Part 3 of the four-part collection – Cloud Monitoring for Cisco Catalyst Switches
Welcome again to the third weblog in our collection about cloud monitoring for Cisco Catalyst 9000 switches.
My final weblog was about community visibility by way of the Meraki dashboard. In this weblog, we’re going to take it a step additional and speak about how cloud monitoring on your Catalyst switches will assist with community troubleshooting.
I labored in buyer help again within the day.
Most of our calls went one thing like this: “Hi, this is Pat, I can’t access my files” or “My internet isn’t working.” Classic, proper?
Speaking of traditional, listed here are some typical approaches to troubleshooting Pat’s downside:
- Top-down: Dig by way of each display and each administration console you’ve bought
- Bottom-up: The similar as above, however beginning with the consumer
- Divide and conquer: All arms on deck; cut up out your administration consoles and areas of the community
- Follow the trail: Where did it come from and the place is it going?
- Spot the variations: Take a very long time to look by way of logs to see in the event you can collect sufficient info
- Move the issue: Pat referred to as again and mentioned they’re linked—no downside and not MY downside! Kick that challenge down the street as a future me downside.
Whether you’re feeling nostalgic or breaking into a chilly sweat like me, there’s a greater approach!
How a couple of extra fashionable method that features:
- A unified group view
- Event logging
- Network well being standing
- Packet captures
- CLI present instructions
Go refill your espresso and take a fast Meraki dashboard troubleshooting journey with me.
Unified Network View
The BEST view within the dashboard is the organizational abstract. This is a fast strategy to see your whole org—not simply community—from one display, wanting on the general well being. It’s really easy to see the place an issue could also be and get to it instantly. Rather than flipping between administration interfaces and networks, you will get to the foundation trigger nearly instantly, from anyplace in your org.
Event Logging
While we don’t get pleasure from occasion storms and getting notifications each second of day by day, it’s good to log in to your dashboard occasion and be capable of have a look at occasions and add notifications in the event you’d like. I’m a fewer-is-better type of gal myself.
Our event-logging display makes it simple to navigate and seek for occasions by machine or networking {hardware}. You may even embrace and ignore occasion sorts.
Network Health Status
My favourite web page particular to switches is the brand new overview—one standing web page to rule all of them!
If we need to get to a network-level challenge, we will get there from the organizational alerts web page or from the community topology. That monitored change, whereas it’s not having a severe challenge, reveals as yellow. Let’s see why it’s sad.
As simple as one click on, right here’s the perpetrator:
We know VLAN mismatches aren’t an enormous deal, however with a single click on you’ll be able to see the difficulty, and yet one more click on will get you to documentation that reveals learn how to simply repair it. Shameless plug: If this change have been Meraki managed, you’d see a hyperlink that asks in the event you’d like to repair it. Click the hyperlink and it’s mounted. Machine studying for the win!
Another of my favourite new dashboard choices is the Switching Overview web page:
This continues to be from a community stage and reveals you the standing of your entire switches, alerts, shoppers on the switches, occasions, Power over Ethernet (PoE)/information utilization, and change port info.
Packet Capture
It’s nearly right here—packet seize on your Catalyst switches! I don’t assume I must inform you how packet seize works and helps diagnose community points, however I can present you a screenshot of learn how to set it up:
For switches, the next choices can be found:
- Switch: Select the change to run the seize on
- Ports: Select the ports to run the seize on
- Output: Select how the seize ought to be displayed: view output or obtain .pcap
- Verbosity: Select the extent of packet seize
- Ignore: Optionally ignore capturing broadcast/multicast visitors
- Filter expressions: Apply a seize filter
CLI Show Commands
No context switching or administration console altering to troubleshoot points? You’re welcome. Command-line interface (CLI) reveals instructions by way of the Meraki dashboard which are a good way to allow distant validation of configuration and troubleshooting, with out having to get direct entry to the machine by way of Secure Shell Protocol (SSH) or console.
Interest Piqued?
Check out our easy-to-follow onboarding documentation. All of the performance I’ve talked about on this publish is both already launched or coming shortly, so onboard your switches quickly to benefit from all this troubleshooting goodness.
If you’re a Cisco Prime buyer who’s shifting away from Prime however not fairly prepared for full cloud administration, it is a nice strategy to get your ft moist with an introduction to cloud operations by way of your Cisco DNA licenses related together with your Catalyst switches.
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