Your network is the vital infrastructure that enables every facet of your organization to run smoothly. When issues occur, tracing the root cause and remedying the problem quickly are critical to maintaining the best client, application, and network experiences. That’s where Cisco Catalyst Center (formerly Cisco DNA Center) Assurance comes into play. Features like health dashboards combined with Application, Client, and Device 360 dashboards provide detailed, actionable insights that can improve the time to detect and resolve network issues that arise, ultimately saving you time and resources. Read on to learn how these features can transform how you monitor, manage, and optimize your network health.
Overall Health View
The Overall Health View dashboard within Cisco Catalyst Center’s Assurance section gives you a quick snapshot of real-time insights into network and client health in your organization over a customizable time period (3 hours to 7 days). It’s a great starting point to review high-level health performance indicators that can help you easily identify potential issues with applications, clients, or network devices via the reports in this view. The Top 10 Issues by Type report is especially helpful for highlighting the highest-priority issues occurring in your network. Additionally, clicking into the specific issues listed allows you to utilize the Machine Reasoning Engine (MRE) tool. MRE acts as your intelligent assistant, automatically detecting, diagnosing, and prescribing fixes for network vulnerabilities and issues. It’s also worth noting that you can search for specific devices, clients, or applications via the search icon at the top of the Catalyst Center GUI and go directly to a 360 dashboard with detailed information, which can be useful in a helpdesk scenario. Learn more about troubleshooting the overall network health in this chapter of the Cisco Catalyst Center Assurance User Guide.
Network and Client Health
The Network and Client Health dashboards are your lenses into the real-time and historical performance of network devices and clients. By clicking on the Network Health or Device tabs, you can access more detailed information about Catalyst switches and other network infrastructure, like percentage of healthy devices, AP data, site analytics, and individual health scores for specific devices and clients. Users can filter network devices or clients by their health scores on each of their respective dashboards to easily identify devices or clients with potential issues.
If you identify specific devices that are experiencing issues, you can drill down further into that particular device via the detailed Device 360 dashboard. This dashboard view provides comprehensive details about network infrastructure devices, including configuration, software versions, and performance metrics. Users can also access timeline views, physical topologies, lists of events and issues, Path Trace options, and more for specific devices. This allows for easy identification and troubleshooting of device-specific issues. Read more about troubleshooting device health here.
A similar detailed overview is also available for specific clients via the Client 360 dashboard. The Client 360 dashboard provides a deep dive into client-specific details and history, including onboarding times, event history, application experience, and more. This data is crucial for diagnosing issues, understanding client behavior over time, and making informed decisions to prevent future problems. You can review more details about Client 360 here.
Application Health
The Application health dashboard is your network’s performance barometer for all applications. It is especially tuned to spotlight business relevant applications, with suggested remediation for any issues or anomalies. Users can view quantitative metrics such as Throughput, plus qualitative metrics such as DSCP Markings, Latency, Jitter and Packet Loss. These stats are shown over customizable time ranges, allowing users to identify application health trends over a specified period. Metrics like Application Health and Application Usage focus on proactively addressing application performance issues. Users can also access comprehensive 360 application data for individual business-relevant applications to deep dive into performance over time and review any potential issues. In addition to the various available reports, users can also utilize network agent tests with Cisco ThousandEyes to monitor application performance across the entire network path, helping to pinpoint issues that might affect application delivery. This level of insight is key to troubleshooting and maintaining a high level of application performance. Read more about application health monitoring here.
Learn more about Catalyst Center Assurance
The Assurance dashboards within Cisco Catalyst Center provide a wealth of data, giving network operators comprehensive visibility into network performance plus the advanced troubleshooting tools to assist with proactive issue resolution. Utilizing these features on a regular basis can help you maintain the best user experience for your network end users. Plus, these dashboards can streamline troubleshooting efforts to save resource hours and allow quicker resolutions of issues that may occur.
To learn more about the benefits of Catalyst Center Assurance, register for one of our upcoming webinars, or review the recordings from previous webinars (linked below). You can also review more details about Assurance features in the Cisco Catalyst Center Assurance User Guide or review curated resources on our Campus Network Observability and Insights Guided Resources page to help guide you through each step of your Assurance journey.
Webinar Recordings
Wireless Client and RF Troubleshooting with Catalyst Center
Troubleshoot your Wired Network using Catalyst Center
Learn how to use various dashboards in Catalyst Center to monitor the network
Cisco Catalyst Center Machine Reasoning
