We performed a comparison between Cisco Data Center Network Manager and Kentik based on real PeerSpot user reviews.
Find out what your peers are saying about Zabbix, Datadog, Auvik and others in Network Monitoring Software."We can manage the entire system across the network and troubleshoot the pain points."
"The product makes the management of our environment simpler."
"The product has excellent stability."
"We use the product to manage access points."
"I don't have to rely on the on-site engineer who can do the configuration. I can have our team just plug the devices and perform remotely. I can also do the templates."
"It uses push technology, which pushes the changes to all relevant devices to ensure they are updated accordingly."
"The tool's most valuable feature is the consolidated dashboard, providing insights into parameters and overall usage of network features. It allows us to easily summarize insights through the dashboards. The solution offers automation capabilities, particularly in the context of connecting LAN sites with websites."
"Data Center Network Manager is absolutely stable."
"Fabric suite automation is a great feature."
"The drill-down into detailed views of network activity helps to quickly pinpoint locations and causes. All the information is there."
"I really love the Data Explorer. I use it all the time to go in and craft exactly what I need to see. I'm able to then take that story and explain it to the executives. I've done that a couple of times and it is helpful."
"In terms of the solution’s real-time visibility across our network infrastructure, I have not been able to find any other monitoring or netflow visualization tool that gives me the kind of information I get from Kentik. If I need to take a deep-dive into something that I see, it's really easy for me to do that. Whereas with most other things, I have to use five or six other tools to get that kind of data, with Kentik, I have it all in one place."
"One of the valuable features is the intuitive nature of building out reports, and then triggering actions based on specific metrics from those reports. It has a really good UI and the ability to surface data through the reporting functions is pretty good. That's helped a lot in the security space."
"We're also using Kentik to ingest metrics. It's a useful feature, and its response time, whenever we're pulling back the data, is higher than our on-prem solution."
"The most valuable features have been anything around traffic engineering: being able to determine the source or destination of a surge of traffic, whether it's DDoS-related, or a customer just happened to have a sudden uptick in traffic. Being able to tell where that's coming from or where it's going to enables us to do things based on that."
"We're pretty happy with the API functionality. It's web, and it's very simple to set up queries. It has served us well and you don't need to be an expert on the API or the product to set these things up."
"It offers a simple yet powerful feature of classifying applications, going beyond basic statistics."
"The Wi-Fi side needs improvement."
"It would be nice to have the ability to more easily collect information from other software when doing some types of analysis."
"The visibility of applications is not great."
"The delivery Cisco Data Center Network Manager could improve if it was easier. Additionally, some feature improvement is needed."
"The solution needs to improve reports."
"The reporting is not very intuitive and has room for improvement."
"Could integrate better with VMware products."
"The tool's pricing strategy could be improved to compete more effectively in the market, especially against competitors like Huawei, Aruba, and Juniper."
"Sometimes the product gives us problems that require support."
"There is room for improvement around the usability of the API. It's a hugely complex task to call it and you need a lot of backing to be able to do it. I should say, as someone who's not in networking, maybe it's easier for people who are in networking, but for me that one part is not very user-friendly."
"They're moving more in a direction where they are saying, "Hey, here's information that you may be interested in or may a need," before the question has to explicitly be asked. Continuing to move in that direction would be a good thing."
"I believe they're already working on this, but I would love for them to create better integrations from network flow data to application performance — tracing — so that we could overlay that data more readily. With more companies going hybrid, flow logs and flow data, whether it be VPC or on-prem, matched with application performance and trace data, is pretty important."
"We asked for a way, regarding the potential networks that exist, to hook Kentik up with external tools like peering DBs to correlate things together and see what we can do... This is all in the [next] beta now."
"I've checked out the V4 version of the interface and it's still a little bit clunky for me to use. I still go back to the old interface. That's definitely one that they still need to work on. It doesn't seem like everything that you get in the V3, the older interface, is there. For instance, I was trying to add a user or do the administrative tasks in V4, and I couldn't figure out where I was supposed to do that."
"I consider the pricing model as an area for improvement."
"I would like to see them explore the area of cost analysis."
"The only downside to Kentik, something that I don't like, is that it's great that it shows you where these anomalies lie, but it's not actionable. Kentik is valuable, don't get me wrong, but if it had an actionable piece to it..."
More Cisco Data Center Network Manager Pricing and Cost Advice →
Cisco Data Center Network Manager is ranked 26th in Network Monitoring Software with 20 reviews while Kentik is ranked 47th in Network Monitoring Software with 12 reviews. Cisco Data Center Network Manager is rated 8.0, while Kentik is rated 9.2. The top reviewer of Cisco Data Center Network Manager writes "Provides insight into the network's health data and has an excellent support team". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Kentik writes " Flexibility for creating reports and gaining more visibility is a definite strength". Cisco Data Center Network Manager is most compared with Marvis Virtual Network Assistant, Zabbix, Cisco DNA Center and SolarWinds NPM, whereas Kentik is most compared with ThousandEyes, Arbor DDoS, SolarWinds NPM, NETSCOUT nGeniusONE and Datadog.
See our list of best Network Monitoring Software vendors.
We monitor all Network Monitoring Software reviews to prevent fraudulent reviews and keep review quality high. We do not post reviews by company employees or direct competitors. We validate each review for authenticity via cross-reference with LinkedIn, and personal follow-up with the reviewer when necessary.