Cisco Secure Workload Reviews

Our primary use case for the Cisco Tetration solution is for troubleshooting network incidents. 

The most valuable feature of the solution is that we don't have to do packet captures on the network. 

Cisco Tetration needs more flags and system alerts that we should get with network capture. We haven't gotten into the security aspects of it. 

From a troubleshooting perspective, there are a few areas they can improve. There should be more types of data.

It is very stable.

The scalability of Cisco Tetration is very good.

We did not have a lot of experience with Cisco support.

We didn't have anything like Cisco Tetration before. We were previously considering ACI. We decided not to use it.

The setup was complex because of how our network is structured. In the network administration setup, Cisco Tetration requires some planning.

On a scale from one to ten, I would rate Cisco Tetration an eight or nine. I'd like to see better documentation for advanced features. The documentation is fairly basic. I would also like to see better integration with other applications. 

It's still a maturing product at the beginning of the lifecycle right now. 

The product is primarily used for automating micro-segmentation.

Cisco Tetration provides visibility into networks and additional security. This improves the entire organization by saving time, resisting attacks, and allocating resources properly.

While automated micro-segmentation is in itself valuable, application dependency mapping is time-saving and efficient. 

While the product does its job and more than any organization currently needs, the entire interface could be improved. It's ugly and uninviting. The biggest competitor has a very nice, modern-looking GUI. Tetration tends to be a lot more cumbersome and it's not very intuitive. It is a good thing for consultants, but not for a typical end user.

The product is very stable. We have never had an issue after an implementation.

Cisco Tetration has scaling capabilities that surpass the realistic needs of any organization. 

We augment Cisco customer service and support for the product, so we generally do not require support. However, Cisco support is excellent and we never have any issues. We will always get the support that we need, whether it be from the business unit that developed it directly, or from the Cisco TAC.

The complexity of the setup depends on the version being installed. The cloud version can be up and running in a couple of hours. The other version could take a couple of weeks. Customers who do not already know the product shouldn't really be deploying it on their own. Once it's up and running, a single person can manage and grow the entire environment in a fraction of the time it would take to do manually. Some organizations will allow as little as 2-3 hours a week and some will have to spend a lot more time on it. The resource allocation really just depends on what it is being used for.

We do all our own deployments so there is no need for a vendor team. However, it is not recommended that end-users install this without prior knowledge and consultancy.

There is an immediate ROI when deploying this product. While it is hard to count in dollars, an organization will experience functionality that they never had before. The product creates cost savings in the allocation of resources but that goes much further than that. As an example, it is possible to recreate a database server that had no documentation and no backup. If that database were to go down, it would cost a company millions. Tetration can gather enough information to be able to rebuild that same database server and have immediate tell over and avoid that type of disaster.

The cost depends on the size and the implementation. The larger the implementation the more cost effective it becomes. There are two different types of licenses. If you want to add enforcement there's an extra cost to turn it on. You can just go with the network visibility it provides without the enforcement. That's the basic difference between the two license types. The price is nominal between the two packages and it is possible to negotiate with Cisco to make the pricing almost equal between the two as Cisco will prefer organizations to have the enhanced utility.

The only other product we considered before deciding on Cisco Tetration is Illumio, which is a direct competitor. It is possible to string together multiple tools from the VMware side that can create similar functionality.

This product does everything that you need it to do and more. I would definitely rate it a 10 out of 10. It does a lot to provide visibility in a network environment, save time and money, and makes the organization IT operate in much more of a streamlined fashion. We could have chosen other products, but this is the horse that we picked to go in the race.

Our primary use case is for process discovery and for the data center. 

One thing for sure about improvement to our organization and that is we do have several applications with no servers. It's hard to identify what port every application is using. So by using Tetration, it runs an agent and will let us know all the processes running within that server. We can quickly turn around and be able to secure the server by blocking the unused ports.

The most valuable feature right now is to do with having visibility on the network — especially on our servers — and to be able to enforce some type of security measures. This is mostly to combat processes that shouldn't be running on the servers.

The data analytics and all the data that it gathers are very useful. It creates a fast turn around to improve the speed of decision making so we can decide what we need to do to remain secure.

A feature that I was looking for was emailed alerts and notifications so we'd get them right away. I don't know if it is there or not yet but I haven't had enough time to explore and find it.

The search capabilities can be improved as well.

So far the stability has been reliable.

Scalability all depends on how many agents you buy. If Cisco makes it more affordable to buy agents, then it will be more scalable for us. The limitation right now is the cost and not the system.

So far tech support has been great. Every time we call, they're always available to help us troubleshoot or help us get around in the application.

It was very straightforward since we're doing cloud-based management.

If you have a somewhat limited budget you may find the scalability limited. The product does not seem to be.

For me, the solution is a nine out of ten. I really like it. It's a great tool that will help give visibility to a data center and network, understand processes that are running within the data center and be able to enforce rules and regulations for all your processes.

For the gas and oil company, who is our customer, they are mainly using it for their networking sites.

Scalability is its most valuable feature.

It is not so easy to use and configure. It needs a bunch of further resources to work, which is mainly the biggest downside of it. The deployment is huge.

It is very stable. We haven't had any problems with it.

We started off with one node. Then, it grew over six months to a year, so we bought two more nodes for a total of three nodes. It is huge right now, especially since the tracer comes with a half a rack.

We have had two pretty straightforward cases with the technical support.

We were not using a previous solution.

The initial setup was complex, because it had a bunch of little details that needed to be tied together.

The price is outrageous. If you have money to throw at the product, then do it.

We possible looked at a vRealize solution, but our customer did not want to consider VMware because it was not Cisco. The customer was a Cisco shop and did not even inquire regarding the price of the Tetration solution.

The product should be easy to use, but it is not. Comparing it to other products, it was very complex. 

There are cheaper products out there which are simpler to use than Tetration.

The solution offers 100% telemetry coverage. The telemetry you collect is not sampled, it's not intermittent. It's complete. You see everything in it, including full visibility of all activities on your endpoints and in your network. 

Other valuable features include vast support for annotations, flexible user applications, machine learning, automatic classification, and hierarchical policies.

The multi-tenancy, redundancy, backup and restore functionalities, as well as the monitoring aspects of the solution, need improvement. The solution offers virtually no enterprise-grade possibility for monitoring. Example include: The onboard features do not allow remote detection of simple hardware failures. There is no backup option for the data lake. The cluster cannot be deployed in a geo-redundant setup. There is no hardware upgrade path.

Our company has been using the solution for 2.5 years.

The stability of the solution is good. What it really lacks is the fact it's not enterprise-grade from an operational perspective.

The scalability is linked to redundancy. You cannot seriously cluster two Tetration units that are physically apart. That doesn't work. So scalability is quite limited. You are basically locked in with the physical setups that you start with.

The solution's technical support is average.

The initial setup was straightforward. It took us about three days to deploy the solution. To reach your first operational capability, from then onwards, it depends on the scenario. We usually spend weeks, if not months, in order to adapt the system to the customer's use case and this requires professional services, specific for the situation.

We use the on-premises deployment model along with MSSP, a service provider.

I would rate the solution eight out of ten.