

Cisco Nexus Dashboard Fabric Controller and InfluxDB compete in the data center management and time-series database categories, respectively. InfluxDB seems to have the upper hand in flexibility and integration due to its open-source nature and extensive Grafana support.
Features: Cisco Nexus Dashboard Fabric Controller offers stability, connectivity monitoring, and advanced automation capabilities. It effectively integrates with security tools and provides unique management features for Nexus hardware, delivering comprehensive data center insights. InfluxDB features strong time-series database capabilities and seamless Grafana integration. Its flexible query language, lightweight design, and open-source availability support custom data aggregation and batch processing tasks.
Room for Improvement: Cisco Nexus Dashboard Fabric Controller needs a simpler configuration process and enhanced integration with external tools. Reporting capabilities and intuitive automation features require improvements, along with an easier setup. InfluxDB could improve in query language support, high-availability features, and error logging. The interface can become more user-friendly, and data backup and tool integrations need enhancement.
Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Cisco Nexus Dashboard Fabric Controller is deployed on-premises or in private clouds, receiving mixed feedback on technical support. Some users find it lacking in operational scenarios. InfluxDB offers both on-premises and hybrid cloud deployments, with ease in initial deployments but with some complexity and needing better technical support responsiveness.
Pricing and ROI: Cisco Nexus Dashboard Fabric Controller is expensive, with annual licensing and potential additional costs for Nexus hardware. Users acknowledge ROI due to its extensive features and reliability. InfluxDB, mainly open-source, requires costs for scaling, and recent price increases have made it more expensive. Despite these, InfluxDB allows cost flexibility due to its open-source base.
InfluxDB reduced my time to show data without any interruption, also reducing the number of people needed to manage the project; it is very good to have InfluxDB in my project.
Time saved is there, as I mentioned, because we have an analytics system from where we get alerting and monitoring.
Cisco's support I would rate as a 10 compared to all other vendors.
The main challenge with InfluxDB, which is common with all databases, was handling very high throughput systems and high throughput message flow.
We’ve scaled on volume with seven years of continuous data without performance degradation.
InfluxDB's scalability is fine for me; I gather a lot of metrics and have not had any issues.
It serves as the backbone of our application, and its stability is crucial.
It is very stable, with no reliability or downtime in InfluxDB.
After integrating Kafka, it never broke again, as Kafka handled messages and metrics appropriately, decreasing the message throughput.
I do not believe it integrated well with different infrastructures for hybrid environments.
InfluxDB deprecated FluxQL, which was intuitive since developers are already familiar with standard querying.
Having a SQL abstraction in InfluxDB could be beneficial, making it more accessible for teams that prefer querying with SQL-style syntax.
It could include automated backup and a monitoring solution for InfluxDB or a script developed by a REST API.
We use the open-source version of InfluxDB, so it is free.
My experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing for InfluxDB was great, as I did not use any license.
We are using an open-source solution, so there is no cost on that.
People typically understand north-south traffic flows but usually miss the east-west traffic flows in data centers.
The most important feature for us is low latency, which is crucial in building a high-performance engine for day trading.
InfluxDB’s core functionality is crucial as it allows us to store our data and execute queries with excellent response times.
It helps me maintain my solution easily because it is very reliable, so we didn't face any performance issues or crashes regarding our queries; we can get the results very fast.
| Product | Market Share (%) |
|---|---|
| Cisco Nexus Dashboard Fabric Controller (Formerly DCNM) | 0.7% |
| InfluxDB | 0.3% |
| Other | 99.0% |

| Company Size | Count |
|---|---|
| Small Business | 10 |
| Midsize Enterprise | 6 |
| Large Enterprise | 16 |
| Company Size | Count |
|---|---|
| Small Business | 5 |
| Midsize Enterprise | 3 |
| Large Enterprise | 8 |
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.
InfluxDB is open-source software that helps developers and enterprises alike to collect, store, process, and visualize time series data and to build next-generation applications. InfluxDB provides monitoring and insight on IoT, application, system, container, and infrastructure quickly and easily without complexities or compromises in scale, speed, or productivity.
InfluxDB has become a popular insight system for unified metrics and events enabling the most demanding SLAs. InfluxDB is used in just about every type of industry across a wide range of use cases, including network monitoring, IoT monitoring, industrial IoT, and infrastructure and application monitoring.
InfluxDB offers its users:
InfluxDB Benefits
There are several benefits to using InfluxDB . Some of the biggest advantages the solution offers include:
Reviews from Real Users
InfluxDB stands out among its competitors for a number of reasons. Two major ones are its flexible integration options and its data aggregation feature.
Shalauddin Ahamad S., a software engineer at a tech services company, notes, “The most valuable features are aggregating the data and the integration with Grafana for monitoring.”
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