Cisco Catalyst Center

The main use case for us is to centralize managing our switches in one spot. We have a lot of switches to manage, so it's very easy to find that useful.

I appreciate that Cisco Catalyst Center gives you notifications when the switches go down. When there's downtime for a switch, we get updates very fast.

I work in the manufacturing industry, so any downtime is losing money. Whenever something goes down, it's easy for us to look into a problem. We won't know that we have to fix the problem unless we've identified it. Before even teammates reach out to us saying they're not getting to the internet or whatever, we already know there's a problem because of Cisco Catalyst Center. So it's very useful and helps us have less downtime.

I think Cisco Catalyst Center addresses the challenges we face with hybrid and distributed enterprise networks pretty well because now I can bring a switch out of the box and configure it through Catalyst instead of manually spending time doing it. So it saves me a lot of time, and I can focus on something more important.

I would say Cisco Catalyst Center's PNP functionality is not as good as it could be. When the switches come out of the box and we try to configure it, the onboarding is kind of hard where I assign it an IP address and it loses connection right away. So that could be improved. I don't think our Catalyst is absolutely up-to-date. It's pretty up-to-date, but I don't think it's the latest version, so maybe it's already fixed.

I have been using Cisco Catalyst Center for about a year to a year and a half.

My experience with deploying Cisco Catalyst Center had one challenge where we couldn't find enough documentation because one of our nodes went down. So we had to rebuild our entire Catalyst. That was hard. We figured it out, but it took us a long time. The good part about that was we called a Cisco rep, and they helped us throughout the process. We were back and forth with emails and calls with them. So that was helpful. But I found it hard to find any good documentation for building a DNA.

I would evaluate customer service and tech support as great. I would give that a nine out of ten. It's very good.

Prior to adopting Cisco Catalyst Center, we were not using anything to address similar needs.

The operational efficiency of Cisco in my IT environment is pretty good. There have been a few problems with hardware, like one of the nodes stops working, but I don't expect it to run perfectly. I would say it gives us overall good visibility, so that's how I would assess it. It's good visibility for what we have out there.

My impression of the end-to-end visibility is that it's great. I'm able to build agents and use Cisco Catalyst Center to give me a lot of information. So now I don't even have to log into Catalyst. I get better visibility if something goes down, like if an endpoint goes down, I can identify the switch, or it will identify it for me and give me troubleshooting tips and advice through Catalyst. So the visibility is very good in that regard.

I rate Cisco Catalyst Center overall as an eight out of ten.

For Cisco Catalyst Center, my main use cases involve monitoring switches, access points, and performance.

The most important features for me that I prefer are switch monitoring and configuration backup.

Storing the configs with Cisco Catalyst Center benefits my organization because if there is a failure, I can restore directly from it.

My impression of the end-to-end visibility offered by Cisco is that it is somewhat clunky; it is not in a single dashboard and is not easily visible, especially from a time-sensitive standpoint.

To improve Cisco Catalyst Center, I would prefer to see better integration with Meraki and visibility into both Meraki and traditional Catalyst product lines on the same interface, achieving end-to-end visibility from a single pane of glass and ensuring that all metrics are included, as sometimes there are blanks and information is missing.

I have been using Cisco Catalyst Center for three years.

I assess the stability and reliability of Cisco Catalyst Center as mostly reliable; I have had to restart it a couple of times when it was hanging, but other than that, it has been quite stable.

Cisco Catalyst Center scales with the growing needs of my organization, but I have really only scaled with the amount of equipment, adding more access points and more switches, while my Catalyst switch count is going down as I migrate to Meraki switches, and because there is not a tight integration between the two yet, I do not have visibility in Cisco Catalyst Center for that, so I am actually scaling down instead of scaling up.

I evaluate customer service and tech support as sometimes being questionable; if it is not labeled as a high priority, it is not treated as such, so if it does not require a very fast response, I can go weeks without hearing anything on a ticket, and I sometimes have to put things in as higher priority to get an initial response, but it always gets changed down to a lower priority.

Before adopting Cisco Catalyst Center, I was using Prime Infrastructure, but I considered a change because Cisco stopped putting development into Prime Infrastructure and moved to Cisco Catalyst Center, with all new devices coming with at least Essentials level Catalyst Center licensing required upon purchase when I buy the equipment.

My experience with deploying Cisco Catalyst Center is that the deployment was simple, as getting all of my devices to join was straightforward, but there were some features that were supposed to function, especially when it came to adding in Meraki Dashboard; devices were not populating, and although it was advertised as being able to do that, when I talked to Cisco TAC, they said that was not possible.

My experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing is that licensing is always a pain, as everything involves levels of licensing, so when there are specific features I am looking for, they are usually bundled with a more expensive license that includes features I do not need, and trying to determine which license is needed can sometimes be difficult.

I did not consider any other solutions before selecting Cisco Catalyst Center.

I have not faced any specific challenges with hybrid and distributed enterprise networks that Cisco addresses.

Since I am all Cisco, I assess the operational efficiency in my IT environment as being at the same level.

I provide an overall review rating of 8 for Cisco Catalyst Center.

Cisco Catalyst Center will be used for deployment, scalability, and compliance.

The features I appreciate most with Cisco Catalyst Center are the net operations and security operations, or SecOps.

Mostly, it is the compliance portion of Cisco Catalyst Center that stands out. The traditional way I managed switches required me to configure them individually. With Cisco Catalyst Center, it is now controlled in one location and I can easily manage them, ensuring they are all up to date with compliance checks and other requirements. This makes the process much simpler for me.

One of the considerations that led us to change prior to adopting Cisco Catalyst Center was the management approach. Because it is easier, and as I mentioned before, we had to configure switches individually. With Cisco Catalyst Center, it has made my life significantly easier.

When I first installed Cisco Catalyst Center, it required a lot of hardware resources during the installation process. It does not use that much after installation, but it seems to use a considerable amount in my virtual environment. Perhaps there will be a lighter version in the near future.

I have been in the IT industry since 2004.

Cisco Catalyst Center scales with the growing needs of my organization at a level of 10.

I have not contacted tech support yet. However, based on my previous experience with other switches, I would rate customer service and tech support at 10. They are very helpful and supportive.

We always used CLI before, so Cisco Catalyst Center is a fairly new solution for us to manage switches.

We just started implementing Cisco Catalyst Center last year, so this is fairly new to us. I had the great opportunity to install and configure it for the first time, and I am learning quite a lot, especially from attending Cisco Live.

Regarding pricing, setup cost, and licensing, my boss would know those details. I do not have that information as it does not really apply to me. I am simply the person he tells to go ahead and configure it. I do not know the details on the price.

In my type of environment regarding hybrid and distributed enterprise networks, I do not work with a hybrid type of environment, so I do not have any challenges in that area.

Cisco Catalyst Center addresses a lot of my security concerns, especially in the world of cybersecurity where there is a lot of risk. It does address many of those concerns.

My impression of the end-to-end visibility is that it is excellent. The new implementation of AI has made it easier, and it can find things that I could not see on my own. I have given this product a review rating of 10.