The key features of Cisco Nexus Dashboard Insights can be divided into three main groups.
Visibility and Monitoring — These feature helps the operations team in monitoring the network infrastructure, anticipate risk, maintain compliance and reduce downtime.
Topology View – From topology view you can explore, navigate, discover, and zoom into issues. Visualize logical constructs such as tenant, VRF, EPG, and more on top of the physical topology. Perform rapid troubleshooting using filters to focus on problematic nodes.
Capacity Planning – Provides fabric-wide visibility of resource utilization and historical trends which helps in efficient capacity planning. Detect components exceeding capacity thresholds ahead of time. Examples: TCAM, routes, ACL entries, ports, tenants, VRFs, EPGs, and many more.
Control Plane Statistics – Provides detailed statistics and state information of PIM, IGMP, and IGMP-snooping protocols to monitor multicast control plane health.
Microburst detection – Exposes and locates invisible microbursts and helps in finding out congestion hot spots and protects application performance.
Explorer queries – Explores associations and connectivity across multiple sites and understand the state of network deployment using powerful natural-language querying.
Interface Statistics – Uses detailed data-plane statistics to diagnose, locate, and remediate issues. Monitor and use protocol anomalies and state information to remediate BGP, vPC, LACP, CDP, and LLDP problems.
Analytics and Correlation — These features leverage Artificial Intelligence (AI) / Machine Learning (ML) based insights.
Flow Telemetry – Use FT (Flow Table)/Flow Table Events (FTE) to minimize troubleshooting time through automated root-cause analysis of data plane anomalies, such as packet drops, latency, workload movements, routing issues, ACL drops, and more. Monitor flow rate usage to optimize FT performance.
Assurance – Validate low-level design configurations across your environment for both online and offline sites using assurance analysis.
Endpoint Analytics – Locate virtual machines, bare-metal hosts, and other endpoints in the data center fabric. Use historical data to track their movements.
Integrations – Cisco NDI provides a central integration point for API-driven third-party applications with the applications that are hosted on Nexus Dashboard.
Delta analysis – Comprehensive view of health drift between any two points in time, minimizing the change window. Comprehensive view of policy/config drift between two points in time, minimizing troubleshooting time.
Pre-change analysis – Predict the impact of the intended configuration changes before deploying and leverage insight-driven change management.
Anomalies – Compare and contrast time-synced data of multiple parameters to derive deeper understanding of issues and behaviors. Know the impacted endpoints, applications, and flows due to network anomalies. Cisco NDI also helps in anomaly assignment by Tagging anomaly events to the right team member for faster resolution.
Advisories and Tools — These features Eliminate unplanned outages, improve uptime and SLA. These features require connection to Cisco Cloud.
Conformance and Lifecycle – Minimize risk of running end-of-sale (EoS) or end-of-life (EoL) devices. View current and project the future status of network software and hardware inventory against known EoS/EoL notices to ensure conformance.
PSIRTs/bugs – Get notified and take necessary action to stay secure and in compliance. Get instant visibility into any applicable bugs. Prevent unscheduled outages.
Cisco TAC assist – Automate the mundane, repetitive tasks of log collection, and attach them to TAC service requests (SRs). Delegate additional log collection to the TAC team, and free yourself from dull work.
Upgrade Analysis – Detect changes in configuration or operational state before and after switch upgrades and validate across 40+ checks
Field notices – Cisco NDI can identify Field Notices that can potentially impact the network sites that it is monitoring, and generate advisory alerts to the network operations team. The alerts consists of relevant impacts of the identified Field Notices as well as the affected devices in the network.
