Solution overviewCisco public

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Introduction At a fundamental level, notwithstanding the scale and complexity of an infrastructure that is ever growing, administrators are expected to prevent problems and recover from them faster when they do occur.

Troubleshooting, root-cause analysis, and remediation of network issues are common challenges for any infrastructure operation. They require network operators to have a high level of domain expertise and the ability to correlate complex IT environments to prevent or fix issues while upholding the infrastructure uptime to honor Service-Level Agreements (SLAs) with minimum disruption.

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Customer challengesCurrent network operations tools do not address the needs of the modern network. These tools are• Fragmented: Unintegrated tools address

siloed visibility use-cases and work on different protocols. Some tools are even outdated or are expensive.

• Reactive: They have inconsistent API architectures and are not proactive. This makes it difficult to analyze root-cause issues and often too late to react to them because the tools are acting on stale data.

• Limited in insight: These tools don’t have data-plane visibility and have low data-fidelity that is not actionable. It is hard to get a holistic picture due to an absence of data correlation.

Cisco Data Center Network Insights for Resources

Solution overviewCisco public

How do Network Insights for Resources (NIR) addresses this challenge?The Cisco® Network Insights applications are designed to address this challenge in a comprehensive and scalable way. Network Insights Resources (NIR) provides analysis and correlation of software and hardware telemetry data, especially for day-2 network operations use-cases, focusing on identifying anomalies and providing drill-down to specific issues.

Biggest consumer of IT time:43% Troubleshooting1

1 McKinsey Study of Network Operations for Cisco – 2016

4X Replicationchallenge

Slowresolution

Network operators spend more time collecting data

than analyzing it while troubleshooting.

Downtime is expensive; unplanned downtime cost Fortune 1000

$1.25-2.5B annually.

Troubleshooting an issue can be impossible if IT

can’t replicate the issue or see the issue as is it happening real time.

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Solution overviewCisco public

Customer benefits

System

System

Operations

Operations

Operations

Resource utilization

Environmentalmonitoring

Troubleshoot applicationlatency Identify traffic/protocol behavior

Identify/predictfailing devices

Fabric-wide capacityplanning, trend monitoring

Avoid environmental(CPU, power, memory, fan,storage related) failures

CiscoNetworkInsights

Resources

Event analytics

Flow analytics

Statistics

Identify subtlepath-related issues

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Use casesEmpower your team with proactive monitoring• Learn from your network and recognize

anomalies before your end users do• Generate proactive alerts useful in

preventing outages

Shorten time to remediation for troubleshooting• Minimize critical troubleshooting time

through automated root-cause analysis of data-plane anomalies, such as packet drops, latency, workload movements, routing issues, ACL drops, etc.

• Assisted auditing and compliance checks using searchable historical data presented in time-series format

Increase speed and agility for capacity planning• Detect and highlight components exceeding

capacity thresholds through fabric-wide visibility of resource utilization and historical trends

• Resource utilization shows time-series-based trends of capacity utilization so you can plan for resizing, restructuring, and repurposing

Solution overviewCisco public

Data collection and ingestion Data correlation and analysis Data visualization and action

Cisco Network Insights

VisibilityLearn from your network and recognize anomalies

InsightsSee problems before your end users do

Proactive troubleshootingFind root cause faster with granular details

Network Insights for Resources

APICDCNM

App Hosting FrameworkApp Store

Apps

Platform App Hosting FrameworkApp Store

Network Insights Advisor

Multi-fabric

Cisco ACI

Users

Applications

InsightsDCNM

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Cisco Network Insights for Resources overviewCisco Network Insights for Resources (NIR) gathers resource information through data collection to provide an overview of available resources and their active processes and configurations across the entire APIC. NIR works for both Cisco ACI™/APIC and Cisco NX-OS/DCNM platforms. Using this data, you can make crucial business decisions that give you more usable information in a shorter time, which can lead to greater operational effectiveness. This application monitors and records hardware and software telemetry data over time to identify anomalies in the fabric and help automate troubleshooting, root-cause analysis, capacity planning, and remediation. It helps infrastructure owners comply with the SLAs required by their customers.

Solution overviewCisco public

The dashboard view is intended for quick action on specific issues that need attention, as shown below:

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What it does NIR is a tool whose GUI is integrated as a plugin into the Cisco ACI APIC and DCNM controller GUI. NIR attracts the administrator’s attention to significant matters relevant to the task at hand, such as troubleshooting, monitoring, auditing, planning, etc. NIR broadly consists of the following components:• Anomaly detection: This involves

understanding the behavior of each fabric component by using different machine-learning algorithms. When the resource behavior deviates from an expected pattern, anomalies are raised.

• End-point analytics: This monitors availability, location, health, of end points and provides visibility of any impact to these end points due to any events or changes in infrastructure. It helps derive potential root causes and reduce MTTR.

• Resource utilization: This is useful for capacity planning because it offers early detection of resources that are exceeding capacity thresholds. These analytics include monitoring of software and hardware resources such as CPU, memory, and VRFs to ensure that they are being used optimally. This identifies anomalies by observing parameters such as CPU, memory, temperature, power draw, fan speed, etc.

• Statistics: Monitors and detects anomalies related to interface utilization, errors, protocol stats and state machines. Helps detect, locate, root cause issues. Correlation with EP analytics provides impact analysis data.

• Flow analytics: This helps identify, locate, and analyze root causes of data-path issues such as latency and packet drops for specific flows.

Solution overviewCisco public

Call to actionhttps://www.cisco.com/go/dcni

© 2019 Cisco and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved. Cisco and the Cisco logo are trademarks or registered trademarks of Cisco and/or its affiliates in the U.S. and other countries. To view a list of Cisco trademarks, go to this URL: https://www.cisco.com/go/trademarks. Third-party trademarks mentioned are the property of their respective owners. The use of the word partner does not imply a partnership relationship between Cisco and any other company. (1110R) C22-742880-00 10/19