Cisco Catalyst Center Reviews

My focus is mostly campus and data center. I am working with technologies like Cisco ACI, Nexus, Catalyst, SD-Access, and VMware. I also work with ACI, VXLAN, and similar technologies.

I am involved as both partner and reseller.

My work mostly deals with regular enterprise core switches. Cisco provides the ability to manage multiple switches with standard templates, so people tend to use Cisco Catalyst Center because it offers better visibility and monitoring capabilities in one place for their hundreds or thousands of switches across branches and campuses. Cisco Catalyst Center gives them one single place to check their devices rather than maintaining a whole list of SSH sessions in SecureCRT or PuTTY and SSHing into each one individually. They get full visibility of the entire network from one location.

Mostly I am dealing with clients who are in colo and hybrid environments. There is a very minimal footprint on the cloud because most of the companies I am working with are medium and large-scale companies. Cloud is very expensive for big companies, so they prefer to have their own setup in either their own data centers or co-locations such as NextDC or Equinix.

I would say that the out-of-the-box orchestration and automation benefits that Cisco Catalyst Center provides are really good, plus it is all one Cisco environment. There are multiple orchestration tools and software outside in the market, but because it is all Cisco, Cisco knows its own infrastructure, environment, technologies, and protocols better than anyone outside. The ease of operation is something that is really good with them.

The most notable benefit includes the reusability of policies and the template structure for any organization, which is a common benefit included in Cisco Catalyst Center as well as other organization software and tools.

I think over time many challenges have been addressed. In the last decade, things have changed drastically in regular networks. Everywhere now it is majorly not regular Layer 2 Spanning Tree Layer 2 dominated network architectures. It is all leaf-and-spine based, whether it is data center or enterprise. They are focusing on leaf-and-spine, Clos network architecture. Cisco has been a pioneer in those fronts and keeps bringing new technology while managing the learning curve under control and not overwhelming users. When compared with VMware's NSX and Cisco's ACI, NSX is too much software-driven and has a very steep learning curve. The learning curve is steep for Cisco products as well, but it is not as big or as steep as for other software. Cisco provides so many features while keeping the user interface and user experience simple. This is important because people like me do Cisco technologies frequently, so we are very well-versed in the technologies. Once we do the projects, it is the operations team who has to manage their networks, so it should be easy for them to learn something new.

The leaf-and-spine technology and architecture is the biggest optimization that has happened. Besides that, Cisco Catalyst Center and all the different orchestrators come with built-in security and general network day-to-day hardening and best practices from Day 1. Rather than configuring everything manually, they configure all those best practices, so you do not have to worry about that. These are the things which save time so much and do things which are supposed to be done either way, so they do not ask you to do it. The boxes do it. That is the part of the real optimization. You just have to worry about the business intent and the real architecture you want to build.

Cisco Catalyst Center and Cisco ACI bring something great regardless of whether it is one site, two sites, 10 sites, or any number of sites. They have brought the whole management plane and monitoring plane in one UI. You can monitor thousands of devices in one window.

Absolutely, and not just troubleshoot, but also identify possible areas of concern and alarms very quickly, rather than relying on other syslog and SNMP servers, which used to happen traditionally. Those types of third-party integrations with the network for monitoring and troubleshooting are becoming redundant now with Cisco's own portfolios.

The learning curve is better with Cisco compared to other products. Everyone has a learning curve because everyone is bringing new technologies, new interfaces, and new ways of doing things. The other products have a steeper learning curve. When comparing Cisco with VMware, I am not comparing Cisco with Arista, Juniper, or HP because those are companies which are doing a very basic level of automation. Cisco is doing way more advanced things. In terms of advanced handling and the advanced orchestration and advanced management plane control that Cisco is delivering, the only competitiveness in advancement is VMware NSX. However, it is really complex. Cisco's platforms are much easier to understand and learn compared to VMware.

The only disadvantage with Cisco would be their services and licensing, which is a bit complex and a bit too expensive. Because their services are so expensive, companies end up buying Cisco, but they end up not buying Cisco services to do it. When they turn to external partners, not many people outside know the technology as well as Cisco does. People deploy it, but they do not get the right resources to deploy it.

I started working with it about one and a half years ago.

Cisco's Technical Assistance Center, the TAC, is probably the best in the market. That is probably one of the best reasons why people choose Cisco: because of the services and the post-sale support that they offer, and the quality of support that they are providing. That is one big reason why people prefer Cisco even if they feel it is too expensive or too complex. They feel that Cisco support team will handle it, so they go with that confidence.

It is definitely very easy because initially we used to have to connect to the console and build so many CLI configs and go into each of the devices and set it up. Now there is something called Zero Touch Provisioning that Cisco does. For that matter, most vendors are doing that now, but Cisco was a leading pioneer in Zero Touch Provisioning of the devices. If you have 100 devices, you just connect the physical cable and Cisco Catalyst Center will automatically detect those devices and configure them. It is easy and you do not have to do anything.

That is exactly one of our major points. It is plug-and-play. Even if you have 10 more sites adding up and you want to deploy a similar setup to an existing branch, you just use the same templates over there. Your 10 sites are up.

It definitely is value for money. The return on investment is definitely better because it is not just about the licensing being expensive. It is all about when you deploy the network, when you set up the network, how well your business operations are able to run that infrastructure, and how much less they are working on just identifying the baseline of an issue. Imagine if you are troubleshooting an issue where traditionally it would take one hour and out of that one hour, 15 to 20 minutes was just to identify the area of concern rather than the issue itself, checking the exact problem. That 20 minutes has reduced now. That 20 minutes of downtime is really significant.

Operational efficiency is definitely better because everything is managed from one single plane. The visibility and monitoring is top-notch. The smart fault handling and event handling are so nice. If one fault happens, it immediately connects all the dots. If a fault has happened, it shows what could be the reason behind it. Sometimes the fault is a repercussion of some other event. People keep checking for the fault and then end up realizing that the fault was not really the fault. The fault was something else. This was just an after-effect. All of that guessing work has finished. Day 2 operation is definitely way better.

I am still heavily working with Cisco technologies.

Cisco Catalyst Center appliances are mostly preferred to be put in the management zone within the data center because it is part of the network which has to be very secure. People do not prefer to put it on the cloud. Although Cisco does provide an option to do that, I have not seen anyone doing that.

Cisco ACI, the virtual APIC, is something I bought a long time ago, but I do not remember the details.

I cannot comment on that exact number, but that is what I have seen.

Operational efficiency is definitely better because everything is managed from one single plane. The visibility and monitoring is top-notch. The smart fault handling and event handling are so nice. If one fault happens, it immediately connects all the dots. If a fault has happened, it shows what could be the reason behind it. Sometimes the fault is a repercussion of some other event. People keep checking for the fault and then end up realizing that the fault was not really the fault. The fault was something else. This was just an after-effect. All of that guessing work has finished. Day 2 operation is definitely way better.

