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

Cisco Nexus Dashboard Fabri...

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Oct 10, 2024

Cisco Nexus Dashboard Fabric Controller and LogicMonitor compete in the network and monitoring tool category. LogicMonitor appears to have the upper hand due to its advanced dashboard customization and user-friendly features.

Features: Cisco Nexus Dashboard Fabric Controller is known for its robust stability, ability to manage admin VDCs of Nexus switches, and graphical connectivity view. It integrates with automation tools. LogicMonitor is recognized for advanced dashboard customization, granular alert tuning, and real-time data visibility, offering comprehensive insights and facilitating issue resolution.

Room for Improvement: Cisco Nexus Dashboard Fabric Controller needs better integration with external tools, simpler configuration, and improved pricing strategies. Users also report complexities in reporting and desire enhanced automation. LogicMonitor requires enhancements in alert logic, improved SLA calculations, and better topology mapping to refine resource visualization and streamlined data presentation.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Cisco Nexus Dashboard Fabric Controller often operates in on-premises and private cloud environments, requiring significant setup complexity. Technical support is generally reliable, with some inconsistencies reported. LogicMonitor supports hybrid and public cloud environments with a straightforward deployment process complemented by flexible customer service, though documentation could enhance the user experience.

Pricing and ROI: Cisco Nexus Dashboard Fabric Controller is expensive, reflecting its advanced features, offering value through application and ROI. Licensing is straightforward but costly. LogicMonitor has competitive pricing with a scalable licensing model, providing value despite higher costs in large environments, justified by the breadth of features and support provided.

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

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

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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

Cisco Nexus Dashboard Fabri...

Ranking in Network Monitoring Software

16th

Average Rating

8.0

Reviews Sentiment

6.8

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

LogicMonitor

Ranking in Network Monitoring Software

22nd

Average Rating

9.0

Reviews Sentiment

7.4

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability (28th), IT Infrastructure Monitoring (23rd), Container Monitoring (7th), Cloud Monitoring Software (17th), AIOps (12th)

Mindshare comparison

As of July 2025, in the Network Monitoring Software category, the mindshare of Cisco Nexus Dashboard Fabric Controller (Formerly DCNM) is 0.5%, up from 0.4% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of LogicMonitor is 1.8%, down from 2.3% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Network Monitoring Software

Featured Reviews

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…

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Manish Bansod

Assistant Manager at a construction company with 5,001-10,000 employees

A feature-packed solution with excellent stability and a notification system

LogicMonitor has good features, but the ease of use is a little bit confusing. Additionally, we are looking for workflow automation, which is a little bit tricky for LogicMonitor. But we are still exploring more and do not have detailed training in LogicMonitor. Moreover, the deployment process needs improvement. The thing is the deployment or whatever the standard deployment should be implemented here. That is not fine-tuning. In my personal opinion, for workflow automation and other stuff, we have Python or scripting knowledge, and that part is very tricky. Whenever we try to call the service or the LogicMonitor team, and we open a ticket, it is chargeable. In future releases, we would like to see a configuration backup manager. A feature that automatically backups the device configuration will help us. So, instead of going with another third-party tool, this will be good.

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Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"Fabric suite automation is a great feature."

"We use the product to manage access points."

"I like that is easy to work on and straightforward."

"Monitoring system provides a clear indication of what's going on in the network."

"The monitoring capability is the best in Cisco Data Center Network Manager. It helps me improve network management tasks and optimize processes."

"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."

"It has a very nice dashboard so you can see what's currently happening in the network and the performance of the back story."

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

More Cisco Nexus Dashboard Fabric Controller (Formerly DCNM) pros

"The initial setup is very simple."

"It's the depth of data that it gathers that I find really useful because there's nothing worse, when you're trying to find information about something or dig deeper into something, than hitting the bottom of the information really quickly and not having enough information to work with. With LogicMonitor, there is a load of information to dig through. It's a really good solution for that."

"LogicMonitor helps us prevent potential downtime. It's pretty good. It generates low-level warnings that aren't necessarily preemptive but can still alert us to issues we should investigate. These warnings allow us to correlate data and identify areas where we should take action, even if the issues aren't critical."

"We get full visibility into whatever the customer wants us to monitor and we get it pretty rapidly. That is very important. Only having certain metrics that other platforms will give you out-of-the-box means you only get a small picture, a thumbnail picture. Whereas with LogicMonitor, you get the entire "eight by 10 picture", out-of-the-box. Rather than some availability metrics, you get everything. You get metrics on temperature, anything related to hardware failure, or up and down status."

