We performed a comparison between Cisco Data Center Network Manager and Kentik based on real PeerSpot user reviews.
Find out what your peers are saying about Zabbix, Datadog, Auvik and others in Network Monitoring Software."We can manage the entire system across the network and troubleshoot the pain points."
"The most valuable features of Cisco Data Center Network Manager are consistency and the core server. The teams have had a good experience."
"Data Center Network Manager is absolutely stable."
"The most valuable feature is the connectivity monitoring."
"After installation, you almost forget that it is working."
"I like running the scripts. With the help of a Python script, we deployed within the configuration and built up the code."
"The feature I find most valuable, is the stability of the solution."
"You can integrate all the networks into the software."
"I like that is easy to work on and straightforward."
"The drill-down into detailed views of network activity helps to quickly pinpoint locations and causes. All the information is there."
"One of the valuable features is the intuitive nature of building out reports, and then triggering actions based on specific metrics from those reports. It has a really good UI and the ability to surface data through the reporting functions is pretty good. That's helped a lot in the security space."
"The most valuable features have been anything around traffic engineering: being able to determine the source or destination of a surge of traffic, whether it's DDoS-related, or a customer just happened to have a sudden uptick in traffic. Being able to tell where that's coming from or where it's going to enables us to do things based on that."
"Having the API access allows us to do a great deal of automation around a lot of our reporting and management tools."
"We're pretty happy with the API functionality. It's web, and it's very simple to set up queries. It has served us well and you don't need to be an expert on the API or the product to set these things up."
"It offers a simple yet powerful feature of classifying applications, going beyond basic statistics."
"The most valuable feature is being able to pull traffic patterns; to and from destinations. We're able to understand where our traffic is going, our top talkers from an AS set, as well as where our traffic's coming from."
"In terms of the solution’s real-time visibility across our network infrastructure, I have not been able to find any other monitoring or netflow visualization tool that gives me the kind of information I get from Kentik. If I need to take a deep-dive into something that I see, it's really easy for me to do that. Whereas with most other things, I have to use five or six other tools to get that kind of data, with Kentik, I have it all in one place."
"The Wi-Fi side needs improvement."
"Could integrate better with VMware products."
"One of the biggest challenges is that we aren't always able to push the configuration onto the target device. Whenever this happens, we have to do a factory reset, put on the script, and then reconfigure it again. In the next release, I would like to have a troubleshooting feature."
"The delivery Cisco Data Center Network Manager could improve if it was easier. Additionally, some feature improvement is needed."
"It is not very easy to monitor or to browse."
"The configuration is too complicated and you have to create templates and use a lot of menus."
"It's a relatively expensive product for some clients."
"API lacks robustness."
"It would be nice to have the ability to more easily collect information from other software when doing some types of analysis."
"They're moving more in a direction where they are saying, "Hey, here's information that you may be interested in or may a need," before the question has to explicitly be asked. Continuing to move in that direction would be a good thing."
"We asked for a way, regarding the potential networks that exist, to hook Kentik up with external tools like peering DBs to correlate things together and see what we can do... This is all in the [next] beta now."
"I consider the pricing model as an area for improvement."
"I've checked out the V4 version of the interface and it's still a little bit clunky for me to use. I still go back to the old interface. That's definitely one that they still need to work on. It doesn't seem like everything that you get in the V3, the older interface, is there. For instance, I was trying to add a user or do the administrative tasks in V4, and I couldn't figure out where I was supposed to do that."
"There is room for improvement around the usability of the API. It's a hugely complex task to call it and you need a lot of backing to be able to do it. I should say, as someone who's not in networking, maybe it's easier for people who are in networking, but for me that one part is not very user-friendly."
"The only downside to Kentik, something that I don't like, is that it's great that it shows you where these anomalies lie, but it's not actionable. Kentik is valuable, don't get me wrong, but if it had an actionable piece to it..."
"I would like to see them explore the area of cost analysis."
"I believe they're already working on this, but I would love for them to create better integrations from network flow data to application performance — tracing — so that we could overlay that data more readily. With more companies going hybrid, flow logs and flow data, whether it be VPC or on-prem, matched with application performance and trace data, is pretty important."
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Cisco Data Center Network Manager is ranked 27th in Network Monitoring Software with 19 reviews while Kentik is ranked 46th in Network Monitoring Software with 12 reviews. Cisco Data Center Network Manager is rated 7.8, while Kentik is rated 9.2. The top reviewer of Cisco Data Center Network Manager writes "Provides insight into the network's health data and has an excellent support team". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Kentik writes " Flexibility for creating reports and gaining more visibility is a definite strength". Cisco Data Center Network Manager is most compared with Marvis Virtual Network Assistant, Zabbix and PRTG Network Monitor, whereas Kentik is most compared with ThousandEyes, Arbor DDoS, NETSCOUT nGeniusONE, SolarWinds NPM and Datadog.
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