It is definitely very easy because initially we used to have to connect to the console and build so many CLI configs and go into each of the devices and set it up. Now there is something called Zero Touch Provisioning that Cisco does. For that matter, most vendors are doing that now, but Cisco was a leading pioneer in Zero Touch Provisioning of the devices. If you have 100 devices, you just connect the physical cable and Cisco Catalyst Center will automatically detect those devices and configure them. It is easy and you do not have to do anything.

That is exactly one of our major points. It is plug-and-play. Even if you have 10 more sites adding up and you want to deploy a similar setup to an existing branch, you just use the same templates over there. Your 10 sites are up.

I cannot think of anything else right now. They are doing pretty much so many things, and a lot of things we are not even using because customers and clients are not comfortable using them. I do not think of any feature that I can think of. My overall review rating for Cisco Catalyst Center is 9 out of 10.

Hybrid Cloud

Other

The product was used with Catholic schools because that was their primary infrastructure. This is an enterprise-level product rather than an SMB-grade solution.

Cisco Catalyst Center's reporting is one of the best features, providing graphs and quick hit analysis in one place instead of having to search elsewhere. Historical data can be stored in Cisco Catalyst Center, and dashboards and widgets can be configured to personal preference.

Device deployment can be automated to the point where all someone needs to do is plug it in. Zero Touch Provisioning, while requiring some initial work to set up properly, provides significant benefits. Once configured, it reduces the need for travel by specific network personnel, allowing on-site or other staff to handle device deployment by simply plugging in the cable.

Cisco Catalyst Center's reporting is one of the best features, providing graphs and quick hit analysis in one place instead of having to search elsewhere. Historical data can be stored in Cisco Catalyst Center, and dashboards and widgets can be configured to personal preference.

The web-based interface for managing network and data tasks is functional, though some users still prefer CLI management.

Cisco Catalyst Center was used with Catholic schools as their primary infrastructure.

Cisco Catalyst Center would benefit from different licensing tiers instead of an all-or-nothing model. Some tiers could focus on monitoring and tracking licenses with minimal configuration automation. Current pricing is too expensive for features that users may not be sure they will use, pricing the company out of the market. More à la carte options or different tiers would allow customers to select products that fit within their operational expenditure budget.

The Cisco Catalyst Center has been used for a total of four years.

Support is easy to deal with and requests for information are clearly communicated, making it straightforward to provide what is needed.

Positive

Cisco Catalyst and Nexus remain in the data center. When sites moved off Catalyst switching to Fortinet during a refresh, it was at the time when they moved to Catalyst.

During license renewal, the pricing for Catalyst licensing increased significantly. For a hardware refresh, the site switched to Fortinet switching because the cost difference was approximately six thousand dollars per device compared to other solutions.

Cisco Catalyst switching and the management of Cisco Catalyst switching were used with 9300 switches, as well as 2960s and 3560s. For management, Cisco Catalyst Center can be used or command line interface can be used directly, whichever is preferred.

Cisco Catalyst Center is customizable to a point. Configuration distribution can be done through Cisco Catalyst Center or through scripting or a combination of both, with a combination of both being recommended.

Automation features can be complex at first. Security integrations were not utilized as that work was segmented to other vendors and products and was not a project on the horizon at the time for the network team, with different groups and budgets involved.

The overall review rating for this product is ten out of ten.

My main use case for Cisco Catalyst Center is network automation, observability, and management, mainly for patching and end-of-life management.

A specific example of how I use it for observability and patching in my environment is that we use it to automate patching to ensure we can meet patching cycles in a timely manner. We use the automated patching method and IS-SU patching. For observability, we leverage insights into network issues, security, vulnerability assessment, and netflow to some degree.

Plug and play is one of the things we're doing to speed up the deployment of devices, though this is a work in progress at the moment.

Cisco Catalyst Center has positively impacted my organization by allowing us to respond in a much quicker way and pivot if we need to change direction for technology changes, automate configuration changes across the fleet, keep things standardized, and understand when devices no longer comply with certain configuration standards that we set.

I can share specific outcomes and metrics showing how it helped us respond faster and stay standardized. There's definitely a reduction in time, as we can patch the whole fleet probably in 48 hours if we have to. There's also a definite reduction in errors by having programmatic deployment of configuration where there are no cut and paste errors; everything is template driven, making it much more efficient with far fewer errors in that field.

The centralized orchestration of switch templates and wireless LAN controllers in Cisco Catalyst Center has shifted how my engineering staff handles day-to-day configuration drift across branch sites by removing command line control, which has made a significant difference in reducing configuration discrepancies and errors in our environment. It is a much better way of tracking what configurations have been changed and made, especially if issues are encountered. This has been a really positive change in how we handle configurations.

The differences I've observed in mean time to identification when investigating RF interference or roaming degradations using wireless sensor metrics versus switch port telemetry in Cisco Catalyst Center are substantial. The wireless feedback is certainly pretty good, and the visual display of all the information required to analyze issues around RF, client connectivity, and network experience is excellent, certainly reducing our resolution times in solving issues in a significant way.

Since implementing Cisco Catalyst Center templates and policy provisioning, I've observed changes in our compliance auditing workflows and configuration drift. We see much less change across the environment; adoption is shifting from looking at configuration issues to resolving the real root cause of problems rather than resorting to band-aids and workarounds, which has resulted in far less double-handling and much less work in tidying things up after issue resolution.

The best features Cisco Catalyst Center offers include the single pane of glass manageability of the environment, providing insights into licensing, end-of-life status, manageability of the environment, and the monitoring capabilities.

The single pane of glass makes my day-to-day work easier because I don't have to log on to different tools to do different things, and it makes it easier to correlate issues. Not just within Cisco Catalyst Center, but not having to switch tools all the time is certainly a huge benefit. The automated licensing capabilities certainly help us from a management perspective. We don't have to have devices go to the network; we can do it all through Cisco Catalyst Center via proxy function. It's simple and easy, so it keeps us in the loop and ensures we're compliant.

Regarding how Cisco Catalyst Center can be improved, the Jinja template is a Cisco style Jinja interpretation that doesn't quite follow the normal Jinja standards, with some shortcomings that really could be addressed. Some standardized templates that most people are using across the board for interface selection could be automated rather than regenerating the code from scratch every time. There's also optimization that could be done in that field. For the 802.1X configuration side, the port configuration side could be better managed, especially for IBNS 2.0 and C3PL type configurations.

Probably some of the management of images could be handled slightly better. While it is a great improvement, there's still some room to manage those better, allowing people to select correct images on a template basis where you can have a default and make changes across the board, eliminating mistakes from selecting the wrong image by excluding things that you can't use in your environment.

