We performed a comparison between Cisco DNA Center and Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform based on real PeerSpot user reviews.
Find out in this report how the two Network Automation solutions compare in terms of features, pricing, service and support, easy of deployment, and ROI."It is a stable solution."
"I like the visibility, instant build, network, policies, and the ability to control access. I also like that you can visualize your whole network."
"It does a lot of things automatically, and that's the big thing with it. They're making the software so that you don't need to be as knowledgeable as me on the switching and routing side to get your work done. If you want, you can have DNA troubleshoot your problem for you and give you solutions or fix it itself, if it was something that's just a configuration issue."
"It is very versatile in terms of analytics."
"I think that their LAN automation is a very good feature."
"Has a good processing feature with a high level of accuracy."
"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."
"The solution helps in user microsegmentation."
"It is very extensible. There are many plugins and modules out there that everybody helps create to interact with different cloud providers as well."
"The solution is very simple to use."
"On the network side, I already have a lot of our firewall related processes automated. If it's not automated all the way from the ticket system, our network team members, our tier-one guys in India, can just go into the Tower web interface and fill in a couple of survey questions."
"There are so many models that I don't have to create one."
"I like Ansible's ease of use. If you have Linux skills, you can create a reusable template for the dependencies and other configurations. I can store the templates in a repository and share them with my customers or other developers. It's a popular solution, so there is a large user base that can share templates."
"It's nice to have the Dashboard where people can see it, have it report to our ELK stack. It's far more convenient, and we can trigger it with API and schedules, which is better than doing it with a whole bunch of scripts."
"One of the most valuable features is that Ansible is agentless. It does not have dependencies, other than Python, which is very generic in terms of dependencies for all systems and for any environment. Being agentless, Ansible is very convenient for everything."
"The playbooks and the code the solution uses are quite useful."
"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."
"The product has many features that do not work properly."
"The tool's deployment is complex. It also needs to improve its GUI."
"The task failure reporting or provisioning failure reporting could be a little bit better in the UI, with more information given to the user."
"Cisco DNA Center should improve its configuration management. It is better to have a dev version before pushing it."
"The solution's integration feature can be better."
"Cisco DNA Center was a new technology for us, at the beginning, it was not easy to do, but Cisco did a lot of training with us to a level we could handle everything. The team is managing itself now without the assistance of Cisco."
"The solution's technical support is an area with which my company's clients have a problem. Cisco doesn't provide good technical support unless a user has a big account that Cisco wants to retain."
"There could be more stuff in the workflows. I hope that if I have ten templates with different services on it, workflow could auto-populate all the template-based services."
"In Community, there's a lot of effort towards testing, standardizing, and testing for module development to role development, which is why Molecule is now becoming real. Same thing with Zuul, which we are starting to implement. Zulu tests out modules from third-party sources, like ourselves, and verifies that the modules work before they are committed to the code. Currently, Ansible can't do this with all the modules out there."
"Some of the Cisco modules could be expanded, which would be great, along with not having to do so much coding in the background to make it work."
"What I would like to see is a refined Dashboard to see, when I log in: Here are all my jobs, here are how many times they've executed; some kind graphical stitching-together of the workflows and jobs, and how they're connected. Also, those "failed hosts," what does that mean? We have a problem, a failed host can be anything. Is SSH the reason it failed? Is the job template why it failed? It doesn't really distinguish that."
"The product could do a better job at building infrastructure."
"They should think of this product as an end-to-end solution and begin to develop it that way."
"It would be good to make the solution more user-friendly,"
"Ansible has just been upgraded, and the only issue that we are seeing at the moment is that the user interface can be slow. We're currently investigating the refresh period with Red Hat when you click a job and run a job. It seems that the buffer no longer runs in real-time. We haven't discovered whether that's partially an issue with our environment, but Red Hat has come back and said that they're working on a couple of bugs in the background. We've upgraded to that version in the last six months, and that's the only issue that we've seen."
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Cisco DNA Center is ranked 1st in Network Automation with 36 reviews while Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform is ranked 2nd in Network Automation with 58 reviews. Cisco DNA Center is rated 7.8, while Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform is rated 8.6. 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 Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform writes "Capable of broad integrations with easy-to-operate infrastructure and user controls". Cisco DNA Center is most compared with Cisco Prime, Aruba Airwave, SolarWinds Network Configuration Manager, Huawei eSight and NetBrain, whereas Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform is most compared with Red Hat Satellite, Microsoft Configuration Manager, VMware Aria Automation, Microsoft Azure DevOps and SUSE Manager. See our Cisco DNA Center vs. Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform report.
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