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."
"I really like the network map. It's probably the most useful feature because we have monitoring set up in other systems too, but seeing what's connected to what and where it is makes a lot of things a lot easier to troubleshoot."
"The traffic insights and the configuration management are the most valuable features."
"Auvik allows me to filter by network elements, so I can get a quick glance at a customer's infrastructure without looking through handmade diagrams. It provides me with an overview of how everything is laid out. From there, I can really drill down into individual inventories and switch ports. For example, I can determine what the issue is, but I don't need to be on the premises and log into customer equipment. It saves a lot of time."
"The topography and historical data are excellent; the latter essentially allows us to see back in time, which is helpful as users don't always report issues promptly. The ability to go back and look at historical data is a good feature."
"It's all intuitive and straightforward. The out-of-the-box alerts provided everything I needed, but I've made a couple of additional alerts. You can schedule maintenance windows in Auvik, and the solution won't send any alerts during that time."
"Among the most valuable features are the hardware life cycle and configuration backups, when applicable... When it does show you the hardware life cycle for, say, a Cisco device and the configuration backup, that's the most useful aspect for me as a network engineer."
"The best features are the alerting and monitoring."
"The network map is fantastic. The backup of configs is also valuable. It does SSH into each network device and retains a copy of the configs on the machines as well as the change logs. So, when something suddenly stops, you can compare the configs to see what happened. You can do a side-by-side comparison of the configs to see exactly what changed. That's fantastic."
"Cisco is a leading network company."
"It is a stable solution."
"The solution has the capability to scale."
"It is very versatile in terms of analytics."
"It gives us automation capabilities for pushing out the configuration to branch networks. It also provides visibility into the health of user network devices."
"The monitoring features are very useful for network engineers."
"The most valuable features of Cisco DNA Center are wireless assurance and visibility."
"I like the visibility, instant build, network, policies, and the ability to control access. I also like that you can visualize your whole network."
"The Wi-Fi side needs improvement."
"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."
"We had some issues with the licensing. You need to pay for premium to use NetFlow, and we had a problem with them counting the same device multiple times for licensing purposes. It was a little frustrating because the Auvik database in the background didn't see it as a single device even though it came from the same critical hardware and only had one serial number. However, it was in different groups, so it was counted two or three times. It took a while to work with the accounting team to get that sorted."
"We're having difficulties with Auvik's regular maintenance windows. They do the maintenance on the cloud side, which affects the on-prem collectors that gather the logs from the different network assets."
"The performance could be better; it gets a little clunky and slow-moving at times, and I wonder if that's due to the VM or if it's just the nature of the tool."
"It is amazing in keeping device inventories up-to-date. It mostly keeps them up to date as things change. There were a couple of hiccups where a device would get replaced and the mapping would break, and we'd have to go in and fix the mapping. It was with devices that Auvik couldn't fully discover or devices that would change frequently, such as cell phones or other devices on the network that are dynamic and change all the time. The integration would just show up with an IP address and a MAC address. There was no other information in them, which wasn't very helpful. They were the devices that Auvik wasn't able to discover fully. If they had full SNMP or SSH credentials and Auvik knew what the device was and it was matched correctly in Auvik, then Auvik could push it through."
"I'd probably like a little bit more mapping functionality. It gives me a visual overlay of the way that one network segment links to another, but I can't adjust it. Everything is at an equal distance, which makes sense, but I'd probably group some of the things closer and further as it reflects in reality, but I can't do that right now on their system."
"There have been times when our SNMP community strings were incorrect or weren't updated for whatever reason, and Auvik kept trying to scan them. Changing it was a pain, and there wasn't a way to extract that from Auvik. I understand there are valid security reasons why we wouldn't want to do that sometimes. In those situations, we had to recreate those community strings and reapply them to various devices."
"Recently, the map performance has become incredibly slow, even for small maps. For example, simply changing a device type can take up to five or ten minutes to reflect the change."
"As a user, it would be good if I could plug in controllers, suites, and devices from other vendors to Cisco DNA Center."
"The tool's deployment is complex. It also needs to improve its GUI."
"The weaknesses primarily involve pricing and the ongoing need for increased bandwidth and data throughput."
"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."
"We encountered issues with their response times, which had a big impact on our workflow."
"They should include UTM features in the product."
"Technical support could be better. The price could be better, and it could be more stable."
"There are some software problems from version to version. It takes a long time for DNA Center to recognize the video and control access devices."
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Auvik Network Management (ANM) is ranked 3rd in Network Monitoring Software with 131 reviews while Cisco DNA Center is ranked 25th in Network Monitoring Software with 36 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, Meraki Dashboard, SolarWinds NPM 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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