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Cisco DNA Center vs Splunk Observability Cloud comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Jun 19, 2025

Review summaries and opinions

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

ROI

Sentiment score
6.5
Cisco DNA Center enhances efficiency by reducing configuration time, despite licensing costs, with positive but varied ROI evaluations.
Sentiment score
7.8
Splunk Observability Cloud enhances visibility and efficiency, resulting in faster resolutions, reduced costs, and improved KPI performance for users.
Although Cisco DNA Center is expensive, we have seen a return on investment in terms of time savings.
Using Splunk has saved my organization about 30% of our budget compared to using multiple different monitoring products.
Anyone working in front-end management should recognize the market price to see the true value of end-user monitoring.
 

Customer Service

Sentiment score
6.2
Cisco's DNA Center support is praised for responsiveness but criticized for slow responses and challenges with complex issues.
Sentiment score
7.4
Splunk Observability Cloud support is responsive but needs faster response times and deeper expertise for improved service quality.
Overall, Cisco DNA Center rates eight out of ten as a complete solution.
They often require multiple questions, with five or six emails to get a response.
Support from Splunk is not very helpful because Splunk doesn't have a dedicated APM; they only have one APM engineer in Korea.
They did respond to us, but they did not explicitly inform us about the feature's absence.
 

Scalability Issues

Sentiment score
7.6
Cisco DNA Center is highly scalable, effectively supports small to large networks, but licensing costs can be high.
Sentiment score
7.8
Splunk Observability Cloud offers scalable and flexible solutions, though concerns about cost and complexity persist among users.
The solution is designed for large enterprise companies.
We've used the solution across more than 250 people, including engineers.
I would rate its scalability a nine out of ten.
The issue is mainly about pricing because if they want to monitor more, it costs money.
 

Stability Issues

Sentiment score
7.5
Cisco DNA Center is generally stable, with some users reporting occasional bugs and needed updates affecting stability.
Sentiment score
8.3
Splunk Observability Cloud is mostly stable and reliable, with users experiencing minimal issues and frequent alert notification management.
I would rate its stability a nine out of ten.
We rarely have problems accessing the dashboard or the page.
Unlike NetScout or regular agents for APM, RUM has many problems during the POC phase because customer environments vary widely.
 

Room For Improvement

Cisco DNA Center needs better integration, user-friendliness, and support, with pricing, scalability, and compatibility issues impacting its effectiveness.
Users seek better integration, customization, scalability, and performance in Splunk Observability Cloud, alongside improved support and navigation features.
The AI-driven insights have contributed significantly to faster troubleshooting and predictive analytics.
There is room for improvement in the alerting system, which is complicated and has less documentation available.
Improvements in dashboard configuration, customization, and artificial intelligence functionalities are desired.
Customers sometimes need to create specific dashboards, particularly for applicative metrics such as Java and process terms.
 

Setup Cost

Cisco DNA Center is costly, justified for enterprises, challenging for mid-market, with SaaS and promotions occasionally aiding affordability.
Splunk Observability Cloud's pricing is competitive and flexible, offering annual licenses with a 14-day free trial for evaluation.
Splunk is a bit expensive since it charges based on the indexing rate of data.
It appears to be expensive compared to competitors.
Splunk is a little expensive, however, it is in line with the current market pricing.
 

Valuable Features

Cisco DNA Center provides centralized management, security, AI-driven insights, and automation, enhancing network control and operational efficiency.
Splunk Observability Cloud offers real-time monitoring, intuitive dashboards, and machine learning for comprehensive analytics and performance optimization.
The most valuable features include AI-driven insights which make troubleshooting much easier.
Splunk provides advanced notifications of roadblocks in the application, which helps us to improve and avoid impacts during high-volume days.
For troubleshooting, we can detect problems in seconds, which is particularly helpful for digital teams.
It offers unified visibility for logs, metrics, and traces.
 

Categories and Ranking

Cisco DNA Center
Ranking in Network Monitoring Software
14th
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
6.3
Number of Reviews
42
Ranking in other categories
Network Management Applications (1st), Network Automation (2nd)
Splunk Observability Cloud
Ranking in Network Monitoring Software
6th
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
7.2
Number of Reviews
56
Ranking in other categories
Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability (9th), IT Infrastructure Monitoring (7th), Cloud Monitoring Software (8th), Container Management (7th), Digital Experience Monitoring (DEM) (2nd)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of June 2025, in the Network Monitoring Software category, the mindshare of Cisco DNA Center is 1.4%, up from 0.8% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Splunk Observability Cloud is 0.7%, up from 0.6% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Network Monitoring Software
 

Featured Reviews

Ahmed  Helmy - PeerSpot reviewer
Experience unified visibility and monitoring for enterprise campus and significant time savings and enhanced troubleshooting with reliable support
We have been working with Cisco DNA Center for ten years. Our clients use Cisco DNA Center for unified visibility/monitoring across Enterprise Campus both LAN & WLAN along with Access and fast technical issues troubleshooting The solution provides fast troubleshooting capabilities and fast…
Lakshmi Padaga - PeerSpot reviewer
Collaborates performance metrics with log data to pinpoint the exact cause of issues and offers error detection
Splunk APM is a robust tool with many capabilities. There are always areas for potential improvement to enhance its functionality and user experience. For Splunk APM, there could be simplified navigation, like streamlining the user interface to make navigation more intuitive for our users, especially those new to APM, which can enhance usability. We can provide more customization options for dashboards and visualizations to help users tailor the platform to their specific needs. There could be more integration capabilities with a wider range of third-party tools and platforms would also be beneficial. By focusing on these areas, Splunk APM can enhance its value proposition, improve user satisfaction, and better meet the evolving needs of organizations monitoring their application performance.
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Computer Software Company
15%
Government
10%
Manufacturing Company
10%
Financial Services Firm
6%
Financial Services Firm
17%
Computer Software Company
15%
Government
7%
Retailer
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about Cisco DNA Center?
The most valuable feature of the solution stems from the fact that it gives some kind of ease in operations, especially since our company is moving from CLI to GUI-based configuration.
What needs improvement with Cisco DNA Center?
The system is working fine for me currently.
What do you like most about SignalFx?
The most valuable feature is dashboard creation.
What needs improvement with SignalFx?
Regarding dashboard customization, while Splunk has many dashboard building options, customers sometimes need to create specific dashboards, particularly for applicative metrics such as Java and pr...
What is your primary use case for SignalFx?
The solution involves observability in general, such as Application Performance Monitoring, and generally addresses digital applications, web applications, sites, and mobile applications. I worked ...
 

Also Known As

DNA Center
Splunk Infrastructure Monitoring, Splunk Real User Monitoring (RUM), Splunk Synthetic Monitoring
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Information Not Available
Sunrun, Yelp, Onshape, Tapjoy, Symphony Commerce, Chairish, Clever, Grovo, Bazaar Voice, Zenefits, Avalara
Find out what your peers are saying about Zabbix, Auvik, SolarWinds and others in Network Monitoring Software. Updated: May 2025.
859,129 professionals have used our research since 2012.