Regarding Cisco Catalyst Center's AI capabilities, I think the governance and security area is somewhat unclear, not from a technical perspective but from management and governance. It is difficult to sell into some environments with higher security restrictions, as it doesn't provide easy insight into data protection, sovereignty, and those considerations that are easier to present to management for decision-making. That process is possible, but it's lengthy and could be improved to hand off to management with a workflow that gives them all the answers they need, rather than just being pushed up from the bottom via engineering.

Concerning Cisco Catalyst Center's AI capabilities, its accuracy and reliability of output are a work in progress and heading in the right direction. Some suggestions are quite good, and some information that comes out of it is promising. It does need verifying in many cases, but I think it's on the right track and certainly needs to be looked at in more detail. I believe that once the wider adoption rate increases, much more improvement will be based on metrics and feedback that Cisco can gather.

We have evaluated the accuracy and actionability of Cisco Catalyst Center's AI network analytics and automated root cause recommendations during live network anomalies at a limited capacity in our environment. We do look at those outputs to see if there's any value in managing issues. Initially, the suggestions via the system are a good starting point but don't always apply as suggested.

I have been using Cisco Catalyst Center since I started with Cisco Works 2000 in the beginning and have gone through all the iterations via Cisco NCS, DNA Center, Prime, and now the whole suite of Cisco Catalyst Center.

Cisco Catalyst Center is stable at this point in time and has worked quite well for us; we don't have any major issues with it, and we're about to embark on a 3.x upgrade to see how that works.

I have not experienced any issues with Cisco Catalyst Center's scalability. I have worked in another environment where they had a larger scale across a much bigger geographic area, and my experience from that side is that the scalability is actually really good with no issues encountered on our side.

The customer support for Cisco Catalyst Center has been good; we have had positive sessions with TAC if there were any issues, and we haven't encountered many. The knowledge level has been very good, so I think the product is well supported by Cisco with no issues on our side. I would rate the customer support a nine on a scale of 1 to 10.

Before using Cisco Catalyst Center, I utilized a number of tools for monitoring and observability. The benefit of Cisco Catalyst Center is that we don't experience tool sprawl; we can see what we need to see in a single interface. Integration with platforms like ICE adds additional information to our visibility, making not having to switch tools all the time one of the biggest single benefits of the platform.

The specific workflow adjustments and technical hurdles my team navigated when transitioning from legacy CLI-driven management or Cisco Prime Infrastructure to Cisco Catalyst Center's intent-based policy model primarily involve change management. The biggest change is getting people to adapt their habits; especially under pressure, people are quick to jump on a device and make a change that must then be managed after the fact to bring things back in line. This adaptation to a new way of doing things is the biggest hurdle.

We have seen a return on investment, demonstrating a reduction in effort, which hasn't necessarily resulted in fewer employees but in better utilization of people's time. Particularly, repetitive tasks such as patching deployment and new switch deployments using plug and play features have made a significant difference. We certainly see a reduction in effort around those tasks, but it hasn't led to a reduction in people, just a more productive use of their time.

My experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing indicates that advantage licensing can be somewhat difficult to sell to the business because the true benefit isn't realized until the system is implemented. However, budgeting decisions need to be made beforehand, making internal selling sometimes challenging. I think enabling some features on a trial basis, such as for 30 days, to demonstrate what can be achieved with this could help the business make decisions more easily regarding better licensing models.

Before choosing Cisco Catalyst Center, we evaluated other options, coming from a Prime/DNA trial, but we've been on this journey for quite a while, so that wasn't a significant issue.

I would rate Cisco Catalyst Center a nine on a scale of 1 to 10.

I choose a nine because it's a good product if you know how to look after it. It's not a zero effort product; it needs attention, but if you give it that, the return on the investment is huge. It's not a 10 because it has some shortcomings that need to be addressed, but I think a solid nine is a good result for a platform such as this.

The advice I would give to others looking into using Cisco Catalyst Center is to commit the time to set it up correctly, as I believe it will give a huge return on investment. It does take more than just setting it up and running a default; it needs effort, but the product is stable and provides really good features.

On-premises

I serve oil and gas companies and banks, along with all types of verticals and industries. My clients are using Cisco Catalyst Center to connect between offices.

The positive impact I see from Cisco Catalyst Center is that you can now have centralized deployment, consolidated monitoring and observability, and automation of troubleshooting. These are the capabilities that Cisco can offer now.

I must be honest: there is nothing to particularly like about Cisco Catalyst Center. Every vendor can do what Cisco does today. Of course, there are advantages and disadvantages with that. I prefer Cisco Catalyst Center because many customers have been using it. It is quite mature and quite stable, and that is the main reason. Otherwise, there is nothing else to share about good features. Every other vendor has quite the same features, so there is nothing that really impresses me now.

The visibility offered by Cisco is there, but other vendors provide almost the same visibility features. If you want more than that, you basically need to have additional services or software. With Cisco, you need observability software like Splunk to give you real benefit. If you just take the plain Cisco Catalyst Center benefit, they have competition when you consider just the standard offering.

Visibility does affect my troubleshooting capability. For troubleshooting with the standard offering from Cisco Catalyst Center, I think it helps. Because it has been used before, the new age now with the latest observability that can be provided by ServiceNow and Splunk will help more towards easiness. It will be much easier using automation and observability. Automation can come from outside of Cisco or from Cisco as well, because Cisco now has Splunk as part of their portfolio. If you take the full features together with Splunk, it will help a lot in terms of troubleshooting. If you just use the standard one, the troubleshooting process and procedure remains the same as before.

For hybrid setup, they have optimized this over the past two or three years. The hybrid setup and distributed setup have been optimized within the Cisco environment. I have no issue with that. I think it is good.

When you have something like Cisco Catalyst Center, it is supposed to be centralized for monitoring and everything. However, Cisco has many other products apart from routers. You have routers, Nexus routers, wireless products, and now they even have IoT. There are other products that cannot be monitored by Cisco Catalyst Center, but they are selling it as if it is the central monitoring or the central hub for everything that you can use for their products. There are many other hardware products within Cisco that cannot be monitored by Cisco Catalyst Center. I know that they are now slowly moving to integrate their products into Cisco Catalyst Center, but it has not happened yet.

There are times when a customer wants a certain product, for example, IoT hardware apart from Meraki IoT hardware, and it cannot be monitored by Cisco Catalyst Center. That is the only part. Because they are too large and have different types of product coverage, there are products that cannot be monitored by Cisco Catalyst Center. I think that is the only thing. When that time comes, it will be very messy for customers and also for partners to integrate them into the overall solution.

I would like to see more automation or more features added to Cisco Catalyst Center in the future. I think they may already have it now, but I am not in operations, so I do not know the details. I want to see more automation because today we still need to know how to configure the routers and the services. I want to see how a non-experienced person can easily deploy the services. The deployment should be simple enough that anyone can use everyday language to ask for what they need and the whole setup would configure itself. I think more automation is what is needed.

