We performed a comparison between Auvik Network Management (ANM) and Cisco DNA Center based on real PeerSpot user reviews.
Find out in this report how the two Network Monitoring Software solutions compare in terms of features, pricing, service and support, easy of deployment, and ROI."We can manage the entire system across the network and troubleshoot the pain points."
"It's hard to say that one feature is my favorite, but I like Auvik's ability to map networks using SNMP. It maps the network, so I can look at all the devices and set them to provide alerts or automatically create tickets when outages occur. If clients need it, I can export all of the data into an Excel spreadsheet."
"The most valuable feature of Auvik is its ability to drill down and identify unusual activity on the network, such as unauthorized devices connecting to our Wi-Fi."
"The other element that it's helped us with is in predicting the future. And another thing that it allows us to do very easily is to track our bandwidth usage that's going in and out of each of the data centers. We've been able to use that information to trend and predict when we need to get upgrades in place. Funny enough, we have an order now where we're increasing our connectivity at one of our data centers tenfold and that's being driven because Auvik's enabled us to understand that we're rapidly approaching our threshold."
"I like the quick mapping. I can put a customer in, and I can put the Auvik monitor in, and then probably within about half an hour to an hour, I can see most of the map."
"That network visualization is really cool. I've been working here for a year now, and the first time I saw it I said, "Whoa, this is so cool"... With Auvik, the map is accurate. It is great and always updating. That's definitely one of the best features of Auvik."
"Shadow IT monitoring is huge for us since so many of our customers are highly regulated."
"I like the ability to remotely access devices securely. The multi-site setup has also been useful. Once we learned how to set that up, we could customize each site and push out common information like SNMP credentials from the parent site to other multi-sites. The automatic network layout is excellent, and the overall monitoring is also beneficial."
"The quick alerts in the event the equipment goes up or down is the most valuable feature."
"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 best feature of Cisco DNA Center is the visibility page, where you can see everything on the dashboard, and you don't have to be a technical person to view the issues."
"The most valuable feature of Cisco DNA Center is the AI (Artificial Intelligence) that provides us with valuable information."
"What I found valuable in Cisco DNA Center is the Software-Defined Access Network, so the entire LAN network can be centralized and managed from a single dashboard. Cisco DNA Center is suitable for centralized management and lets you deploy switches in a centralized fashion. You can also do multiple switch port configurations simultaneously and segregate your traffic into multiple fabrics. Another valuable feature of Cisco DNA Center is enhanced security through Scalable Group Tags. Cisco DNA Center can be integrated with your Cisco ISE to enhance the port securities, and this paves the way for Software-Defined Networking in the LAN segment, which is the main advantage of Cisco DNA Center. I also like that you can use Cisco DNA Center for data assurance or correlation. The solution shows your network and client health parameters, which I find convenient for troubleshooting."
"It is a stable solution."
"People like to use the dashboards to get an overview of their network."
"The automation features are significant, reducing configuration time. This means outstanding functionality. By deploying the controller automatically, the rest becomes automated"
"The solution has the capability to scale."
"The Wi-Fi side needs improvement."
"I'd like to be able to deep dive more into the reporting. The reporting is still being scaled and built out and I would love to see some additional products being added to the stack. For example, Auvik covers certain types of firewalls, but I would like to see more enterprise stuff added to the stack."
"The tutorial could be a little bit more comprehensive."
"They can definitely build more alerts."
"The price shouldn't be an issue for a larger organization, but a smaller organization or an MSP might struggle because the billing is per device. You're paying for your firewalls and devices that appear on the network. If you have a smaller organization with an extensive network, your revenue won't be able to support that cost. That's probably the biggest downside for me."
"I don't know if it has integrations with ticketing systems so that alerts would get to the ticketing system right away. That would be a good feature to add."
"The ability to subcategorize our inventories, between physical and VM servers, for example, would be a welcome addition."
"It requires a lot of hands-on maintenance when it comes to cleanup. That's probably the biggest problem I've had, because I don't have a dedicated resource to manually clean up stale records. I have a customer where it shows 4,000 devices because of the duplication of devices that I have to clean up."
"I like the auto-mapping feature, but I would like to see more layouts and predefined views."
"Requires more focus on the digital side of things."
"The solution needs to improve the dashboard."
"An area for improvement in Cisco DNA Center is the latency in data correlation. For example, sometimes, when an issue happens, and I check the logs, I can't find the corresponding log. There's a delay in log replication, so this is what needs improvement in Cisco DNA Center. Reporting in Cisco DNA Center could also be improved because it only has a few templates, and you can't customize it based on your requirements. There aren't many options available in Cisco DNA Center regarding reporting, versus Cisco Prime, which has excellent features for different levels of detailed reports. I'd like to see real-time data replication in the next release of Cisco DNA Center, similar to what's done in Meraki. Data in Meraki is real-time with no delay, so data is immediately replicated in the cloud. Currently, there's a lag in Cisco DNA Center, and addressing that lag is the enhancement I'd like to see in Cisco DNA Center. The solution also needs to be more user-friendly."
"When it comes to deploying wireless fields, integrating defaults into the DNS interface can be challenging."
"It seems to be a little bit more centered toward wireless than wired. You've got more options you can do wirelessly than you can with the wired switches, but it works for what we need it to do. We would like to see a little bit more about the traffic, and we're looking at what's out there to see about that. We are looking at something that might give us a bit more insight into the actual traffic. If they had the full functionality on the wired side, as they do on the wireless side in terms of being able to view traffic and everything, it would be good."
"Technical support could be better. The price could be better, and it could be more stable."
"DNA Center has been on the market for a few years and they need to update it."
"The solution's technical support is an area with which my company's clients have a problem. Cisco doesn't provide good technical support unless a user has a big account that Cisco wants to retain."
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Auvik Network Management (ANM) is ranked 3rd in Network Monitoring Software with 139 reviews while Cisco DNA Center is ranked 25th in Network Monitoring Software with 37 reviews. Auvik Network Management (ANM) is rated 8.8, while Cisco DNA Center is rated 7.8. The top reviewer of Auvik Network Management (ANM) writes "Enables us to get on top of issues before they become an outage". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Cisco DNA Center writes "Practical implementation of VXLAN is good and provides centralized control". Auvik Network Management (ANM) is most compared with PRTG Network Monitor, LogicMonitor, SolarWinds NPM, Zabbix and FortiMonitor, whereas Cisco DNA Center is most compared with Cisco Prime, Aruba Airwave, SolarWinds Network Configuration Manager, Huawei eSight and Juniper Mist Wired Assurance. See our Auvik Network Management (ANM) vs. Cisco DNA Center report.
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