"LogicMonitor improved on-premises infrastructure monitoring in several ways. One key feature was dynamic resource allocation, although we didn't utilize it much in our system. The main functionalities we benefited from were email alerts, network mapping, and dashboards."

"LogicMonitor saves time in terms of its ability to proxy a connection through a device. For example, if you are troubleshooting a device, which you may want to connect to, you can proxy this connection through the platform. As a support resource, I don't need to use multiple platforms to connect to a device to further investigate the issue. It is all consolidated. From that perspective, it saves time because a resource now only needs to use one platform."

"The solution’s overall reporting capabilities are pretty powerful compared to ones that I have used previously. It seems like it has a lot of customizations that you can put in, but some of the out-of-the-box reports are useful too, like user logon duration and website latency. Those type of things have been helpful and don't require a lot of, if any, changes to get useful content out of them. They have also been pretty easy to implement and use."

"One thing that's very valuable for us is the technical knowledge of the people who work with LogicMonitor. We looked at several products before we decided to use LogicMonitor, and one of the key decision-making points was the knowledge of the things that they put in the product. It provides real intelligence regarding the numbers that you see on the product, which makes it easy for us technical people to troubleshoot. Other products don't provide you with such information. You see a value going up, but you don't know what it means. LogicMonitor provides such information. For instance, if a value goes up, it says that it is probably because your disk area was too low."

More LogicMonitor pros

Cons

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

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

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

"It's a relatively expensive product for some clients."

"Automation for the RMA process can be added."

"The visibility of applications is not great."

"We need better performance and reliability."

"More integration features would be beneficial."

More Cisco Nexus Dashboard Fabric Controller (Formerly DCNM) cons

"The process of upgrading some of the collectors has been a little bit confusing. I need to understand that better."

"LogicMonitor's reporting capabilities definitely could use an improvement. We have made do with the dashboarding and done what we can to make that work for our customers. However, there are definitely customers who would like a PDF or some kind of report along those lines, where we have been utilizing other tools to provide them. The out-of-the-box LogicMonitor reporting is the only thing that we have been less than impressed with."

"One thing I would like to see is parent/child relationships and the ability to build a "suppression parent/child." For example, If I know that a top gateway is offline and I can't talk to it anymore, and anything that's connected below it or to it is also going to be offline, there is no need to alarm on those. In that situation it should create one ticket or one alarm for the parent. I know they're working towards that with their mapping technology, but it's not quite to that level where you can build out alarm logic or a correlation logic like that."

"The dashboards can be improved. They are good, but there is a pain point. To show things to management, to explain pain points to other customers, to show them exactly where we can do better, the dashboarding could be better. Dashboards need to show the key things. Nobody is going to go into the ample details of Excel sheets or HTML."

"There is a lack of automation, especially in terms of remediating problems. The problem is seen and identified, but there is a need and a gap where LogicMonitor can help us automate the remediation of the problem."

"LogicMonitor can easily easy to pull data from one item at a time. I have yet to find a good way to get LogicMonitor to show me all the WAN devices and how they're doing in terms of capacity."

"It needs better access for customizing and adding monitoring from the repository. That would be helpful. It seems like you have to search through the forums to figure out what specific pieces you need to get in for specific monitoring, if it's a nonstandard piece of equipment or process. You have to hunt and find certain elements to get them in place. If they could make it a bit easier rather having to find the right six-digit code to put in so it implements, that would be helpful."

"One thing that could be really better is the mapping. Auvik is really good at it. They have a really nice way to give you a visual representation of your network, but in LogicMonitor, this functionality is not as powerful and as good as Auvik."

More LogicMonitor cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The solution is very expensive."

"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."

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

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

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

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

"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."

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

"We've had customers who have reduced their costs by not having multiple platforms for monitoring. That said, especially with super-large environments, the cost model for LogicMonitor is the one area where we run into issues."

"It definitely pays for itself in the amount of time we're not spending with false errors or things that we haven't quite dealt with monitoring. It has been good cost-wise."

"As a managed services provider, the licensing model that LogicMonitor provides us is excellent. We are able to scale up and scale down as needed. The pricing is reasonable for the amount of features and support that they provide."

"We have definitely seen ROI with LogicMonitor. We used to provide 24/7 IT support for our users. We have since been able to change to operating just within normal business hours for IT support, and LogicMonitor was a large part of being able to accomplish that."