I have been working with Cisco Catalyst Center for approximately three to five years.

For stability, I would rate it as six or seven points. Before it reaches a stable state, you will face many problems. Once it is stable, after one or two years without any issues, it will remain stable for a very long time.

For Cisco Catalyst Center scalability, the capability to scale I would rate at ten. However, the easiness to scale I would put at five.

The setup is complex. That is what I was saying about the installation part.

Technical support from Cisco is very good. I think the reason is that Chinese products do not have as many English-speaking people as Cisco. Their technical reference and technical people are mostly in China and do not speak English. That is one of the reasons why I am saying that it is quite hard for customers to move to a Chinese brand. However, I have seen their technical datasheets and technical capability, and I think they can be on par or maybe better than Cisco today.

When you compare services that do not need as much interaction with people, for example radio service and mobile service, I think a large chunk of the global market now is taken by Huawei. Why? Because it is not an enterprise service and there is much less interaction between Huawei and the customer. Whereas if you go with enterprise service, you will need the end user to talk with the vendor, and there will often be a lot of interaction between the end user, the owner of the platform, the service provider, the partner, and Cisco. There are many interactions there. You need people who can manage the conversation or the interaction within that process and setup, but not in telco service like mobile. At one point in time, I would say the English-based vendors will still be safe in terms of providing enterprise service.

Since I mentioned that customer support for Cisco is good, I would rate support from Cisco at seven points.

The installation depends on what you are installing. If you are talking about Meraki, it will be very easy. If you go with Viptela SD-WAN, it is complex.

The installation of Cisco Catalyst Center is quite complex. I would not categorize it as easy. It is quite complex.

The challenge when you install Cisco Catalyst Center is that the setup is very complex. If you are talking about installing routers, it is very easy. However, if you want to talk about Cisco Catalyst Center itself, it will be quite complex because you need to have the proper setup of servers, virtual machines, and everything. It is very hard and quite difficult to install.

In the majority of cases, we deploy Cisco Catalyst Center in both on-premises and cloud or in a hybrid environment.

It is hard to answer the question about value for money. Cisco has been a mature and also trusted product and platform. It is very hard for customers to move away. However, in the market today, especially coming from China, Chinese products can offer approximately ten times cheaper pricing than Cisco for the same type of products. Cisco is not cheap. Even if you compare Cisco to other American vendors, Cisco is not cheap. Value for money is, for sure, not a strong point.

If Chinese products can penetrate the market and position their products for enterprise solutions or enterprise design, I think Cisco will be in trouble. For now, it is the most trusted product and we know that it is already stable and matured. For any company or organization wanting to move away from Cisco, it is very hard.

I think the price for Cisco Catalyst Center is expensive.

When I compare Cisco with Chinese vendors, the price is around ten times cheaper. Regarding the solution and the technical part, I think China can be as good as or can be better than Cisco. It is just that the support is not as good as Cisco. I can say that the technical part can sometimes be better than Cisco.

To summarize all that we have discussed about Cisco Catalyst Center, I could give it a final rating of six or seven points. I am not saying that there are other things out there that cannot withstand. I am just saying it is six to seven to my liking, and I think all others in the market are also around the same thing. It is very hard to make something rate an eight, nine, or ten.

Hybrid Cloud

Other

I use Cisco Catalyst Center to automate patching schedules for all switches and firewalls on the network, and I will soon be using it to build out layer two and three network maps and topology maps.

We are switching to a hybrid setup with Cisco Catalyst Center, and many of our VMs are moving to the cloud, which is providing a challenge from a routing perspective.

My favorite feature of Cisco Catalyst Center is the automated patching because previously I had been manually updating equipment at each site.

Cisco Catalyst Center has significantly reduced travel time for our organization, which has approximately 60 locations across our state. The farthest location from me is about three hours away. If something goes wrong, I previously had to physically travel there to fix it, but now I can resolve it through Cisco Catalyst Center, which is extremely convenient.

My impression of the end-to-end visibility offered by Cisco Catalyst Center is 10 out of 10. This was the primary reason we wanted Cisco Catalyst Center, so we could have a live view of all nodes on our network.

To improve Cisco Catalyst Center, I think the dashboard and UI experience is inferior to what I used previously with Ubiquiti equipment. The Ubiquiti equipment I used and configured was extremely easy to get up and running, and then on the backend, I could see what was going on. Cisco Catalyst Center is very nice, but I feel I need a degree in Cisco Catalyst Center to use it, and that is the primary downside so far. Cisco appears to be built for an engineer's mindset, whereas Ubiquiti's approach was more accessible.

I have been using Cisco Catalyst Center for approximately two months.

I assess the stability and reliability of Cisco Catalyst Center as solid so far; I have not experienced any issues.

I have not experienced any downtime, crashes, or other problems with Cisco Catalyst Center, and any issues that have occurred were on our end.

On a scale from 1 to 10, I would rate customer service and technical support as 10 out of 10. I have not needed to use it yet, but we have a representative who has been extremely helpful. I have not had any issues, and any issues I have brought to him are handled promptly.

The response time from Cisco Catalyst Center support is very quick.

Prior to adopting Cisco Catalyst Center, I used SolarWinds Orion for a long time, and it worked fairly well. However, I wanted something that, since I use Cisco products, would make it easier to replace and integrate Cisco software into my setup.

My experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing for Cisco Catalyst Center was not too bad, but with supply chain issues, it has become significantly more expensive. Our main core switch is a 9300 48-port switch, and the cost increased from 8,000-9,000 to almost 14,000. Because of this price increase, I have considered not using Cisco everywhere and instead switching to Cisco for just firewall and routing while using another vendor for switching.

Cisco Catalyst Center might optimize the experience in a hybrid or distributed enterprise setup; I just have not used it long enough to determine that. My overall review rating for Cisco Catalyst Center is 8 out of 10.

On-premises

Amazon Web Services (AWS)

My main use case for Cisco Catalyst Center is automation. I automate iOS upgrades with Cisco Catalyst Center.

Regarding my main use case, I have assurance, and more likely we will have the endpoint status, such as the endpoint wireless signal, LAN user, or the speed. Whatever the status of the health of the network being visualized, it is preferable to providing CLI logs for reports.

Automating iOS upgrades changes the work for my team by allowing us to pre-schedule upgrades much more easily without uploading the firmware to each network device one by one. Instead, we can perform a group upgrade and schedule downtime, and everything should be completed by 10% before where now we've done it with one or two BAU engineers.

Cisco Catalyst Center has positively impacted my organization by moving us from a very legacy way to deploy networks to now going through the proper process, including pre-design on Catalyst Center, then onboarding the switch on-site and following the design, deploy, and operate workflow. We have a more secure workflow to deliver a new site now, and on a BAU basis, we now have the status of all networks.

