If you’re nonetheless utilizing CLIs, Syslogs, and SNMP to watch and handle your community, there’s an excellent probability troubleshooting continues to be a thorn in your aspect.
But it doesn’t must be.
Modern switches have all of the telemetry information wanted to speed up downside identification and backbone. But the information needs to be pulled collectively and offered in methods which are useful and actionable.
Most community monitoring instruments can flip uncooked information into enticing graphs and condensed statistics. Many present customizable alarms that elevate a flag when sure thresholds are exceeded. And some provide restricted packet path tracing capabilities (usually a pricey add-on that requires tedious configuration).
And but, these options and capabilities aren’t sufficient. Accelerating community orchestration and troubleshooting requires extra visibility. More context and correlation. And extra steerage.
NetOps groups must see all packet flows – hop by hop – at line fee. They want clever root trigger analyses that not solely pinpoint anomalies and issues, however present the complete scope of influence. They want prescriptive suggestions for methods to resolve these points. And they want the power to automate the community’s response ought to the issues reappear, serving to set up a self-healing community that requires much less troubleshooting over time.
These are the superior capabilities community operators can solely get with Cisco Nexus Dashboard Insights, the community monitoring, evaluation, and automation engine of Cisco Nexus Dashboard. Here are solutions to a few of the questions we’ve been fielding about this new instrument, adopted by a few frequent eventualities and the way Nexus Dashboard Insights may also help:
Q: How can I get a quick, consolidated view of my community connections and assets?
A: Easy. Nexus Dashboard Insights doesn’t simply show leaves and spines, but in addition service modifications, service paths, ports, load balancing, firewalls, VMs, endpoints, CPUs, reminiscence, and extra.
Q: Can I set up new connections or change present connections?
A: Yes, after all. With Nexus Dashboard Insights, you possibly can simply set up guidelines that dictate endpoint-to-endpoint communications. These guidelines may even outline which protocols the endpoints are licensed to make use of (permitting communication between two endpoints over safe HTTP, for instance, whereas blocking ICMP). This is extraordinarily essential for corporations in regulated industries which have particular compliance necessities. Nexus Dashboard Insights additionally offers a pre-change evaluation perform that means that you can simulate and validate the impacts of every change and determine potential issues earlier than these modifications are made.
Q: Can I see how packets are transferring from level A to level B?
A: Yep! In addition to displaying all packet flows at line fee, Nexus Dashboard Insights offers a Connectivity Analysis instrument that helps validate the trail between two endpoints within the community material. This is enabled by the movement telemetry embedded in Nexus 9000 Series {hardware} (so it by no means impacts the CPU). Nexus Dashboard Insights normalizes and correlates movement data to supply the end-to-end path and latency of every packet, displaying precisely the place drops occurred and the context wanted to know why.
Q: Where can I get some extra recommendation and steerage?
A: Nexus Dashboard Insights helps there too. It has built-in advisories primarily based on Cisco finest practices. It affords prescriptive suggestions when issues are recognized. And with an easy-to-use pure language question engine, you will get quick solutions to questions like, “What endpoints are connected to each leaf?” with out sifting by way of onerous topology documentation.
Q: How do these capabilities enhance NetOps?
A: We’ve seen the advantages firsthand. Using Nexus Dashboard Insights, Cisco IT has minimize the time spent going back-and-forth between monitoring instruments by 50 %, decreased correlation efforts by 40 to 50 %, and accelerated imply time to detect (MTTD) by 30 %. Read the complete case research to be taught extra.
Let’s check out a few real-world eventualities and the way they’re simplified and accelerated with Nexus Dashboard Insights.
Scenario 1: Excessively excessive ingress utilization
Let’s say one in every of your switches is nearing its ingress capability limits. Nexus Dashboard Insights not solely flags the issue, but in addition exhibits the flows, VMs, and IP addresses which are probably being impacted. It then offers suggestions for methods to resolve the problem – together with utilizing larger bandwidth hyperlinks or rerouting visitors to a special swap – earlier than packet drops happen or congestion begins to hinder software efficiency.
Scenario 2: BGP down anomaly
Perhaps you’re experiencing anomalies along with your BGP. Nexus Dashboard Insights will determine precisely which interface went down (and why) and the routes being impacted. In addition, it would present a number of suggestions for resolving the problem.
Scouring logs to troubleshoot community issues is like looking for a needle in a haystack, slowing down a high NetOps precedence – Mean time to innocence. While different community monitoring instruments drive you to piece collectively a fancy puzzle utilizing disparate items of knowledge and guesswork, Nexus Dashboard Insights offers the visibility, context, correlation, and steerage wanted to speed up community operations and troubleshooting.
To see it in motion, check out Cisco Nexus Dashboard.
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