"It's an enterprise-grade solution and competitively priced compared to the other solutions that are out there... Our organization is not huge, but LogicMonitor is worth every penny that we pay for it. I've never heard anyone say, "I'm not sure that we're getting good value for money from this product." It's integral to our business."

"It can handle scaling. It is like any other cloud service. There is a cost associated with scaling, so we currently don't monitor all of our environments. We monitor just the customer-facing production environments. It would be nice if we could monitor our dominant environments, but we will have to pay a lot more due to the scaling issue. So, there's a balance there between what we would like and what we are willing to pay for."

"I know we are saving at least several hundred thousand dollars in that we're not buying Cisco Prime."

"The features were very valuable to us because we could consolidate them into one platform and have a good user experience with the platform, our accounts, and the support team. That was the key driver for us. That was what we were looking for. We looked for a comprehensive solution that could provide advanced features all in one platform, and LogicMonitor was the solution that we chose. It definitely has a premium price. However, you are getting what you pay for in a very effective way. That was important in our decision-making.The features were very valuable to us because we could consolidate them into one platform and have a good user experience with the platform, our accounts, and the support team. That was the key driver for us. That was what we were looking for. We looked for a comprehensive solution that could provide advanced features all in one platform, and LogicMonitor was the solution that we chose. It definitely has a premium price. However, you are getting what you pay for in a very effective way. That was important in our decision-making."

More LogicMonitor pricing and cost advice

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Computer Software Company

15%

Government

12%

Financial Services Firm

10%

Real Estate/Law Firm

Computer Software Company

17%

Financial Services Firm

12%

Manufacturing Company

Healthcare Company

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

Questions from the Community

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.

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...

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...

What is the best network monitoring software for large enterprises?

It actually depends on the exact purpose or requirements. Some tools are better for only network devices while others are better from a cloud monitoring or APM monitoring perspective. You can check...

What do you like most about LogicMonitor?

LogicMonitor helps us prevent potential downtime. It's pretty good. It generates low-level warnings that aren't necessarily preemptive but can still alert us to issues we should investigate. These ...

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for LogicMonitor?

The pricing can vary yearly or monthly, depending on the clients we're working with and their size and scale. For example, the pricing for a customer with ten thousand licenses versus a hundred lic...

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Product Reports

Cisco Nexus Dashboard Fabric Controller (Formerly DCNM)

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

Cisco Nexus Dashboard Fabric Controller (Formerly DCNM) report

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Also Known As

Cisco Data Center Network Manager

No data available

Overview

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

LogicMonitor provides infrastructure and network monitoring, alerting, and reporting across environments like AWS, Azure, and on-premises.

LogicMonitor aids businesses and managed service providers in maintaining system health, performance, and availability. It supports various technologies including Citrix, Cisco Voice systems, operating systems, virtual machines, and network devices. Businesses benefit from dashboards and data insights for proactive management, customizable data sources, and integration with third-party applications like Slack or ServiceNow. AI technology enhances monitoring capabilities by recognizing normal behavior and updating monitored elements, while multiple monitoring features consolidate data sources into one interface.

What are LogicMonitor's key features?

Dashboards: Instant, interactive access to data for easy monitoring.
Customizable Data Sources: Robust, adaptable monitoring with logic modules.
Granular Alert Tuning: Enhances issue identification and resolution.
Reporting Capabilities: Detailed oversight and forecasting.
Third-Party Integration: Expands functionality with applications like Slack and ServiceNow.
AI Technology: Recognizes normal behavior and updates monitored elements.
Consolidated Monitoring: Combines diverse data sources into a single interface.

What benefits or ROI should users expect?

System Health: Ensures optimal system performance and availability.
Data Insights: Facilitates proactive management with comprehensive data.
Scalability: Adapts to different environments and technologies.
Efficiency: Streamlines monitoring with a single, efficient interface.
Predictive Analysis: Provides detailed oversight and accurate forecasting.

LogicMonitor is utilized across diverse industries by managed service providers to ensure seamless monitoring and management of clients' systems. This includes application performance monitoring, manual topology mapping, SLA calculations, and improvement of role-based permissions. Companies also seek enhanced resources view, better collector upgrade processes, and streamlined customization for monitoring from the repository.

Sample Customers

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

Kayak, Zendesk, Ted Baker, Trulia, Sophos, iVision, TekLinks, Siemens

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