In terms of specific outcomes or metrics, we are able to save time and migrate 19 sites within six months, which used to take a few years to complete. This is a significant improvement.

The centralized orchestration of switch templates and wireless LAN controllers in Cisco Catalyst Center significantly improves how my engineering staff handles day-to-day configuration drift across branch sites. Instead of configuring one by one, the template-based approach is more straightforward, making troubleshooting easier in the future because we will have all sites on the same configuration.

I can see a real scenario where we are able to deliver 19 sites within six months, which is a good improvement.

The difference I have observed in mean time to identification when investigating RF interference or roaming degradations using wireless sensor metrics versus switch port telemetry in Cisco Catalyst Center is significant. Instead of using the usual 9800 wireless controller where we had to run a debug on a specific device, it has now been visualized and is easy to obtain the information.

I notice significant improvement in that, making it much easier to know the information without needing to talk to the user and run debug commands on the controller. Now we can have direct information from Cisco Catalyst Center Health.

The best features Cisco Catalyst Center offers include VXLAN segmentation and visualization, which is one of the important data sets for the network health status as a report. I think this is one of the best features because instead of CLI, now we have visualizations.

The segmentation and visualization features help my team day to day by allowing us to segmentize all end user VLAN instead of using a per-site VLAN basis, resulting in a centralized group of end user, department-wise LAN, and department-wise access control, which is a major change in our networks. Visualization is more on the BAU status and monthly reporting, and we now have more accurate data to provide.

Regarding how Cisco Catalyst Center can be improved, I would say the current state is good, but it is not that easy to get knowledge online or to train on it. It needs to provide easy access on how to manage or configure Cisco Catalyst Center Health, which is one of the major steps that need to be provided for the public with easier access to all documentation.

I rate it an eight because there is still room for improvement for Cisco Catalyst Center Health, mostly from the user base. We need more information that is beginner-friendly in training materials. To configure this, you need proper expert training level to fully utilize the features.

Concerning the accuracy and reliability of Cisco Catalyst Center's AI capabilities, it is still in an early stage. I would say it is not accurate at the moment, but I believe that given more time, they can provide correct feedback. With more use cases, databases, or logs being collected, it will become accurate. Currently, it is still very early stage.

I have been using Cisco Catalyst Center for more than five years.

Cisco Catalyst Center is stable.

Cisco Catalyst Center's scalability is good. It is scalable, and we can keep adding new switches without seeing any limit for now.

The customer support is good and easy to access, but contract-wise, it sometimes gets slightly confusing.

On a scale of 1 to 10, I would rate the customer support a seven.

I previously used a different solution. We switched from Fortinet because it was priced cheaper.

Cisco Catalyst Center is deployed in my organization as an on-premises VM.

In terms of return on investment, I can deploy four Fortinet solutions for every Cisco solution deployed, but with Cisco wireless, especially for wireless and switching, we have the 10-gig capability that no other vendor can really deliver right now. This is a major advantage of Cisco equipment in terms of hardware support and stability.

This is one of the reasons a company can afford it initially, but we cannot compare apples with oranges as they are two different things. However, Cisco always remains at the top of the range of equipment in terms of capability.

My experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing involves going through the BOM with a Cisco partner and a Fortinet partner.

On a scale of 1 to 10, I would rate Cisco Catalyst Center an eight.

Regarding Cisco Catalyst Center's AI capabilities, I think its governance and security are still in a very early stage. Companies still have their own policies on AI and are not yet fully under approved AI applications or tools to be used currently. We cannot comment much until we have the approved state before we can start using Cisco AI on our production network.

The advice I would give to others looking into using Cisco Catalyst Center is that price is a main concern. If you have the budget, then it is worth the investment.

On-premises

The specific use case for Cisco Catalyst Center is managing a network environment where I want to keep an eye on inconsistency between devices. Using SDA, I can set up a template and push it to all our edge switches for a consistent outcome.

I still have eyes on glass for a managed service outcome, but from the project work I did when trying to deploy the solution, it was great. I just need the managed services partner to come on board and have eyes on glass.

The benefits of moving over include that time to deploy has been reduced by 90%. Ultimately getting things out of the box, getting the right OS versions on them to meet all the modules and bits and pieces using high-end Catalyst 9300Xs was probably the biggest hurdle. Once I plug it into the network, along with the zero-touch provisioning, it can deploy the switches really fast. I did 10 floors, and the first floor was probably the hardest, but every floor after that took no more than four hours for two stacks of four switches to be built and deployed.

I have been using Cisco Catalyst Center since the start of this year.

Cisco Catalyst Center is really stable. The only issue I had with stability was using a one plus one plus one VR, so I have a witness node offsite. That was a bit clunky to set up, but I did an update of Cisco Catalyst Center appliance and put the new witness node software out there. It has been stable ever since.

The engineers work with TAC and TAC has been very handy.

To a degree, my experience with customer support is that sometimes it is difficult to get the right person on the call. It used to be much better, and I say that because the skillset an individual used to have to manage networking outcomes on a TAC case has exponentially increased. They are dealing with probably another 100 more products, so they do not have the same level of expertise they used to have. In the end, I seem to get my results, but it just takes a bit longer.

I moved from a legacy CLI driven management. We were looking at other solutions because I use a lot of Cisco products in-house. I have Nexus Dashboard Fabric, which is taking over from my data center side of the house. I am putting in a new Catalyst SD-WAN manager, the cloud-based one, to manage my WAN. My old one was a bit clunky, and it was easy just to migrate across to a new platform. I am deploying and trialing ThousandEyes at the moment because, under a managed service offering, there are a lot of incidents and issues with the time to resolve. In addition to ThousandEyes, I am complementing that with a NetFlow solution by Plixer called Scrutinizer.

I think deploying the SDA puts me in a position, particularly with the bandwidth I deployed between my edge switches and my border node and control nodes. I am ready for AI agents on the desktop at my sites. I have significant east-west bandwidth and probably still have more work to do on my north-south, but that is more service provider from branch to data center.

Feedback on the pricing and licensing is that it is overly confusing, and I think that has been well acknowledged by everyone, including my accounts team, who struggle at the best of times. The impact is that it creates a bill of materials that may take a month or two to develop and sometimes takes six months because there is a lot of back and forth around the individual licensing elements not being correct. It can be problematic at times.

Regarding pricing, it is expensive. In comparison, coming from probably 30 years of experience, the pricing model was good at the start, but now compared to an HP switch, an Arista switch, or an Aruba switch, it is high, and most of it is software licensing that is the cost, not the hardware.

On a scale of one to 10, I would rate the product overall as probably an eight. What it loses a couple of marks on is that I cannot take a traditional network engineer and have them deploy software-defined access; it is a specialist skillset, not something that should be attempted by someone who does not understand the solution. Once it is in, it is great and just needs to build up skill sets around it.

