Catchpoint vs Cisco Nexus Dashboard Fabric Controller (Formerly DCNM) comparison

Catchpoint and Cisco are both solutions in the Network Monitoring Software category. Catchpoint is ranked #60 with an average rating of 8.0, while Cisco is ranked #18 with an average rating of 8.2. Catchpoint holds a 0.4% mindshare in NMS, compared to Cisco’s 0.6% mindshare. Additionally, 100% of Catchpoint users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 92% of Cisco users who would recommend it.

Catchpoint

Read 14 Catchpoint reviews

1,492 Views
612 Comparison Views

100% willing to recommend

Cisco Nexus Dashboard Fabri...

Read 25 Cisco Nexus Dashboard Fabric Controller (Formerly DCNM) reviews

841 Views
824 Comparison Views

92% willing to recommend

Catchpoint

Cisco Nexus Dashboard Fabri...

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Oct 10, 2024

Cisco Nexus Dashboard Fabric Controller and Catchpoint compete in the network management and monitoring category. Cisco DCNM is seen as having an edge in management capabilities, while Catchpoint excels in monitoring and customer satisfaction.

Features: Cisco DCNM integrates with various tools, offers stability, and supports multi-vendor management with an open-source approach. Its automation features streamline network management. Catchpoint provides alert notifications, API monitoring, and dashboards that offer comprehensive network visibility. It also features synthetic monitoring and external integration.

Room for Improvement:Cisco DCNM has complex configuration, pricey integration, and non-intuitive reporting. Catchpoint needs a better UI, improved monitor creation, and more automation to decrease manual work.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service:Cisco Nexus Dashboard installs on-premises with strong technical support but requires better operational support. Catchpoint operates on public and private clouds, ensuring reliable services and generally satisfactory support levels.

Pricing and ROI:Cisco DCNM has high costs due to its extensive features but provides good value in long-term use. Its pricing is justified by its ROI. Catchpoint charges based on usage, which is cost-effective for large enterprises, though its pricing remains high.

To learn more, read our detailed Catchpoint vs. Cisco Nexus Dashboard Fabric Controller (Formerly DCNM) Report (Updated: July 2025).

Buyer's Guide

Catchpoint vs. Cisco Nexus Dashboard Fabric Controller (Formerly DCNM)

July 2025

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Review summaries and opinions

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:

Categories and Ranking

Catchpoint

Ranking in Network Monitoring Software

60th

Average Rating

8.2

Reviews Sentiment

7.1

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability (38th), Cloud Monitoring Software (31st), Digital Experience Monitoring (DEM) (12th)

Cisco Nexus Dashboard Fabri...

Ranking in Network Monitoring Software

18th

Average Rating

8.0

Reviews Sentiment

6.8

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

Mindshare comparison

As of August 2025, in the Network Monitoring Software category, the mindshare of Catchpoint is 0.4%, up from 0.4% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Cisco Nexus Dashboard Fabric Controller (Formerly DCNM) is 0.6%, up from 0.4% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Network Monitoring Software

Featured Reviews

AnmolRai

Technical Consultant Project Lead at Capgemini

Valuable monitoring features enhance ecommerce experience while improvement needed in region-specific insights

As part of the improvement, there are certain categories, like for the China market, where we face issues. We are currently using an external tool, Splunk, for reporting. If we could receive similar data for the China market as we do for North America and Asia Pacific, this would be helpful.

Read full review

Upul Abhayasena

Manager - Technology at a engineering company with 10,001+ employees

Robust management tool with an easy setup and room for more features

DCNM is used by one of the airline customers in Qatar to manage many data centers and rack switches running on normal Nexus or NX-OS mode. They required a controller platform to manage these Nexus switches, and thus, they utilized DCNM as a Fabric controller. Given that ACI deployment is very low…

Read full review

Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:

Pros

"We really need the API monitoring, as well as client side session monitoring, the global synthetic monitoring, to track the availability of the systems from the customer side."

"The most valuable features of Catchpoint are basically the transaction monitors on the API and UI."

