Catchpoint vs. Cisco Prime LAN Management (discontinued)

Proactive Website and API performance testing, Synthetic monitoring, and third-party integration are where Catchpoint is best suited. Catchpoint is less appropriate in Deep Application Performance monitoring, debugging complex user journeys in real-time, Small businesses, and Mobile app performance monitoring. These are the scenarios where I find Catchpoint is well-suited and scenarios where it is less appropriate.

Incentivized

Cisco Prime can monitor faults and performance, generate heat maps, manage device configuration, and alert. The tools that we find will help us identify wireless access points, network switches, and everything in between. It's simple to manage a dozen devices, but hundreds or thousands require a platform like Cisco LMS. Its bulk configuration and backup configuration features are crucial. We can also access dashboards that show admins and technicians the network's health at a glance.

Incentivized

• Catchpoint Synthetics: We create our synthetic monitoring using catchpoint. Creating the synthetics monitors are easy and requires basic knowledge on selenium and javascript. It allows you to run the test from external(backbone) and internal enterprise nodes. The screenshot and filmstrip feature is an add-on along with various customisations. Once created, It provides a detailed insight of each request that is involved in the application flow which helps us in addressing the issue at the request level.
• Catchpoint API Test: This is another kind of test which we have explored in our organisation. This has helped us to maintain the health check of our APIs and also we have utilised it for a variety of our use cases.
• Catchpoint Dashboard: This is our one-stop shop for all our monitors. It has multiple widgets that displays various application performance metrics. We use this feature immensely and it is of great value to the business.
• Catchpoint UI: It is very user friendly and with basic introduction anyone can just get started with it.

Incentivized

• You can deploy from simple snippets of config to a whole template to multiple devices at the same time. That saves us a lot of time (remember that time is money) when we need to change some setting globally, like adjust a ACL or add new global policy. Doesn't matter how many models of the same equipment you have.
• The Network Topology map is also a great tool for troubleshooting. You can check several aspects of the topology, the connection between the equipment, the status of the connections and even check specific alarms related to that part of the topology (or map). Again, consider that in a multi site, global environment and you'll see the benefits.
• Inventory and firmware updates are also great tools inside the solution. You have check exactly what equipment is outdated and schedule an update with a couple of clicks. You can do that also in a batch, saving a lot of time (and money) and avoid to go handle the equipment one by one, sometimes even needing to have physical access to those equipment.

Incentivized

• The ability to monitor the Catchpoint nodes with the ability to setup a take a recovery action based on specific criteria
• The ability to tell us when we are at X% capacity so that we better plan or budget for increasing the "capacity" of the Catchpoint nodes before we get to an overloaded state. The capacity utilization graph is not a reliable indicator for this metric. How can the capacity utilization rate get above 100%, it does not make sense

Incentivized

• Prime can be be difficult to use in some cases where the UI falls short in doing things effeciently
• Prime maps can take quite a while to load with lots of APs
• Locations for certain key functions are sometimes buried away behind menus that don't pertain to it

Incentivized

we are heavily dependent catchpoint system for the following functions * Detect end-user availability/performance-related problems * Ensures
service level objectives (SLO) are met, that prevents service level
agreement (SLA) breaches * Identify and understand the cause of any
network connectivity or application level issue * Improves the
availability and response time service levels

Incentivized

It's hard to find the functionalities that I am looking for in the application. Even if I did something in the past, after a time I have to re-learn again where the functionalities are. This is a powerful tool, but not user-friendly. Texts in the buttons and menus are not always meaningful or easily comprehensible.

Incentivized

The customer support is fantastic as they keep you updated and follow up even though we may not even follow up. Make sure they send a communication so that we remain updated. They value engineers who will get on a call with you to understand any requirement we have on any test, and they bring in the best developers on call.

Incentivized

We are very happy using Cisco Prime LAN Management Solution for the following reason: 1- Ease of use with the GUI. 2- Very well organized dashboard which can view many statistics on your devices. 3- Customized dashboard for different views ( for technical team and executives ) 4- Schedule configuration templates to use whenever we need on whatever device we want.

Incentivized

very easy to implement as the product is user-friendly

Incentivized

Datadog is good, but more expensive. New Relic is good but does not provide the same features as Catchpoint does. Checkly is good, but Catchpoint offers different frameworks to create synthetic tests, which is preferable to my engineering team.

Incentivized

Although there are many powerful tools available in the market such as Solarwinds, Micro Focus, CA Spectrum with advanced configuration options and customization options available still Cisco Prime [LAN Management Solution] is the preferred tool for following reasons - 1. If you have only Cisco Infrastructure then go for Cisco Prime Blindly. 2. Extensive information on network devices mapping layout. 3. Devices configuration management specially for wireless.

Incentivized

• Catchpoint points based licensing for public hosted nodes is complicated and unpredictable in points required.
• Catchpoint lacks AI powered anomaly detection and automated remediation. This gap means more manual triage and slower MTTR during incidents.
• The advanced 360 degree blackbox monitoring is enabling us to monitor the APIs, UI and proactively gain insights into the application behavior and performance before customer is impacted.

Incentivized

• It has helped us with our quarterly wireless security testing by pinpointing the location of non-approved access points vs. hunting for them via signal strength.
• Saves time by helping to identify network health issues before they become a definitive problem causing downtime.
• With errors detected early, we have noticed our wi-fi network is much more stable thus freeing up our engineer's time elsewhere.

Incentivized