Secure Web Gateway is from Cisco. I met a lot of troubles, so I am in touch with TAC. I thought it was a call from some open ticket. I am working on firewalls, FTD, FMC, so these are my daily challenges with firewalls.

Cisco Catalyst Center is part of the customer's network. Sometimes I check something when I troubleshoot authentication, AAA authentication in Cisco ISE. I need some information and I was surprised how well developed Cisco Catalyst Center is because it is much easier when you can check on Cisco Catalyst Center instead of checking every switch or every router, signing there, and checking some commands and then copying it. When you are in Cisco Catalyst Center, everything is on one page. I am very quick and it is effective. I can compare and check statistics from all devices. Cisco Catalyst Center is a very nice product from Cisco.

I met Check Point, but it is not in my scope. Sometimes I set something on Cisco ISE when I tested in our customer environment when they have authentication via Cisco ISE for Check Point. From my opinion, it is quite a horrible management when you need the installation of Windows on your computer when you use Mac OS. I think that Palo Alto and Cisco are the best solutions for customers. What I can hear and see when I speak with them is that they are satisfied with these two technologies from the firewalls world. I co-work with NetScout, but it is about DDoS, which is a little bit different. NetScout or Arbor was part of Cisco several years ago, so it is one world of security and networking.

I have been working with Cisco technology such as switches and routers. Our customers are very happy with Cisco technology and they suppose it is the best solution for them. It is a very well-known technology and quite old, making it quite a responsible technology for them. Cisco Catalyst Center is something I started with in my new work. It is not in my scope, but I heard it is a very nice technology too. It cooperates with Cisco ISE. Cisco ISE is within the scope of my work too. I work with switches only a little bit.

I have experience with SecureX. When SecureX started, I managed it in our company environment. It was a very nice service, but our company, because I changed my work and changed company, was only about twenty people, so we were not able to pay for XDR in the next version. We had to leave this excellent service because we set a lot of notifications about bad behavior in our network. It was a very nice service and very useful. I had a presentation for our customer about SecureX and they were very happy. It sounds very good, but finally, there are universities and they cannot pay such a large amount of money for this service, although they were very happy. I have a little experience with SecureX. I met XDR in some workshops from Cisco company on site and online, so I know a little bit about XDR.

I am new with Cisco Catalyst Center, and I have been working with it for about the last month. From my first experience, the menu is not very user-friendly for new people because I thought it could not be so hard when I am working with Firewall Management Center and Cisco ISE. I thought it could be some modification from it, but from my first experience, it was completely different. The first time I was a little lost. Nowadays with AI, it is not so hard. I asked where I could find, for example, statistics about a switch, so I could find a way to access the right things that I need because Cisco Catalyst Center is a huge application where you can find a lot of information. From my first view, it was not so easy to find the right way. When I access Secure Web Gateway, I can find everything I need, and it can find me all possibilities how I can access it. From Cisco ISE, it is the same, and I can choose which one and from this offer, I can decide what I need. I am not sure it is the same strategy in Cisco Catalyst Center, but I appreciate it from Cisco ISE and from Secure Web Gateway. It is better from a user view. From Cisco Catalyst Center, it is a very nice statistic when I find a switch that I need, and then it is quite easy to find all information. However, the way from my overview to go to concrete needed information is a long way to access it, so it is not so user-friendly from my view.

I am new with Cisco Catalyst Center, and I have been working with it for about the last month. From my first experience, the menu is not very user-friendly for new people because I thought it could not be so hard when I am working with Firewall Management Center and Cisco ISE. I thought it could be some modification from it, but from my first experience, it was completely different. The first time I was a little lost. Nowadays with AI, it is not so hard. I asked where I could find, for example, statistics about a switch, so I could find a way to access the right things that I need because Cisco Catalyst Center is a huge application where you can find a lot of information. From my first view, it was not so easy to find the right way. When I access Secure Web Gateway, I can find everything I need, and it can find me all possibilities how I can access it. From Cisco ISE, it is the same, and I can choose which one and from this offer, I can decide what I need. I am not sure it is the same strategy in Cisco Catalyst Center, but I appreciate it from Cisco ISE and from Secure Web Gateway. It is better from a user view. From Cisco Catalyst Center, it is a very nice statistic when I find a switch that I need, and then it is quite easy to find all information. However, the way from my overview to go to concrete needed information is a long way to access it, so it is not so user-friendly from my view.

I would appreciate some webinars or something for Cisco Catalyst Center because it is new for me. I would also appreciate some unification, or unifying GUI, that would be similar for all Cisco products. I think that would be the best way that when someone new comes to this technology but knows Cisco or some other product, it will be similar and then they can start working with this product very quickly.

I have been working in this field for more than six years since COVID started, directly in Cisco security. In my past, I was working with monitoring and network monitoring, which is a little bit different, but it has been six years.

I think Cisco Catalyst Center is quite stable. I assume that Cisco Catalyst Center is better than Cisco ISE. Sometimes Cisco ISE has more troubles than Cisco Catalyst Center.

When I need to solve some case, usually there is a very quick response. I can see the location of the engineers, so I can see that they are from Mexico or something. In the past, I had very good experience with people from Mexico or South America and then Krakow. I was very surprised that it was a very experienced engineer. I think Amsterdam or I am not sure which one, but I think it was from Europe. Usually there is a very quick solution. Sometimes I can see a compromise from their side because when I open a ticket with priority number three, it has some response time, but I can see that they are quicker than I sometimes need. In case some customer has some maintenance window and it is priority three, they are quicker than they should be. The solution is found very quickly. For example, when I had some troubles with a customer's Cisco ISE, I created a task at eight p.m. and the customer had a maintenance window at eleven p.m. A TAC engineer called me one hour after creating the ticket. We managed a WebEx and solved everything in twenty minutes. It was very nice and the customer was surprised and could see that it is very good support from Cisco and I was happy for this experience and to show him that it is really excellent support and response time. I had experience from Juniper support, and when I compare these two, Cisco is unbelievably accessible. It is very quick, and I can see that Cisco is on another level from Juniper support. I can recommend Cisco support for everybody because it is really good.

I only had my first bad experience maybe one month ago, when I opened a ticket and I could see that the problem could be seen by the engineer on a WebEx meeting and he said that it could not be and he did not have time. The customer was quite angry. But finally, when I pushed from the Cisco Czech Republic side and I escalated this ticket, then it was solved very quickly. The solution was found very quickly after this WebEx meeting. It is only one bad experience. Usually it is very quickly solved, and I can recommend Cisco TAC support for every customer. I usually solve some security problems with Cisco ISE, Firewall Management Center and these topics. From my side, I am very satisfied.

