Cisco Nexus Dashboard
Cisco Nexus Dashboard revolutionizes operations in today’s modern data center environments. Network operations teams are struggling to reconcile fragmented toolchains, an inconsistent user experience (UX), and siloed processes in order to manage complex data center environments that include on-premises infrastructure and public cloud sites. Cisco Nexus Dashboard specifically addresses this pain point by providing a single pane of glass from which to manage a unified operations infrastructure based on the Cisco Nexus Dashboard platform. Based on a horizontal, scale-out architecture, Cisco Nexus Dashboard can unify operations from the on-premises infrastructure (Cisco Application Centric Infrastructure [Cisco ACI] or Cisco NX-OS with Cisco Nexus Dashboard Fabric Controller [NDFC]) to co-locations and to the public cloud. Cisco Nexus Dashboard provides a seamless user experience for the operator, whether it is to rapidly troubleshoot issues or execute change window actions with a high degree of confidence. Operators spend more time on the “logistics ladder” of traditionally fragmented toolchains before any operational value is realized. With the frictionless user experience of Cisco Nexus Dashboard, operators can focus on what they do best—troubleshooting, triaging, and executing change windows with a high degree of confidence, rather than figuring out URLs, credentials, and access controls.
The intuitive Cisco Nexus Dashboard platform provides services such as Cisco Nexus Dashboard Insights, Cisco Nexus Dashboard Orchestrator, Cisco Nexus Dashboard Data Broker, and a single operational view of geographically dispersed multicloud environments. The platform enables the acceleration of NetOps and DevOps capabilities while scaling into the cloud, and it aligns seamlessly with third-party ecosystem tools from HashiCorp Terraform, ServiceNow, and Splunk, with other integrations to come.
The Cisco Nexus Dashboard Orchestrator (formerly Cisco ACI Multi-Site Orchestrator [MSO]), Cisco Nexus Dashboard Insights (formerly Nexus Insights [NI]), and Cisco Nexus Dashboard Data Broker (formerly Nexus Data Broker) services are being integrated into the Cisco Nexus Dashboard as native services in order to simplify the customer experience:
• Cisco Nexus Dashboard Orchestrator: Formerly Cisco ACI Multi-Site Orchestrator, the Cisco Nexus Dashboard Orchestrator service allows operators to push policies and templates and set up intersite connectivity at scale. Besides delivering high-level policies to the local data center controller—also referred to as the domain controller—it enables separation of fault domains, federation of data center and cloud networks, and business resiliency at a global scale. Nexus Dashboard Orchestrator also enables end-to-end change management workflows, centralized fabric management and upgrades, multi/hybrid-cloud connectivity, normalized segmentation, and security policies across the data center, SD-WAN, and enterprise branch and campus networks. For example, the SD-WAN integration provides application-aware SLA-based routing (policy-based path selection and quality of service [QoS] treatment) in the SD-WAN infrastructure used for interconnecting sites.
• Cisco Nexus Dashboard Insights: Formerly Nexus Insights, the Cisco Nexus Dashboard Insights service allows operators to consume the entire insights and assurance stack as a unified offering but also to take advantage of the integrated services to set up automated workflows such as upgrade assist and automated Splunk SIEM (security information and event management) integration. It incorporates a set of advanced alerting, baselining, correlation, and forecasting algorithms to provide a deep understanding into the behavior of the network. It also analyzes flow telemetry data streamed from Cisco Nexus 9000 Series Switches to provide perfect introspection into hybrid cloud infrastructure. The Insights service and AppDynamics are tightly integrated to pinpoint exactly where and when an application issue originated from a network perspective.
• Cisco Nexus Dashboard Data Broker: Formerly Nexus Data Broker, the Cisco Nexus Dashboard Data Broker service is now a part of Cisco Nexus Dashboard, which provides pervasive packet and network visibility for NetOps and SecOps to programmatically manage aggregating, filtering, and forwarding complete workflows to custom analytics tools. It is a multitenant-capable solution that can be used with both Nexus and Cisco Catalyst fabrics. It replaces the traditional purpose-built network packet broker appliances with high-throughput Cisco Nexus switches, enabling IT to create cost-effective and scale-out packet broker fabrics.
• Third-party applications: Cisco Nexus Dashboard offers a rich suite of services for third-party developers to build applications. REST APIs allow third-party tools to authenticate and integrate with key services such as Nexus Dashboard Insights and Nexus Dashboard Orchestrator. Currently supported third-party integrations in the Nexus Dashboard ecosystem include ServiceNow ITSM/ITOM, Splunk SIEM, HashiCorp Terraform, and Red Hat Ansible.
• Cisco Nexus Dashboard Fabric Controller: Cisco Nexus Dashboard can also host Cisco Nexus Dashboard Fabric Controller (NDFC), similar to the hosting of operational services. This unified capability gives customers a single touch point on their journey from installation to operations. This brings the controller for fabrics based on Cisco NX-OS under the Cisco Nexus Dashboard platform and unleashes the benefits of faster time to deploy and upgrade and an improved overall user experience to Cisco NDFC.
The operations team now has to deal with a single stack and one operations toolkit—whether they are running Cisco ACI or Cisco NDFC in their hybrid cloud infrastructures. Figure 1-3 illustrates the Cisco Nexus Dashboard graphical user interface (GUI).
Figure 1-3 Cisco Nexus Dashboard GUI
Operational infrastructure standardization and toolchain unification directly lead to operational excellence and savings as well as free up resources for business innovation.
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