We performed a comparison between Cisco DNA Center and Cisco ISE (Identity Services Engine) based on real PeerSpot user reviews.
Find out what your peers are saying about Cisco, Fortinet, HPE Aruba Networking and others in Network Management Applications."The automation features are significant, reducing configuration time. This means outstanding functionality. By deploying the controller automatically, the rest becomes automated"
"People like to use the dashboards to get an overview of their network."
"What I found valuable in Cisco DNA Center is the Software-Defined Access Network, so the entire LAN network can be centralized and managed from a single dashboard. Cisco DNA Center is suitable for centralized management and lets you deploy switches in a centralized fashion. You can also do multiple switch port configurations simultaneously and segregate your traffic into multiple fabrics. Another valuable feature of Cisco DNA Center is enhanced security through Scalable Group Tags. Cisco DNA Center can be integrated with your Cisco ISE to enhance the port securities, and this paves the way for Software-Defined Networking in the LAN segment, which is the main advantage of Cisco DNA Center. I also like that you can use Cisco DNA Center for data assurance or correlation. The solution shows your network and client health parameters, which I find convenient for troubleshooting."
"It is simple to manage and it is all done from a single dashboard."
"Application Assurance works very well."
"The most valuable features were the monitoring, maintenance, and configuration."
"I like the visibility, instant build, network, policies, and the ability to control access. I also like that you can visualize your whole network."
"DNA Center is scalable."
"The interface is pretty easy to use."
"It's easy to change and add policies."
"When you push out the policy, it is able to populate the entire network at one time."
"The most important feature for us is visibility in terms of user connections. It's the ability to see what devices are online for a particular user that helps a lot with our troubleshooting."
"Cisco ISE is a comprehensive solution that allows you to control access to network resources granularly based on policies."
"At the moment, ISE seems to integrate very well with a number of other technologies."
"They provide you multiple ways to achieve security, not only on-prem, but also when you have remote and guest workers. Especially post-pandemic, a lot of our customers have remote workers. So, it has been really helpful."
"For device administration, all devices have multifactor authentication in collaboration with IT, so it secures access to all of our devices. For guest and wireless access, it's a matter of a lowly manager who we give access to the portal and he can assign access to the guests, so it's a very simple process now. It keeps the IT focusing on their work, and gives the business people the right access."
"The tool's IoT integration should be better."
"They should include UTM features in the product."
"What I want to see in Cisco DNA Center in the future is more support for other platforms so that you can manage third-party products, such as Fortinet."
"There should be an option for automation of template deployment by using the stored data. It is not easy to save configuration information for lots of devices without using other tools. There should be a tighter, better repository of information that can be merged with the templates."
"The network, data center, and SD-WAN are all being treated as different services, but I would like to have only one solution to manage all of them."
"It seems to be a little bit more centered toward wireless than wired. You've got more options you can do wirelessly than you can with the wired switches, but it works for what we need it to do. We would like to see a little bit more about the traffic, and we're looking at what's out there to see about that. We are looking at something that might give us a bit more insight into the actual traffic. If they had the full functionality on the wired side, as they do on the wireless side in terms of being able to view traffic and everything, it would be good."
"Cisco could improve the security side of their solutions."
"There is a limitation with the number of VRFs that you can have in your network, and this has caused us problems with some customers."
"The user interface could be improved to make it more user-friendly."
"The solution is not so user-friendly."
"I would like for the next release to be easier to implement and to limit its dependencies around ISE, Windows, the network as a whole, etc."
"It is too complex. It should be easy to use. We are not such a big team. We only have three engineers to work with this, and we don't use all of the functionality of the product. Its range of functionality is too wide for us, and this is the reason why we are thinking of switching to a more simple product. We have shortlisted a Microsoft solution. We have a big footprint for Microsoft products, especially in security. As a global strategy, we try to leverage to the maximum what is possible around Microsoft."
"The user interface could be more user-friendly."
"The knocks I have against the product are the number of bugs that we encounter, constantly, and the amount of upgrading that we have to do."
"They should improve their licensing. Licensing is always trouble with Cisco, and Cisco Identity Services Engine is no different. The way the product is licensed could be improved."
"The primary issue is the slowness of the application and the web interface. We have multiple admin nodes and app nodes. So when I need to get some information about a particular user, the GUI would take ten to fifteen seconds in loading when we need to know right away."
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Cisco DNA Center is ranked 1st in Network Management Applications with 37 reviews while Cisco ISE (Identity Services Engine) is ranked 1st in Network Access Control (NAC) with 138 reviews. Cisco DNA Center is rated 7.8, while Cisco ISE (Identity Services Engine) is rated 8.2. The top reviewer of Cisco DNA Center writes "Practical implementation of VXLAN is good and provides centralized control". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Cisco ISE (Identity Services Engine) writes "Gives us that extra ability to assist the end user and make sure that we are making them happy". Cisco DNA Center is most compared with Cisco Prime, Aruba Airwave, SolarWinds Network Configuration Manager and Juniper Mist Wired Assurance, whereas Cisco ISE (Identity Services Engine) is most compared with Aruba ClearPass, Fortinet FortiNAC, Forescout Platform, CyberArk Privileged Access Manager and Fortinet FortiAuthenticator.
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Hi Anyman
1- first you need to enable pixgrid setting at CIsco ISE at Admin setting.
2- You Need to activate ISE as Radius in DNA Setting tab at the left corner (user name and password is any ISE administrator user ).
3- From Network Hierarchy Tab in DNA Cisco choose ISE as your AAA server.
4- You need to create STG group at policy tab to create the proper user grouping.
4-Then go to provision / fabric / switch interface then apply ISE as your authentication profile.
Most Importantly you need to ensure that your fabric switch has DNA advantage license