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Cisco Nexus Dashboard Fabric Controller (Formerly DCNM) vs ThousandEyes 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:
 

ROI

Sentiment score
1.0
Cisco Nexus Dashboard Fabric Controller delivers consistent connections and high ROI, benefiting diverse sectors over a decade.
Sentiment score
6.4
ThousandEyes offers a positive ROI through time savings, enhanced network performance, and improved customer satisfaction with reduced MTTR.
There has been a great ROI from using ThousandEyes, with significant time saved in troubleshooting as I can quickly pinpoint issues rather than spending time isolating them, alongside enhancing customer feedback and experience.
Senior cloud engineering lead and IT project owner at KDD
I have seen a return on investment by reducing troubleshooting time and having lesser user mapping error issues, in addition to engineering time saved through better observability and reduced organizational MTTR.
Project Manager at Procter & Gamble
A positive impact should be there in terms of the customers in that they are very happy when they are using ThousandEyes right now, and earlier, they had multiple issues with the teams.
Deputy Manager, Insurance Distribution Department at a tech vendor with 10,001+ employees
 

Customer Service

Sentiment score
6.4
Customer service is praised for responsiveness and expertise, though some operational cases take longer to resolve.
Sentiment score
7.2
ThousandEyes is praised for exceptional customer service, proactive support, and comprehensive documentation despite minor response time improvements.
Cisco's support I would rate as a 10 compared to all other vendors.
Network Engineer at a healthcare company with 1,001-5,000 employees
We contacted the support team, and they resolved it within a couple of hours.
System Operation Associate at a financial services firm with 10,001+ employees
I would give it a rating of 10 because whenever we have any issues, we can typically reach someone who has the knowledge to help us.
Network Engineer Iii at a healthcare company with 5,001-10,000 employees
Customer support is very prompt, offering on-demand services and support with separate teams for high-level guidance and break-fix issues.
Observability Consultant at a computer software company with 11-50 employees
 

Scalability Issues

Sentiment score
7.3
Cisco Nexus Dashboard Fabric Controller is scalable, supporting integration and expansion, with varied user experiences on upgrading and compatibility.
Sentiment score
7.4
ThousandEyes is highly scalable and adaptable, efficiently serving diverse organizations with easy cloud access despite licensing costs.
Scalability with ThousandEyes is straightforward as you don't really need to scale; it's designed to monitor multiple applications, accommodating 50 or 100 applications simultaneously.
Network Assistant Engineer at Staffordshire and Shropshire Health Informatics Service
ThousandEyes's scalability is excellent; it is very scalable and grows with my organization's needs.
Project Manager at Procter & Gamble
We could easily add hundreds of devices with no issue.
Senior Security Consultant at a tech vendor with 10,001+ employees
 

Stability Issues

Sentiment score
7.8
The Cisco Nexus Dashboard Fabric Controller is praised for its stable performance and reliability, especially in managing data centers.
Sentiment score
8.2
ThousandEyes is praised for its high stability, reliability, and efficiency, with minimal bugs and minor IT intervention needed.
From my experience, ThousandEyes has been stable up to 95%; I have not seen any stability issues.
Senior cloud engineering lead and IT project owner at KDD
I did not see any downtime.
Senior Security Consultant at a tech vendor with 10,001+ employees
ThousandEyes is not very stable; sometimes you have to reboot the servers to get actual results.
Network Assistant Engineer at Staffordshire and Shropshire Health Informatics Service
 

Room For Improvement

Cisco Nexus Dashboard needs easier configuration, better integration, improved performance, intuitive reporting, and competitive pricing to enhance user experience.
ThousandEyes needs better usability, integration, documentation, and enhanced features like network monitoring, visualization, and security at lower complexity.
I do not believe it integrated well with different infrastructures for hybrid environments.
Network Engineer at a healthcare company with 1,001-5,000 employees
Incidents should be alerted on and traced early, before they escalate to full outages.
Software Developer at The Code
I think the pricing, setup cost, and licensing for ThousandEyes are too costly.
R&D at a comms service provider with 51-200 employees
Having a dedicated incident alert system for URL alerts would help manage noise and streamline operations, especially during patch upgrades.
System Operation Associate at a financial services firm with 10,001+ employees
 

Setup Cost

Cisco Nexus Dashboard Fabric Controller is costly but offers high value, transparent pricing, and excellent support and service.
ThousandEyes pricing views vary, with some users finding value and others noting complexity and potential high costs for small businesses.
My experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing has been that everything was cost-effective.
Project Manager at Procter & Gamble
My experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing is that it comes in cheaper than alternatives.
Lead Technical Consultant at a financial services firm with 5,001-10,000 employees
It's too complex, too expensive, and it takes a lot of time to manage the licensing model.
Senior Consultant at a tech services company with 1,001-5,000 employees
 

Valuable Features

The Cisco Nexus Dashboard Fabric Controller offers stability, ease of use, integration, and real-time insights for optimized network management.
ThousandEyes provides deep visibility and proactive troubleshooting, enhancing user experience with AI integration and Cisco compatibility.
People typically understand north-south traffic flows but usually miss the east-west traffic flows in data centers.
Network Engineer at a healthcare company with 1,001-5,000 employees
I measure the 70% improvement in customer experience through customer tickets and feedback after resolving issues, where previously, users faced problems and limited time on the platform, and after using ThousandEyes, the user time reached up to five to six hours a day, even for teams possibly totaling 30 hours a day.
Senior cloud engineering lead and IT project owner at KDD
ThousandEyes offers the best features including global internet and cloud visibility from distributed vantage points, application and network performance monitoring, real-time outage detection and incident alerts, end-to-end path visualization for rapid troubleshooting, proactive issue demarcation, and historical data.
Project Manager at Procter & Gamble
ThousandEyes has become critical for swift network troubleshooting as well, so anytime that there's potential issues with applications or we want to be proactive in resolving potential issues before they arise, ThousandEyes is really the platform that we're leveraging for WAN monitoring, Wi-Fi, latency, packet loss, etc.
Vice President, Finance and Operations at Fruitist
 