Palo Alto is the second vendor for me. It is not on as high a level as Cisco because I am working with Cisco for six years now and with Palo Alto only three years. My experience with Cisco is bigger than with Palo Alto. However, I think that every customer has different needs. I think that both technologies are experts in some area, so I cannot recommend only one of them. It depends on customer needs and what they need and how they need access to the internet and what they need from a firewall. It is two different ways how you can check and control your network. Sometimes customers are afraid about only application layer control, so they prefer the traditional L3, L4 control about their network. It depends on experience too.

I did not meet Meraki. I only saw this Meraki product on some webinars and some days with Cisco products on site in Cisco Prague branch. I cannot use it in my own hand.

I am not an expert on servers by Cisco. It is the domain of my colleagues, so I did not work with Cisco servers.

I am working with a customer on the deployment of Secure Web Gateway at the moment.

When I do not assume this last bad experience, I would rate the support a ten. Usually it is very quick, and in case an engineer does not have the right information, he asks colleagues or escalates inside of Cisco and from my view, it is solved very quickly.

Sometimes the best time for presales is when we upgrade something and we speak about some problems. For example, the concurrent vendor is a lot, FortiGate. We discuss if Cisco is able to fix this one or if it has some problems with this. I think that when they can compare in some webinars or maybe some labs, it would be helpful. I recommend to my customers labs in Cisco when they create some workshops for customers. I think that is the best way how they can try it in some environment, and then they can compare their own solution from another vendor and this one. It is very important to take care of customers and help them with installation and setting in their network. I think that this service is very important for them, which can help them take this device as their own. When they cannot set it and they cannot use it, they decide on another solution. I think that service with onboarding services is very important. I appreciate support from Cisco when we have some configuration troubles and sometimes it is something new and we do not know. I appreciate patience from Cisco TAC when they can help us with these configuration things. My overall rating for this review is nine out of ten.

On-premises

Other

My main use case for Cisco Catalyst Center in the sandbox is to test APIs and integrate network data into the FloodGaurd project, where I tested device inventory, device health, network health, site health, and activities issues, then displayed the data in our dashboard.

One use case I can mention about Cisco Catalyst Center is in network monitoring during a disaster response operation, where it can give us health and availability of network devices at a site. Along with our FloodGaurd risk information, we can understand whether the supporting network infrastructure is healthy or offline.

One specific challenge I faced with hybrid and distributed enterprise networks that Cisco Catalyst Center addresses is connectivity in a distributed or hybrid setup. Since it was running in a Cisco sandbox and our FloodGaurd back end was hosted separately, we had to ensure the back end could reach the controller reliably while handling cases like timeouts, controller being unreachable, and the sandbox going offline. We added retries, timeout, caching, and clear offline states in the dashboard.

Cisco Catalyst Center has had a positive impact on my organization because it gave real-time network visibility alongside our FloodGaurd risk information. Instead of only showing the flood prediction, FloodGaurd can also show whether the supporting network infrastructure is healthy or offline, making the dashboard more useful for monitoring and disaster response situations.

A specific outcome I noticed after integrating Cisco Catalyst Center with my dashboard is that I was successfully able to display live sandbox data in the dashboard, pulling four devices' device health, network health, and all through the APIs while keeping the Cisco credentials completely on the back end.

In my IT environment or during work integrations, the main improvement Cisco Catalyst Center provides is automation and centralized operation, where we connected it to our FloodGaurd back end so network health and device information could be collected automatically instead of having to check devices manually, making overall operations more reliable and easier to monitor.

Cisco Catalyst Center optimizes the experience in a hybrid or distributed enterprise setup. In our setup, we optimized the experience by keeping the Cisco integrations on the back end instead of connecting the front end directly to it. We added a 45-second cache, a timeout, retries, and clear offline handlings, which reduced repeated API calls and made the dashboard more stable, especially when the controller or network connection was unavailable.

The biggest benefit of end-to-end visibility from Cisco Catalyst Center is that it makes troubleshooting much faster. I can see the device health, overall network health, and everything else all in one place, so instead of checking different statuses manually, I can quickly identify where the problem might be and then take action.

The best feature Cisco Catalyst Center offers is the centralized network health and device visibility, which I could use to get device inventory, device health, network health, site health, and issues through the consistent APIs and bring all of that into our own FloodGaurd dashboard.

When I talk about centralized network health and device visibility with Cisco Catalyst Center, what I mean is that instead of checking each network device separately, it gives me a centralized view of the whole network. I can see how many devices are connected, their health status, the overall network health, site health, and any issues from one place, allowing us to use that data in our FloodGaurd dashboard to give a quick view of whether the network infrastructure was healthy or offline.

For an API experience with Cisco Catalyst Center, I found it pretty straightforward once the authentication was set up, as the endpoint structure was consistent and I could easily get device inventory health, network health, and issues.

My overall impression is that Cisco Catalyst Center gives very good visibility in the network from one place, making it easy to bring device and network health into our dashboard for our project. I think the experience is strong, especially for centralizing monitoring, though the main area I would improve is making the initial sandbox setup and documentation simpler.

I think Cisco Catalyst Center can be improved overall by making the sandbox setups and documentation more straightforward, as it was a little confusing because the DevNet page documentation, controller URL, and sandbox credentials were separate. I would also like to see more realistic sandboxes with more devices and actual issues on alerts since the small environment made it difficult to test a real-world monitoring scenario.

I have used Cisco Catalyst Center on a sandbox for around five days, mainly for testing API integrations and building it into our FloodGaurd project.

Cisco Catalyst Center was stable for what we tested, where the API consistently returned device and network health data, and we were able to integrate it into our dashboard without major issues. Since we only tested the DevNet sandbox with four devices, I haven't validated it on a large-scale production.

In my opinion, Cisco Catalyst Center's integration is scalable since we kept it behind our back end and used caching so the front end doesn't directly hit Cisco for every request. I only tested the DevNet sandbox with the four devices, so I haven't personally validated how it performs on a large enterprise scale, but for our use case, the architecture is ready to scale. I would want to test it in a much larger environment before making a production-scale claim.

In our case, we mainly relied on DevNet documentation and sandbox resources rather than using Cisco's paid customer support, so I cannot really judge the enterprise support experience from personal experience. The documentation was enough for us to get the API integration work, although I found initial setup information could have been clearer.

We did not have a previous commercial network management solution that we replaced with Cisco Catalyst Center; for this project, we chose it because we wanted a proper centralized source for Cisco device and network health data, and its API made it straightforward to integrate the information into our existing FloodGaurd dashboard.

There were a few challenges I faced integrating those APIs and displaying the data in my dashboard, where the main one was the self-signed certificate in the sandbox, so I had to disable SSL verification from that environment, and I also had challenges understanding the authentication flow and keeping the Cisco credentials secure.