"The drill-down feature of this product was very good. It allowed us to identify the exact page or area of the site that was causing our customers an issue."

"Catchpoint helped us establish that something is in a provider network, so we could tell our customers to check their internet provider because the traffic is not getting to us. You need to be gentle when you tell them that, but the fact that we could do it was crucial."

"The best feature in Catchpoint is the alert or the notification my company gets frequently, in particular, every five minutes. It's the notification you get whenever a respective market has an issue. There's also a dashboard in Catchpoint that shows the markets you support, so all the markets will be highlighted graphically in the dashboard whenever there's downtime that could affect you. If there's no issue for a specific market, it will be in green, so in this way, anybody would be able to understand which market has issues and which market has no issues through Catchpoint. The tool is very useful for monitoring activities."

"During business hours, it has worked absolutely fine without any issues."

"One of the features, the scatter plot, is very useful. It shows red dots wherever there are issues."

"Catchpoint provides a great amount of information."

More Catchpoint pros

"After installation, you almost forget that it is working."

"The most valuable feature is the connectivity monitoring."

"Stability is not an issue."

"The product makes the management of our environment simpler."

"You can integrate all the networks into the software."

"The automation capability is more than enough. It depends on how we consider and integrate the automation engine. We need to ensure the automation engine and then how to perform it. It depends on the policy making, API integration, and other integrations."

"VCNM provides a unique capability of managing the admin VDCs of Nexus boxes."

"Data Center Network Manager is absolutely stable."

More Cisco Nexus Dashboard Fabric Controller (Formerly DCNM) pros

Cons

"if we need to do performance analysis, we have to click too many times. For example, if there is an issue that is caught by Catchpoint, we need to understand what the error is and at which step it failed, or which transaction that is impacted. To drill down, we have to click too many things to get the answer."

"The old user version was better, it was more user-friendly."

"There's still too much manual involvement in getting customized test configurations out there. It's good, but it still takes a lot of effort. In other words, it's when you need to configure it to collect a specific variable and that kind of thing."

"As part of the improvement, there are certain categories, like for the China market, where we face issues."

"Trending needs improvement. Currently, out-of-the-box, they provide only seven days availability. So, we have to do queries and we have to go into a separate analysis module, we have to run lot of queries to long-term trends."

"There are essentially a lot of quotas. Nobody wants to sit and manually create monitors for someone who uses synthetic monitoring."

"A room for improvement in Catchpoint is that it lacks an automated page updating feature. My company receives all the alerts and notifications it needs, but the page doesn't update automatically. You need to manually refresh the page, so every five minutes you need to refresh it to see the most updated information. If there's an automated page refresh feature, that would help my company. It's a feature that Grafana has. The page auto-refreshes in Grafana, so you don't have to manually refresh the page. If that feature is implemented in Catchpoint, it'll be useful for the users. Another area for improvement in the tool is you have to do a manual task, for example, when you have a notification for a market, you get a zip code that the user could have entered, but if the zip code is incorrect, you have to manually go into Catchpoint and update that parameter, so that manual step is another area in the tool that needs improvement."

"A large selection of nodes are available but it is a challenge to test reliably in China and the Middle East."

More Catchpoint cons

"The solution needs to improve reports."

"The delivery Cisco Data Center Network Manager could improve if it was easier. Additionally, some feature improvement is needed."

"The configuration is too complicated and you have to create templates and use a lot of menus."

"It is not very easy to monitor or to browse."

"It's very costly."

"The visibility of applications is not great."

"The reporting is not very intuitive and has room for improvement."

"Sometimes the product gives us problems that require support."

More Cisco Nexus Dashboard Fabric Controller (Formerly DCNM) cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"In terms of licensing fees, I believe they were slightly higher."

"The solution's pricing varies based on services and licensing models."

"The solution's pricing is comparable to the last tool we were using."

"The price and licensing are very, very high. They have to come down on the pricing to match with the industry standard."