Categories and Ranking

Cisco Nexus Dashboard Fabri...
Ranking in Network Monitoring Software
44th
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
6.2
Number of Reviews
26
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
ThousandEyes
Ranking in Network Monitoring Software
8th
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
7.1
Number of Reviews
31
Ranking in other categories
Cloud Monitoring Software (10th), Digital Experience Monitoring (DEM) (3rd)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of September 2026, in the Network Monitoring Software category, the mindshare of Cisco Nexus Dashboard Fabric Controller (Formerly DCNM) is 0.6%, up from 0.6% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of ThousandEyes is 1.6%, down from 3.4% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Network Monitoring Software Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
ThousandEyes1.6%
Cisco Nexus Dashboard Fabric Controller (Formerly DCNM)0.6%
Other97.8%
Network Monitoring Software
 

Featured Reviews

Jagdev Dhaliwal - PeerSpot reviewer
Network Engineer at a healthcare company with 1,001-5,000 employees
Flow monitoring has improved planning for east-west traffic and real-time capacity decisions
Cisco Nexus Dashboard Fabric Controller (Formerly DCNM) helps to understand the flows and data plane capacities, which are the primary use cases. Usually, people struggle with east-west traffic flow when they need to decide on firewalls or products. People typically understand north-south traffic flows but usually miss the east-west traffic flows in data centers. I was focusing more on this so that people can accordingly plan, such as after F5, the number of servers, the number of sessions needed, and whether we need to plan the interface for groups from the line capacity perspective. This kind of information was valuable to us. The real-time telemetry feature was beneficial. When experiencing performance issues, I could determine if there were any issues related to flows or areas where bottlenecks were occurring.
Shreyans Parekh - PeerSpot reviewer
Vice President, Finance and Operations at Fruitist
Proactive monitoring has transformed digital experience and now optimizes application delivery
With ThousandEyes, there are some configuration and metric screens that are not entirely intuitive with ThousandEyes, so they can certainly improve in terms of the usability of certain metric screens. ThousandEyes can also offer deeper traffic insights relative to specific applications, so detailed analytics on application-level traffic would help in better understanding and managing our network resources effectively. I would say that ThousandEyes can also, in terms of providing more extensibility with other observability tools, offer more out-of-the-box integrations with other observability tools so that ThousandEyes can serve as that single source of truth, so that we don't necessarily need to go to other tools to be able to be that one-source dashboard. I think there's a lot that ThousandEyes can continue to improve on there. The issues that I've talked about, including extensibility with other platforms and the improvement of accessing specific metric screens in order to be able to provide for fuller access and more detailed access to network-level metrics would make the platform feel less complicated to navigate. It wouldn't require as many manual integration inputs.
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Top Industries

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

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business10
Midsize Enterprise6
Large Enterprise16
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business10
Midsize Enterprise3
Large Enterprise21
 

Questions from the Community

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Cisco Data Center Network Manager?
The tool is always expensive, but their service, product quality, and support are good. We're happy with it, but it's still an expensive solution. There are cheaper alternatives but no similar plat...
What needs improvement with Cisco Data Center Network Manager?
I do not believe it integrated well with different infrastructures for hybrid environments. I am uncertain because we have never attempted that in our environment, so they could perform better in t...
What is your primary use case for Cisco Data Center Network Manager?
The main use case for URL filtering with PAN-DB is that it performs quite well. Earlier, when I started in 2012, there was a Blue Coat product available during that period. I am not certain whether...
What is the best network monitoring software for large enterprises?
It actually depends on the exact purpose or requirements. Some tools are better for only network devices while others are better from a cloud monitoring or APM monitoring perspective. You can check...
What needs improvement with ThousandEyes?
We face challenges with hybrid and distributed enterprise networks since we use Cisco, but we also have other third party integrations. When it comes to ThousandEyes, it does not show anything when...
What is your primary use case for ThousandEyes?
I have been using ThousandEyes with this company for two years. The main use case is that we would like to get insights into our calls. Currently, we are still in the POC state with ThousandEyes, b...
 

Also Known As

Cisco Data Center Network Manager
No data available
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Banco de Guayaquil, Cox Communications, Kuwait Petroleum Italia, Roper St. Francis, University of British Columbia
Wayfair, GitHub, Craigslist, Comcast, SurveyMonkey, Lyft, Box, HP, Zendesk, IO Data Centers, Good Technology, NNTCommunications, Proofpoint, Schneider, Crowdstrike, Avera, Pitney Bowes, InstartLogic, Shutterfly, Shutterstock, Condé Nast, Roche, Jive, Actelion, Brocade, Infor, Okta, JLL, DigitalOcean, Zuora, NetSuite, CloudFlare, One, DemonWare, Quantcast, Carbonite, CareerBuilder, Prosper, Oscar, Slack
Find out what your peers are saying about Cisco Nexus Dashboard Fabric Controller (Formerly DCNM) vs. ThousandEyes and other solutions. Updated: September 2026.
913,683 professionals have used our research since 2012.