For our project, we did not measure a formal ROI in terms of money or hours saved with Cisco Catalyst Center, so I would not give a made-up percentage. The practical benefits were clear, as instead of manually checking individual devices, we could get the device and network health information through the API and see it centrally in our dashboard, which reduces the manual effort involved in monitoring and troubleshooting.

We did not purchase Cisco Catalyst Center through the AWS Marketplace as we used the Cisco DevNet always-on sandbox which gave us temporary access to a hosted Catalyst Center environment for testing and integration.

From our experience with Cisco Catalyst Center, we did not directly purchase it, so I cannot give an accurate opinion on actual licensing or total setup costs since we used the DevNet sandbox for free; however, for a real production deployment, I would want the pricing and licensing to be clearer upfront, including appliance, infrastructure cost, software license, and ongoing support.

Before choosing Cisco Catalyst Center, we mainly evaluated it based on how well it fit our use case and how easily we could integrate its API, without doing a formal comparison or procurement evaluation against other commercial network management platforms, though I would not claim that we have tested multiple alternatives in depth.

I would give Cisco Catalyst Center a rating of eight out of ten.

I chose an eight out of ten because the APIs were consistent and easy to work with once I understood the authentication flow, and I deducted a couple of points because the sandbox setups and documentation were a little confusing, especially around the different URLs and credentials.

Regarding Cisco Catalyst Center's approach to security and governance, I would say it has a good approach to security and governance, as in our integration, we kept Catalyst Center credentials and authentication tokens only on the back end and never extended and exposed them to the front end, while also controlling which data was publicly accessible and requiring authentication for sensitive device information.

Regarding Cisco Catalyst Center's accuracy and reliability, the output were good based on what I tested, where the API consistently returned the device inventory and health information, and our integration handled timeouts and controller unavailable cases properly, though I have not tested it on a large production network.

In my organization, Cisco Catalyst Center is deployed using the Cisco DevNet always-on sandbox, where it is provided as a hosted controller that I accessed remotely through the sandbox URL, while for production, it can be deployed as a Cisco-managed appliance, virtual appliance in an organization's own environment, rather than being the same type of public sandbox.

My advice to others looking into using Cisco Catalyst Center would be to start with the DevNet sandbox and get familiar with the authentication flow and basic APIs before doing the full integration, while also keeping the Catalyst Center credentials on the back end and building proper timeout and offline handling from the beginning. I would recommend reading the sandbox instructions carefully because understanding the correct controller URL and sandbox credentials can save quite a bit of setup time.

The major use case for my client with Cisco Catalyst Center is that most of my work depends on it. For configuring the device and every organization architecture, I am creating means site-wise, such as country, state, city, building, and floor. We can map and put the DWG or PNG file image as your floor plan. Accordingly, we can put the switch and access points on the floor so we can check the health status of the user. For any user, we can work as per license. If we have the client with the analytical license, then we can do many things from Cisco Catalyst Center. We can upgrade the image, configure devices, and perform many other functions.

Cisco optimizes the experience in an enterprise setup by primarily optimizing most of the Cisco devices. It supports a few other vendors, but client-side, they are normally managing only Cisco devices from Cisco Catalyst Center. For multiple segments, it configures standard configurations or the same configuration to every device. It helps with OS upgradation, health-related issues, and optimizing any current issues with devices. If any access point or WLC has issues, it provides ideas on those. It can give you the location of any AP that has an issue and recommends steps. If connected with ServiceNow, it can trigger a ticket for you as well.

The visibility does affect my troubleshooting capability. Troubleshooting is much easier nowadays with Cisco Catalyst Center. It is easier because it gives you the exact issue of what happened. For example, suppose if any switch in a network with more than four thousand or five thousand Cisco switches has high memory utilization, there is a common bug for Cisco's switches or access points may have high memory utilization. Cisco Catalyst Center gives you the pop-up or notification about devices with high memory utilization so you need to check, and it provides recommendations. It can indicate other issues such as STP issues or MAC flooding occurring from a port, and you can receive those notifications.

The benefits and advantages I see in Cisco Catalyst Center that really stand out to me is its ability to access all devices from here. I can say it is everything for me. It is a monitoring device, and we can do configuration from it and monitor any issue. It has the features to help solve those problems including suggestions and records. It can indicate how critical an issue is, whether it is a P1 case or P2, and it can provide data for any reports, traffic data, or client-wise information.

If a Wi-Fi user tells me that their signal is low, the data from Cisco Catalyst Center allows me to provide information when its signal is low, what the speed is, and everything else I can give them.

The end-to-end visibility that Cisco provides is good for me. As per licensing, the price is a bit higher, but it is good.

There is a disadvantage in Cisco Catalyst Center that I see, which is the same as Cisco's disadvantage, being a bug issue. That is the only thing, and this disadvantage is that every feature requires different licensing.

The types of bugs I see here include one I forgot to mention last time when a bug happened. We upgraded Cisco Catalyst Center for generating reports, and it gave false monitoring alarms a few times.

I have been working with Cisco Catalyst Center for seven to eight years.

Cisco Catalyst Center is stable enough.

Scaling Cisco Catalyst Center is a tough question for me. I have never tried to scale those. For me, it is good, but there are a few parts that are complicated for Cisco Catalyst Center. The upgradation part is much easier than others, but a few things are much complicated. Overall, I can say it is good scalable.

I rated technical support for Cisco switches as eight points out of ten, and I would give the same rating for Cisco Catalyst Center, but I can say it is the same, yet Cisco Catalyst Center is much better.

The support is much better for Cisco Catalyst Center overall.

Support is better because they associate with much more senior people in the Cisco Catalyst Center case. The people handling those tickets, maybe that is why they are more knowledgeable about everything.

Regarding the experience with deployment, Cisco Catalyst Center is not straightforward. It is quite complicated. There are many challenges because the control plane is different. There are many aspects, and if you have complicated cases, if you install your Cisco Catalyst Center without proper configuration and saving, then after restart, such as during a power issue, everything will be gone, and you need to manually re-enter your commands.

I usually deploy Cisco Catalyst Center both on-prem and in a hybrid environment. I work with both physical devices and virtual devices such as Hyper-V and ESXi.

Even though I say the solution is quite pricey, it is a value for money because I actually love this product much.

Value for money means clients do not need many resources to manage their network. They have much visibility on their network, understanding what is going on, including stability, reports on any side, which side consumes much bandwidth, and which side consumes much data. Everything can be checked easily with just a click.

In comparison to similar tools on the market, I have never worked with Cisco Catalyst Center compared to others. I have worked with Cisco Prime, which is the earlier version of Cisco Catalyst Center. It has some features that are free and are not available on Cisco Catalyst Center, but we need a subscription and license for those.

My final rating for Cisco Catalyst Center is eight points, with two points deducted for licensing being complicated. I gave this solution an overall review rating of eight points.

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