Anyone who has ever poured over enormous amounts of data from syslogs, Wireshark, and debug dumps from individual devices can relate to this very well. There’s got to be a better way to identify trouble spots in the network. With the network playing an increasingly important role in our businesses and our lives and with new technologies becoming mainstream and indispensable, verifying that the network is performing as designed is critical.
Having experienced this troubleshooting agony first-hand during my days as a developer, I was keen to see advances in this area and went to see the LiveAction booth at the recent Cisco Live. I learned how LiveAction’s LiveNX application makes diagnose and fix process simple by their powerful visualization tools that complement Cisco DNA Center’s native assurance capabilities.
You can’t troubleshoot what you can’t see
DNA Center collects extensive amount of telemetry data from the enterprise network. Sources of this data include network devices such as wired and wireless clients, wireless access points, routers, switches, and wireless LAN controllers, applications, as well as other contextual sources like LDAP, DNS, DHCP, AAA, CMX, IPAM, etc. In addition to collecting and performing its own comprehensive analysis, DNA Center also makes it available via open APIs to external applications such as LiveNX. The following diagram illustrates this integration.
“Having an open platform like DNA Center is very important to us and our customers”, says John Smith, CTO and Founder, LiveAction, “The data that we get is at the heart of all our visualizations and analytics. So having access to all that data through open APIs is very critical to us. By integrating with DNA Center, we can benefit from its telemetry and insights, and are able to bring it up on our dashboards. This enables our customers to understand what is happening in the network and be able to troubleshoot and resolve their problems.”
LiveNX uses these APIs to retrieve network data and adds to the native analysis performed by DNA Center. You gain from the seamless manner in which LiveNX interacts with DNA Center and the value-add it provides that can help you better understand network traffic to identify trouble spots. By its close integration with DNA Center, LiveNX allows you to cross-launch DNA Center’s troubleshooting and remediation capabilities directly from its own dashboard. LiveNX has built-in support for many Cisco technologies such as SD-WAN, SD-Access, and Meraki. With its visualization and 3rd party device support abilities, LiveNX can help during your during pre-deployment assessment, the deployment process itself, and later during operations.
Watch John demonstrate the solution.
Conclusion
With the DNA Center open platform, Cisco has opened the enterprise network for innovation. Partner written applications can not only programmatically access telemetry data but all its native automation and assurance capabilities as well. Innovative applications like LiveNX further build up on DNA Center capabilities, and deliver solutions that solve business needs simply, efficiently, and effectively.
Read this white paper from IDC to see how you can leverage network as an open platform and create new revenue opportunities.
Discover this solution and others from our DNA Center open platform partners and see how they are redefining the future of networking.
Find out more
Learn DNA Center APIs: https://developer.cisco.com/dnacenter/
See how intent-based networking can spark business innovation: https://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/solutions/enterprise-networks/intent-based-networking-business-innovation.html
Read the Cisco Focus Magazine special issue on Intent-Based Networking: https://newsroom.cisco.com/focus/2018/jun/intent-based-networking
