Cisco DNA Center Reviews

Cisco DNA Center offers managed services and integration. It also has centralization of management. Centralized management is crucial; additional tools are available for invoicing and endpoint certification. The platform offers various features, including new Wi-Fi capabilities and access points. There is no licensing for users.

Cisco DNA Center is costly for Ukrainian customers. The functionality and connections are excellent. If the price decreases, it should become more accessible.

I rate the solution’s stability an eight out of ten.

The solution is suited for large organizations. 

There are several compliance issues that they are unable to resolve. The response time is very slow, and we must change the agent frequently because the agents cannot address questions.

Neutral

People should keep an eye on the Cisco DNA Center software, which is becoming more accessible. This software is not confined to a single device due to its large size and high cost. Some customers can utilize multiple sources or partner sources and can use virtual or software clients to install it on their network. This ensures certified features on the platform.

Overall, I rate the solution an eight out of ten.

I am a solution architect. I design for the data center and I also write technical presentations.

Cisco is a leading network company. Every organization uses networks and data centers. The data centers are mainly on-premise enterprise environments.

Cisco has been used in our organization for 14 years.

From the recent DNA point of view, there are some stability challenges with Cisco, but very minor. 

I have not worked with Cisco technical support for over three years. From my experience, Cisco support is available. They have their own SMEs in each area. There is a gap in between the information shared between Cisco and the technical teams. Cisco should provide a clear view of what has caused the problem when they do the RCA. By providing more information, we can be more proactive and do the upgrades if it is impacting security compliance.

Neutral

We have been using Cisco for so many years that setup is straightforward. The DNA solutions are there and SD-Access is in place. With these, we have come to zero touch provisioning. Deployment is easier than it was five or six years ago. 

We have a large Cisco portfolio in our organization. We have a three-year license with them.

I would rate this solution a seven out of 10. 

It can assess traditional networks.

The automation features are significant and reduce configuration time. This means outstanding functionality. By deploying the controller automatically, the rest becomes automated.

When it comes to deploying wireless fields, integrating defaults into the DNS interface can be challenging.

I have experience with Cisco DNA Center.

In the dashboard, we observe that the integration with IT is functional. However, when inspecting the system, we encounter occasional errors in the desktop.I would rate it 8 out of 10.

I would rate it 8 out of 10.

Deployment is not difficult; it could take approximately a day to complete, assuming we have all the necessary information and the initial email from Cisco.

Maintenance can be challenging because we're unsure about the number of applications utilized in the studio.

I would rate it 7 in terms of pricing.

Overall, I would rate it an eight out of ten.

We use it for incorporating around four hundred wireless access points into our network infrastructure.

It enables monitoring of various components such as access points, switch cards, and other elements within the company's solutions.

We encountered issues with their response times, which had a big impact on our workflow.

We started using it this year, so for a couple of months now.

Overall, I would rate it seven out of ten.

My experience with Cisco DNA Center is with selling it and receiving feedback from my customers. I have not personally done any configuration or management with it.

I have worked with the demo and also presented it to customers.

My clients use this solution to give them more visibility into their network, and the management mode helps with to troubleshoot and fix problems.

People like to use the dashboards to get an overview of their network.

If you have a bottleneck in your network then this solution can fix it.

DNA Center is easier to use than Fortinet FortiManager.

The pricing of this solution could be improved.

There is a limitation with the number of VRFs that you can have in your network, and this has caused us problems with some customers.

This solution does not support IP version 6.

I would like to see better integration with Cisco Meraki.

I have been working with this solution for about a year.

It is easy to expand this solution because it is easy to configure, add new sites, and get bigger because you already have the plan. With the configuration already done, it's just plug and play.

The only problem with scaling DNA Center is that it doesn't support IP version 6 yet.

Our clients have between 3,000 and 8,000 users.

We have not been in touch with technical support for this solution.

I have experience with several solutions including FortiManager. Cisco DNA center is easier to use. Also, competitors like Fortinet and Aruba do not have a similar system. They are working on it and trying to get it, but they just don't have a DNA Center.

The initial setup is easy and straightforward if you follow the steps and you have a normal network. However, if you have an advanced network and a lot of things to think about then it can be an issue. For example, if you have a network with a lot of VRFs then it may be an issue because DNA Center can't handle it. If you are starting from a greenfield rather than a brownfield then it should be easier.

My advice for anyone who is looking into implementing this solution is to start with Cisco Assurance and do the mapping of the network. I would suggest asking for help from the partners to help with the installation. You can do it on your own but you will easily save the money that you spend on the consultants because they are experts. You will not waste time getting it up and running, and you will be back on track quickly.

This is a good solution but nothing is perfect. That said, they are ahead of the other vendors. 

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.

Our primary use case is for real-time data transmission. I'm a senior manager and we are customers of Cisco. 

I think the processing is a good feature and the product also has a high level of accuracy.

I'd like to see them focus more on the digital side of things. 

I've been using this solution for four years. 

We've had some stability issues recently and that's something they could work on. 

The solution is scalable, we have around 100 users. 

The initial setup is quite complex and requires some expertise.

There is some room for improvement so I rate this solution eight out of 10. 

