pretty good. Their documentation was very clear, so we could do it just by referring to their data sheets and documentation.

The initial setup was handled in-house. 

I see cost being a major factor for their hardware. However, when you buy Aruba AirWave, that is a very expensive product compared to Prime. You need to at least look at price competitiveness.

Cisco's pricing is quite competitive. That said, there are products that provide bare minimal feature sets. It all boils down to the network manager, and what tasks they want to accomplish using a particular tool. If the buyer is very clear, they should not face any issues with taking the product as it will provide a modular license, which is a nice thing.

I'd rate the affordability at a four out of five. It's one of the most competitive options on the market.

They have different licenses. The cost purely depends on the Prime license subscription that we take. They charge differently if we manage LAN devices and take traditional backups on the network switches and devices. Ours is a hybrid license. It is not a locked-down license against X number of devices. That way, it is not that expensive at all.

I don't see any similar product in the market that is as reliable in nature, especially if you talk about its competitors like Juniper or HP. A relevant product, which is widely used in the market, is Aruba and Aruba is just winning based on the cost factor. However, if you remove that cost factor, they're not that great. We did do the POCs for a couple of our very large plants. In fact, it is spread around a couple of kilometers, so you could understand the wireless connectivity, the full wireless POC. In terms of reliability especially, Cisco is light years ahead.

I'm a Cisco customer and end-user.

I'd rate the solution seven out of ten.

Our company uses the solution for management of complex configurations, archiving routes and switches, and monitoring wireless connections. Our team of seven administrators serve as system integrators for our clients and currently manage more than 1,000 sites. 

The solution's configuration management tool is amazing because it centralizes and pushes configurations which saves a lot of volume and effort. 

The solution has issues with real time monitoring of devices and NetFlow such as inadequate visualization for reports, sources, and destinations. Because of this, I have to rely on other tools for monitoring and troubleshooting so I am only able to use 50% of the solution. 

I would like the solution to allow open monitoring for use with other products in the same fashion that competing vendors support any SMP products. 

I have been using the solution for six years. 

The solution is stable if the appliance is functioning properly without interruption. 

We experienced three cases where the solution was interrupted on push and almost corrupted. 

Sudden outages that interrupt host availability will cause instability. 

The solution is scalable from the configuration management side. 

There might be limitations on the monitoring side. 

Technical support is good with no issues. 

Positive

The initial setup is easy and deployment takes about 30 minutes. 

Our company implements the solution for customers. 

The solution uses a licensing model for pricing. 

The solution is only good for configuration management and has issues with real time monitoring. 

Our company had the expectation that we could use the solution for both configuration management and real time monitoring, but unfortunately we were not able to replace our other monitoring tool.

We still recommend that our customers use the solution for configuration management, especially if they have a lot of Cisco devices. 

Predominantly we have been using Cisco Prime to manage the wireless infrastructure for our enterprise customers. We also use it for pulling critical reports, monitoring alerts, and managing all the configurations of the wireless portfolio.

A customer's biggest problem is usually poor Wi-Fi, especially in meeting rooms or video conferences. Cisco Prime can help customers fix their Wi-Fi issues with scientific and digital data, which helps to improve the Wi-Fi experience of the customer. Even if most of the workforce goes back to the office, there would still be a need to connect to an office network using Wi-Fi, not only wired LAN cables.

Cisco Prime is a critical tool which helps us design the Wi-Fi network. If something doesn't work properly, the entire operations team can use it to troubleshoot and discover what went wrong in a particular building or floor.

Cisco Prime is a one-stop place to log in and manage our entire wireless infrastructure. We don't need to log in to individual devices to perform configuration changes, allowing us to pull critical historical reports for the customer. It is an excellent platform if the devices need to be upgraded or downgraded. It helps to maintain a database where we can manage the licenses of all the devices.

They can add 3D wireless maps to Cisco Prime. They can also improve the management of more enterprise devices. There is currently a way to manage more enterprise products, but it's not great. However, it is perfect for managing wireless devices.

Cisco is transitioning away from Prime and is getting replaced by Cisco DNAC, the next generation.

We have been using this solution for about eight to ten years, deployed on-premises. There is no cloud version of this solution, and we are using the latest version, 3.8.

It is very stable. No product on this planet is 100% bug-free, but Cisco Prime is one of the best tools for managing the wireless portfolio of Cisco products.

There are no issues with scalability. It is awesome.

The technical support is good. Cisco Prime has been in the industry for a long time, and many engineers have solid backgrounds.

The initial setup was pretty straightforward, and there is a lot of installation documentation available for free on Google and videos on YouTube. It's a very straightforward process if we consider the memory and CPU utilization. We only need two resources for the deployment, an onsite engineer and somebody working remotely. It took about an hour to deploy.

No maintenance is required, and we just need to ensure the license is valid. We have approximately 17 people using this solution.

There is a great return on investment because it is a centralized management platform where we can deploy to hundreds of locations. Without Cisco Prime, we would have to hire more network engineers to manage our 50 office locations across the globe. So it is an indirect cost saving for hiring employees.

The price of Cisco Prime is higher than Aruba, but the difference is not exponential.

Aruba has a similar product to Cisco Prime. However, Aruba's only advantage over Cisco Prime is its flexibility to host on cloud. With Aruba, you can host on a private or public cloud like Azure, AWS, or GCP.

I rate this solution a nine out of ten. Regarding advice, if a customer has decided to adopt Cisco Wireless, then Cisco Prime is a great choice. However, if they have decided to adopt a different vendor solution for wireless, then Cisco Prime may not be the best choice.

We use Cisco Prime for network management, ensuring our network's performance and security. It also helps with project execution and project monitoring.

The most valuable feature of Cisco Prime is its excellent audio and video conferencing with clear quality and no interruptions.

While it is a great solution, some improvements are needed, specifically in the form of more updates and enhancements.

I have been using Cisco Prime for a month.

We have not experienced any issues with the stability of the solution. I would rate the stability as a seven out of ten.

Cisco Prime is quite scalable.

The initial setup is fairly easy. It only takes a few minutes to deploy it.

Overall, I would rate Cisco Prime as a nine out of ten.

We use Cisco Prime to monitor Cisco wireless environment.

The product's most valuable features are monitoring and configuration.

We have been using Cisco Prime for four years. We are using version 3.6.

I rate the product's stability a ten out of ten.

We have one server for Cisco Prime. It supports as many devices as required. We have 1000 users for it in our organization. I rate its scalability a ten out of ten.

I contacted the technical support team for server certification renewal. They are helpful.

Positive

The product is expensive compared to other vendors in the market. Although, from an operational point of view, it is worth the money.

It is a good product. I recommend it to others and rate Cisco Prime a nine out of ten.