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Cisco DNA Center vs Pandora FMS comparison

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Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Oct 10, 2024

Review summaries and opinions

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Categories and Ranking

Cisco DNA Center
Ranking in Network Monitoring Software
36th
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
6.1
Number of Reviews
44
Ranking in other categories
Network Management Applications (2nd), Network Automation (3rd)
Pandora FMS
Ranking in Network Monitoring Software
64th
Average Rating
9.2
Reviews Sentiment
7.6
Number of Reviews
22
Ranking in other categories
Server Monitoring (26th), IT Infrastructure Monitoring (59th), Log Management (59th), Cloud Monitoring Software (38th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of November 2026, in the Network Monitoring Software category, the mindshare of Cisco DNA Center is 0.7%, down from 1.3% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Pandora FMS is 0.7%, up from 0.6% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Network Monitoring Software Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Cisco DNA Center0.7%
Pandora FMS0.7%
Other98.6%
Network Monitoring Software
 

Featured Reviews

Mahir Öztürk - PeerSpot reviewer
Network Engineer at NGN Bilgi ve İletişim Hizmetleri
Client history has helped resolve past network issues more efficiently
I mostly use the client history feature of Cisco DNA Center. I didn't use the real-time monitoring capability of Cisco DNA Center because I primarily used it for client history regarding issues and problems. I don't use it for real-time monitoring. If there is a problem, I can inspect the situation and see what is happening, which is beneficial.
Gabriel Glusgold - PeerSpot reviewer
Asociado/ at Infraestructura Informática
Personalized metrics; simplicity of data
My primary use case for Pandora is monitoring This solution has helped us improve our organization by allowing us to create a lot of metrics on several platforms, including Windows, Linux, and Unix. We then use these Pandora metrics to create an interface. We then pass the interface off to the…

Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Pros

"The automation features are significant, reducing configuration time. This means outstanding functionality. By deploying the controller automatically, the rest becomes automated"
"I like that we can easily configure any new hardware. It's also easy to deploy and easy to troubleshoot."
"Scalability in Cisco DNA Center is good; we are using it for Software-Defined Access solution, and we haven't reached our device limit yet— from my experience, we can easily manage numerous devices."
"The most valuable feature of Cisco DNA Center is the AI (Artificial Intelligence) that provides us with valuable information."
"The product gives a consolidated view."
"The advice I would give to other people who want to use Cisco DNA Center is to go for it, particularly if they have Cisco infrastructure, though these days integration could be an issue."
"The most valuable features were the monitoring, maintenance, and configuration."
"The monitoring is very valuable to me."
"Pandora's architecture is interesting; it's open so you can easily extend and enhance it, it's simpler to customize Pandora compared to other solutions, and it's also scalable enough to support large environments."
"It is easy to create your own custom modules if you just know a little bit of scripting. If you have unique requirements, you can just make your own modules. You can even grab checks from other vendors. There are open-source checks for various things such as SMTP, etc. There is a long list of different ones from Nagios. You can just use them, and within seconds, you get yourself a check that is monitoring whatever you need. It is really flexible. I guess that's why they call it Pandora Flexible Monitoring System (FMS). It is reliable. It does the job, and it alerts. It is also surprisingly feature-rich. Our network guy just recently asked about a particular protocol to monitor the bandwidth on the network, which is not a common protocol. When I looked it up, and I found that they cover it. It is very mature for a not-so-known product."
"The support from Pandora FMS is legendary."
"The network monitoring and configuration within this solution is very good."
"The official forum is active enough to answer most of the high-end technical questions that you may have."
"It allows me to quickly see the status of all of my printers, switches, computers, and virtual machines to determine if any system has fallen."
"Thanks to this software and to the work of the support team, we have everything under control."
"It provides us with proactive monitoring and is very easy to configure and maintain."
 

Cons

"The cost is very high."
"DNA Center has been on the market for a few years and they need to update it."
"It's quite good, however, it's not ideal for smaller organizations as it's cost-prohibitive."
"The product doesn’t have good monitoring capabilities."
"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."
"Requires more focus on the digital side of things."
"Cisco DNA Center should improve its configuration management. It is better to have a dev version before pushing it."
"From the recent DNA point of view, there are some stability challenges with Cisco, but very minor."
"The price for Pandora FMS is expensive."
"We would like the real-time monitoring of an interface to be improved within this solution."
"I think some improvements to the Android app would be good."
"It would be helpful to include the generation of reports for times that the network was out of service."
"We would like to see improvement in the mainframe integration that this solution is capable of."
"Pandora FMS is relatively new, and the interface with the older version crashes at times. We have several different operating systems, such as Linux and Windows, and Pandora does not run as well in these."
"The product lacks APIs for integration with other systems and we have issues with monitoring."
"It would be useful if Pandora FMS included an ISO image (or «software appliance») for each big company that leases virtual private machines (VPS), just like in AWS."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The price could be better. It's a very expensive tool."
"The tool is medium-priced."
"The licensing cost for Cisco DNA Center is not more than that of other solutions."
"The solution is expensive."
"Affordability is a problem because it's created for large enterprises only. So, some customers, even if their engineers want the solution, might have problems with budget limitations."
"The tool's licensing may not come across as something that may be friendly for users."
"I would rate the pricing a six out of ten, with ten being expensive."
"I rate the product's pricing an eight on a scale of one to ten, where one is very cheap, and ten is very expensive."
"In terms of money, the Enterprise version is the cheapest that I have found after a market study."
"My rule of thumb would be that if you need more than thirty agents, and you lack an automation tool such as Chef or Puppet, you will save a lot of time and money going to the Enterprise edition."
"Growing the solution or migrating to the Enterprise version is easy, and various plans are available."
"The Open Source Community Edition is great to just explore the software, or use it on medium-sized infrastructures."
"You get the license and it includes updates, new versions, and access to the complete library of modules."
"The open-source version offers 100% functionality and the hardware requirements for a solution like this one are very modest."
"Pandora FMS is easy to implement and the pricing of licenses is competitive."
"Only one payment and it includes support, updates, new versions, and access to the complete library of plugins except for SAP and z/OS."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Manufacturing Company
15%
Financial Services Firm
8%
Comms Service Provider
7%
Government
7%
Comms Service Provider
20%
Outsourcing Company
12%
Construction Company
11%
Manufacturing Company
9%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business12
Midsize Enterprise9
Large Enterprise24
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business11
Midsize Enterprise4
Large Enterprise3
 

Questions from the Community

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Cisco DNA Center?
After evaluating other solutions, we will provide feedback.
What needs improvement with Cisco DNA Center?
The deployment of Cisco DNA Center was complex due to the fact that on the data center side, we have a Juniper infrastructure, which created some complexity, though not significant. The deployment ...
What is your primary use case for Cisco DNA Center?
In my organization, we currently have some Cisco devices such as access switches, and we also have infrastructure, but that is not part of our responsibility. We do not manage that infrastructure. ...
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Also Known As

DNA Center
No data available
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Information Not Available
Rakuten, Prosegur, Repsol, Teléfonica, Allianz, Ottawa Hospital, Hughes
Find out what your peers are saying about Cisco DNA Center vs. Pandora FMS and other solutions. Updated: November 2026.
920,929 professionals have used our research since 2012.