We are an educational environment that is similar to a university, but we only teach management and leadership. We have a variety of visitors every day, more than 2,000 of them, and they are unknown to us. This makes it very difficult to centrally manage using a traditional network.

We are currently in the second round of the implementation phase for this solution. We have two buildings with the solution implemented now, and we are working on other buildings. We are on the same campus but we are doing the work in four phases. Now that two are complete, we have two more that we are about to finish.

Everything is secure in our environment, so we are using the overlay of the DNA Center to separate the visitors and the employees and the trainers. We are using a multi-segmented network, so DNA was a very good solution for us to deal with this type of environment.

Prior to implementing DNA Center, it was very difficult for us to create a large number of VLANs for our switches. This has made it possible for us to meet the need of maintaining connections when people move between buildings on the campus or travel to another campus.

The most valuable feature is the DNA analytics, which is very good for us.

It is very important for everyone to be able to see everything that is happening in the network from one location. It is simple to manage and it is all done from a single dashboard.

We set up the identity service and it is amazing for us to have an identity for each user. All of the network policies are set according to one's identity.

The ability to trace attacks if they occur is very good in terms of security. The security is part of the network layer. Generally, security has been improving with Cisco solutions because it was not as good in the past.

If a device is lost then it is very easy to replace. I just drag and drop the configuration from the old device to the new one and after a few seconds, the new device is working with the same configuration that we had before. It does not have to be configured manually.

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. Data is traveling from the inside to the outside layer, and I want to be able to fully control all of the data going in and out. It should not be set up as multi-service, but rather a single one.

If you have old Cisco hardware such as switches or access points, or they are from another vendor, then they will not work with this solution. The hardware will still function but you will not be able to control it with DNA.

I have been working with Cisco DNA Center for two months.

This solution has been stable since it was installed two months ago.

The scalability is one of the reasons that we chose Cisco DNA. We have ten buildings within the same campus and when we implemented the PoC, Cisco said that scalability is very important for us.

We have had about 3,000 people using this solution to this point, but we are not yet at full capacity. We expect to have more than 4,000 concurrent users.

We have not been in contact with technical support.

Prior to using Cisco DNA Center, we had a traditional network. We had switches and routers from Cisco, HP, and Dell. We switched because we are joining all of the buildings together and given their size, the number of visitors, and the scalability that we need, we had to switch to DNA.

The initial setup is straightforward except for the issue that this solution is incompatible with switches or access points from other vendors. That is very bad.

It takes us about two weeks to deploy this solution in one of our buildings. This includes installing the hardware, software, access points, and everything.

We have a technician from Cisco to do the implementation for us.

During deployment, there were eight people from our staff and five people from Cisco.

For maintenance, for each building, we have two or three technicians at various levels. We have other administrators as well, although they are responsible for different solutions such as SAP and ERP. The same person is responsible for multiple technologies.

Our licensing agreement is for three years.

The Cisco Digital Network Architecture is the first solution with these types of capabilities that I have used. It allows me to monitor everything in the network, including end-to-end packet travel and tracking the specific packets.

This solution is really stable and scalable.

My advice for anybody who is considering this solution is to consider the size of the environment. If there are a very large number of switches or visitor access points then I recommend DNA. However, if there are a small number of switches and access points then I would recommend the Cisco Meraki because it is fine for small and medium-sized networks.

The biggest lesson that I have learned from working with this solution is that this technology is much easier now. I think it's a revolution in networking and wireless communication where it is becoming easier and nothing like traditional networking. It is now an overlay and an underlay network. All of the people working in this field have to be up to date with the technology. It is very new and there are many capabilities when it comes to network control, analytics, and security compliance. IT people have to adapt to new technologies.

I have not yet tested the IoT for our smart building because we don't use it in our current location.

I would rate this solution a nine out of ten.

Automating customers' campus networks, redesigning their networks and giving much more visibility on traffic flows.

As a company, we significantly reduced operation and maintenance costs for our top customers, and simplified network resources planning.

• Analytics, because it really can improve your network based on what your company really does.
• Security, because with ISE integration you now have really centralized authentication, authorization, and profiling.

Better compatibility with third parties and to other Cisco products because if versions are not perfectly matching requirements, it gives a lot of problems.

We've still not received long-term feedbacks from customers, but for now, I can totally suggest the solution.

It can scale very well from really small to huge and distributed networks.

Nothing to complain about. Instead, they helped us to find alternative solutions and design when something was not still supported by the platform.

We always deployed traditional campus networks because there wasn't a real alternative.

The initial setup is well driven; you can do it wrong only if you try to improvise.

I've been very well supported by the vendor's technical team especially when versions were changing on a monthly basis.

As system integrators, we're now able to use an operations team to follow specific and highly difficult problems and not losing a lot of time in garbage ticket to configure a single port, a single policy, etc.

The price is really high, but it's worth every single dollar you pay. Keep attention on licensing model because you don't really need top licenses on every node and that can help to spare some money.

Yes, we evaluated more traditional equipment like Catalyst 38xx/36xx/68xx and so on.

If you plan to implement, I suggest you follow the guide step by step and do not proceed on your own, else you'll face a lot of problems and you'll need lots of support from Cisco TAC.