The more I learn about the applications Cisco partners are building using the DNA Center’s open APIs, the more I am impressed by the creativity by which they are using these APIs. Their solutions are helping network operations by removing the guesswork and manual steps traditionally employed to find and fix network issues.
One shining example of such an application is Micro Focus’s IT Operations Management (ITOM) solution. The complete solution consists of six separate management applications that encompass IT service, hybrid cloud, and data center. The two applications, out of the six, that they have integrated with DNA Center are Network Operations Management (NOM) and Operations Bridge. Whereas Networks Operations Management (NOM) focuses on monitoring of networks, Operations Bridge acts on the output from monitoring, analyzes service impact of an infrastructure issue, and takes remedial actions.
Bidirectional integration with DNA Center
The two applications tie in extremely tightly with DNA Center. Network Operations Management (NOM) uses DNA Center’s integration APIs to retrieve network data from DNA Center. This data includes events, network topology, and incident trends on both wired and wireless networks. NOM goes on to assimilate this data, add compliance information and send it on to Operations Bridge, Operations Bridge consumes the data, adds application health statistics, and presents it in a single-pane-of-glass dashboard for operators.
As part of its analysis, NOM combines the data it receives from DNA Center with data it gathers from other sources, and passes the data (events, metrics and topology) to Operations Bridge. Operations Bridge then creates a comprehensive view of the complete IT operations. Users can now detect a problem, if any, and by event correlation, identify the root cause and remediate the problem using operations orchestration through its interface with DNA Center.
“DNA Center as an open platform is very significant for our customers and they are quite excited that Cisco DNA now provides REST APIs for automation.”, says Tapan Shah, Product Manager of Network Operations Management product at Micro Focus, “We at Micro Focus consume these APIs to drive monitoring and provisioning use-cases. We integrate with DNA Center in a bidirectional manner. We get network events from it, determine the impact to applications, if any, and if so, isolate the network fault, and then use DNA Center provisioning APIs to remediate the fault.”
Watch Tapan demonstrate the solution.
Conclusion
With the DNA Center open platform, Cisco has opened many opportunities for independent software vendors, such as Micro Focus, to enrich their own offerings with the native functions and the network data collected and insights generated by the DNA Center. Partner written applications can not only programmatically access telemetry data but all its native automation and assurance capabilities as well, 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