"The pricing is based on consumption and works on a point scale. For example, let's say I want to look at www.google.com, and I'm going to test it to see if it's there. It will bring back all this data that tells me how long it took to connect and how long it took to get the first byte. It will list all the resources on the page, showing that they all work and there are no broken links. It brings that data back. That test has an assigned point value depending on what you decide to extract from that test. If all I do is check to see whether it's available, it might be one point. I don't know the exact point values off-hand. This is just an example."

"The solution is very expensive."

"On average, Data Center Network Manager's pricing isn't too costly unless you choose a premier license."

"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 platform across all domains."

"I would say that the pricing offers great value for the money."

"When we purchase a Nexus box, the MDS CM license comes with it."

"The price of Cisco Data Center Network Manager is expensive compared to other vendors on the market."

"We usually opt for a yearly plan, commonly for three or five years upfront. Some customers may not utilize all the features included in the product, and this can lead to them paying for functionalities they don't need."

"The product is licensed with contracts that work on a yearly basis rather than a monthly model."

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Financial Services Firm

27%

Retailer

15%

Real Estate/Law Firm

11%

Computer Software Company

12%

Government

12%

Manufacturing Company

Financial Services Firm

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about Catchpoint?

Catchpoint is very flexible and also provides logs for troubleshooting purposes. It helps us fix issues within the SLAs signed with the end users. The tool is easy to learn.

See all answers

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Catchpoint?

The solution's pricing varies based on services and licensing models. Clients typically see significant operational and cost efficiencies, with time savings estimated between 30% and 40%.

See all answers

What needs improvement with Catchpoint?

See all answers

What do you like most about Cisco Data Center Network Manager?

It uses push technology, which pushes the changes to all relevant devices to ensure they are updated accordingly.

See all answers

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...

See all answers

What needs improvement with Cisco Data Center Network Manager?

In a mixed architecture where Nexus switches are used as border devices and are connected to a Palo Alto firewall (e.g., version 9.1 or 10.1), you might encounter issues with BGP peering. For insta...

See all answers

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Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Catchpoint

August 2025

Download Catchpoint product report

Buyer's Guide

Cisco Nexus Dashboard Fabric Controller (Formerly DCNM)

August 2025

Cisco Nexus Dashboard Fabric Controller (Formerly DCNM) report

Download Cisco Nexus Dashboard Fabric Controller (Formerly DCNM) product report

Also Known As

No data available

Cisco Data Center Network Manager

Overview

Catchpoint is the Internet Resilience Company™. The top online retailers, Global2000, CDNs, cloud service providers, and xSPs in the world rely on Catchpoint to increase their resilience by catching any issues in the Internet Stack before they impact their business. Catchpoint’s Internet Performance Monitoring (IPM) suite offers synthetics, RUM, performance optimization, high fidelity data and flexible visualizations with advanced analytics. It leverages thousands of global vantage points (including inside wireless networks, BGP, backbone, last mile, endpoint, enterprise, ISPs, and more) to provide unparalleled observability into anything that impacts your customers, workforce, networks, website performance, applications, and APIs.

Learn more at: https://www.catchpoint.com/

Catchpoint

The Cisco Nexus Dashboard Fabric Controller (NDFC) offers a comprehensive solution for managing Cisco NX-OS switches in hybrid-cloud environments, providing automation, visibility, and consistent operations. Designed to simplify and enhance data center management, NDFC integrates with Cisco Nexus Dashboard to streamline network connectivity, reduce deployment times, and ensure seamless transitions with minimal disruptions. Its modular architecture, new user interface, and support for non-Nexus OS platforms make it a robust tool for LAN, SAN, and IP Fabric for Media management. Additionally, NDFC enhances fabric reliability, automates workflows, and supports cloud connectivity with AWS and Microsoft Azure, making it ideal for businesses adapting to increasingly complex digital environments.

Cisco

Sample Customers

Information Not Available

Banco de Guayaquil, Cox Communications, Kuwait Petroleum Italia, Roper St. Francis, University of British Columbia

Buyer's Guide

Catchpoint vs. Cisco Nexus Dashboard Fabric Controller (Formerly DCNM)

July 2025

Free Report: Catchpoint vs. Cisco Nexus Dashboard Fabric Controller (Formerly DCNM)

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