We performed a comparison between Cisco DNA Center and Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform based on real PeerSpot user reviews.
Find out in this report how the two Network Automation solutions compare in terms of features, pricing, service and support, easy of deployment, and ROI."Cisco DNA Center provides operational support, compliance support, security vulnerability detection, and automatic scheduling."
"I think that their LAN automation is a very good feature."
"Has a good processing feature with a high level of accuracy."
"It does a lot of things automatically, and that's the big thing with it. They're making the software so that you don't need to be as knowledgeable as me on the switching and routing side to get your work done. If you want, you can have DNA troubleshoot your problem for you and give you solutions or fix it itself, if it was something that's just a configuration issue."
"The solution helps in user microsegmentation."
"I like that we can easily configure any new hardware. It's also easy to deploy and easy to troubleshoot."
"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."
"DNA Center is scalable."
"Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform is quite stable. If you set it up correctly with the right configurations and there are no hiccups during installation and deployment, it will be stable. I'd give stability a rating of eight out of ten."
"Some colleagues and other companies use it and comment that it is easy to use, easy to understand, and offers good features."
"It has improved our organization through provisioning and security hardening. When we do get a new VM, we have been able to bring on a provisioned machine in less than a day. This morning alone, I provisioned two machines within an hour. I am talking about hardening, installing antivirus software on it, and creating user accounts because the Playbooks were predesigned. From the time we got the servers to the actual hand-off, it takes less than an hour. We are talking about having the servers actually authenticate Red Hat Satellites and run the yum updates. All of that can be done within an hour."
"Ansible is agentless. So, we don't need to set up any agent into the computer we are interacting with. The only prerequisite is that the host with which we are going to interact must have the Python interpreter installed on it. We can connect to a host and do our configuration by using Ansible."
"I like being able to control multiple systems and push out updates quickly with just a couple of clicks of a button and commands. I like the automation because it is a time saver."
"Managing our inventory is a big pain point. Right now, we have Satellite, but we can tie it in with Satellite, so we can actually manage things and automate the entire deployment stack, instead of trying to grab things from tickets, then generating Kickstart, and using that to get things in Satellite. That doesn't work well. We can do the whole deployment stack using the inventory share between Tower and Satellite."
"It is quick to production. It has an API in the back which allows for integrations."
"The user interface is well-built and very easy to navigate around."
"They should include UTM features in the product."
"Cisco could improve the security side of their solutions."
"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."
"What I want to see in Cisco DNA Center in the future is more support for other platforms so that you can manage third-party products, such as Fortinet."
"What could be improved is the licensing cost of Cisco DNA Center. It's a little bit expensive."
"The tool's deployment is complex. It also needs to improve its GUI."
"The features of Cisco DNA Center and Cisco Prime could have more parity."
"The tool's IoT integration should be better."
"The governance features could be improved."
"The solution should add a nice self-service portal."
"The job workflow needs to be worked on. It's not really clear to how you actually link things together. What they probably could do is provide an example workflow on how to stitch things together. I think that would be very helpful."
"Networking needs to be improved."
"The tool should allow us to create infrastructure. It has everything when it comes to management, but it lacks the provisioning aspect."
"There is always room for improvement in features or customer support."
"It needs better documentation."
"There could be more stuff in the workflows. I hope that if I have ten templates with different services on it, workflow could auto-populate all the template-based services."
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Cisco DNA Center is ranked 1st in Network Automation with 37 reviews while Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform is ranked 2nd in Network Automation with 58 reviews. Cisco DNA Center is rated 7.8, while Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform is rated 8.6. The top reviewer of Cisco DNA Center writes "Practical implementation of VXLAN is good and provides centralized control". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform writes "Capable of broad integrations with easy-to-operate infrastructure and user controls". Cisco DNA Center is most compared with Cisco Prime, Aruba Airwave, SolarWinds Network Configuration Manager, Huawei eSight and NetBrain, whereas Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform is most compared with Red Hat Satellite, Microsoft Configuration Manager, VMware Aria Automation, Microsoft Azure DevOps and Automic Workload Automation. See our Cisco DNA Center vs. Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform report.
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