Cisco Nexus Insights: Proactive Day 2 Operations

Today’s complex data center networking environments are often composed of solutions from multiple vendors and spread across multiple locations, making it challenging to smooth out application performance and availability.  

Operations teams can put themselves in the driver’s seat with Cisco Nexus Dashboard. With better visibility with its Insights service, providing compatibility with multiple vendor and Cisco solutions, customers can proactively identify, investigate, and resolve issues.  

• Get the detailed data center view. Not only does Nexus Dashboard Insights collect and analyze Cisco’s best-in-class telemetry, it gives you a detailed view across your data center’s hardware and software.  
• Speed up incident response. For data center incidents, Nexus Dashboard Insights provides several third-party integrations that can shorten mean time to identify (MTTI) and mean time to resolve (MTTR). 
• Automate public-facing announcements. Nexus Dashboard Insights familiarizes itself with all your deployed hardware and software to create the baseline you need for customized field notices, security alerts, software defects, and end-of-sale/end-of-life notifications. 

Visibility across the stack 

That same level of visibility extends beyond data center switches. Hypervisor integration is top of mind for customers. The ability to integrate vCenter visibility easily and seamlessly, both at the host and guest level, means the operations team can view critical statistics for application servers and individual applications.    

Visibility into the hypervisor host and guest anomaly score and utilization for the CPU, memory, storage, and network helps to verify whether the state of the hypervisor is in some way impacting performance or availability of your applications. This feature allows Nexus Dashboard Insights to function as a single source of truth for day 2 operations. 

Closely related to hypervisor visibility is application component and dependency visibility. Integrating Nexus Dashboard Insights with Cisco’s Application Performance Management (APM) solution, AppDynamics, further enhances cross-stack analytics and troubleshooting. Nexus Dashboard Insights can display the application-specific details directly from AppDynamics for an additional layer of world-class visibility in the data center at your fingertips. 

What’s specific to all of the above scenarios—Cisco Nexus fabrics, hypervisor integration, and AppDynamics integration—is the presentation of the infrastructure as a topology diagram. Whether you’re investigating the physical hardware, hypervisor hosts and guests, or a specific application, a dynamic, toggle-based diagram that includes component health status and connectivity is there to give you instant insights into the overall state of critical data center components. 

Leveraging the ecosystem 

On the heels of Cisco’s recently closed acquisition, the Nexus Dashboard Insights hosting platform, Nexus Dashboard, offers integration with Splunk and ServiceNow to further enhance the day 2 operations strategy.  

The Splunk integration allows for adding Nexus Dashboard Insights anomalies to the Splunk data lake to enhance in-depth event correlation and provide historical statistics trending. ServiceNow integration enables the inclusion of Nexus Dashboard Insights anomaly details and the subsequent creation of tickets and alerts based upon context and severity, further enhancing the IT service management experience. 

Rounding out the best-in-class feature set; Nexus Dashboard Insights provides the ability to send scheduled and IT function–specific customizable email alerts and syslog messages in addition to Kafka message bus support. 

With recent modifications to the Data Center Networking (DCN) subscription licensing model, any customer with an Essentials license is entitled to at least a subset of Nexus Dashboard Insights features. All features were previously made available with either a Premier or à-la-carte day 2 operations license.  

There is power in enhanced visibility in the data center. Nexus Dashboard and Nexus Dashboard Insights support this with third-party and Cisco solution integrations, placing all pertinent information at your fingertips for expedited issue identification and resolution. Contact your Cisco and Cisco Partner account teams for a demo of Nexus Dashboard Insights today. 

Please visit Nexus Insights for more information.